“BLUE BEYOND sets the human in the centre placed in a cyclic schema of Time corporeal phenomenological representation and teleological cosmology through audio digital-soma technologies and non-linear interactive meta-dramaturgy.”

BLUE BEYOND is a dance performance about time which as an experiential perception, a natural phenomenon, a corporeal event runs through a continuum. It constructs an imaginary condition where future penetrates present and present emerges into future creating overlapping temporalities.

Drawing from the chi-fi book of the beginning of the 20th century “Last and First Men: A Story of the Near and Far Future” by Olaf Stapledon, 1930, explores corporealities, cartographies and images of the Future and questions how the idea, the vision or the fantasy of the Future is depicted, reflected, embodied.

Through an interplay with mythologies, realities, fictions, topologies, imaginary spaces of the future, memories of the live present and embodied traces of the past, it turns the stage into an active hybrid space with movements, objects, sounds, words and creates a live moving capsule of imprints and visions forming a Memoir for¦of the Future, a cyclic schema to represent time.

The piece uses montage dramaturgy techniques in order to reveal different variations of non-linear performance unfolding and explore how body and movement are affected when transferred in a different temporal condition or spatial context.

To enhance this, it implements an interactive sound design technology with live amplification processes, algorithmic prototypes and recording within recording techniques in real time through an installation of ground and space microphones, integrated into the wider stage design.

A choreographer’s note:
The piece questions how the body can map the future, with what materials and movement landscapes. With what visions and mythologies do we invest it, what archives it carries? In reverse, the performance, as a living space with memories, predictions, scenarios seeks to detect atmospheres and impressions of tomorrow floating in the sea of now, tune in to resonances, movements, waves, vibrations of what is not yet here, has not arrived but it is already inscribed within us and within the dance to be made. What if the present through the moving body already encapsulates echoes of Future in the dance waiting ‘to come into being’.

BLUE BEYOND follows a series of Siarava’s artworks about Time. The Body and the Other~ (2020) premiered in one of the most important dance production houses in Europe, Tanzhaus NRW at Düsseldorf in the framework of Temps D’ Images Festival while Who knows where the time goes – potential destination #1 (2021) was presented in Athens supported by the Ministry of Culture of Greece and after a residency at SE.S.TA Centre for Choreographing Development for Interdisciplinary Incubator 2019 (Prague).

With the financial support of the Ministry of Culture of Greece for 2021-2022

Presented in:
-Theseum Theatre, Athens, May 2022 [Premiere]
–National Theatre of Northern Greece, October 2022
–TANZ:DIGITAL, International Theatre Institute Berlin, Video Exhibition, Bethanien Art Gallery, Berlin, February 2023, supported by Dachverband Tanz Deutschland
–Frankfurt Lab, Emerging Artists Program 2023, Frankfurt, Germany, December 2023 

Subsidised by the Frankfurt LAB – Emerging Artists Program 2023, with the kind support of the Crespo Foundation and the Stiftung Polytechnische Gesellschaft Frankfurt am Main as well as the BHF BANK Stiftung and the Adolf and Luisa Haeuser Stiftung für Kunst und Kulturpflege.

Review at Springback Magazine

In an era that Time seems to be illusionary, to freeze, sometimes being compressed or others endlessly expanding Who knows where the time goes — potential destination #1 is a dance performance / choreographic installation that attempts to enter the paradoxical and ambiguous universe created when Time is intertwined with the Image.

Time can be storming. It transforms us and the surrounding world. The time in flow, the freezing time and the living present. How time can be traced in our bodies moving in a constantly changing world? For the philosopher Roland Barthes, the “Image” encapsulates what he calls the Third Meaning. According to Barthes, an image always contains a dark, blurry area that cannot be explained and articulated verbally, escapes the descriptive possibilities of language, becomes inexhaustible and infinite with multiple meanings and references. How can dance through the body and movement approach this unmapped zone? Ηow can dance be inscribed in body as a succession of images? Does the viewer’s eye share any analogy to the lens of a camera while watching a dance unfolding as a scenic event?

To capture and illustrate this Image and Time relation, the performance is based on the construction of an Ephemeral, Live, Variable Scenography that includes the use of tapes as scenographic objects. The performers experiment with different designs, overlapping layers and spatiotemporal arrangements while the audience is invited to reflect on the ephemeral, the vivid memory, the image as an imprint of time. What is the experience of choreographed images in constant transformation? The moving bodies within the ephemeral scenography settings create images highlighting the complex interaction between past, present and future. Finally, “where the time goes” seems to find its answer, is wandering between us in circular paths.

Premiere October 2021, Roes Theater, Athens.
December 2021, Metropolitan Urban Theater, Thessaloniki.

With the financial support of the Ministry of Culture and Sports of Greece for 2020-2021.

The choreographic research started in the framework of a residency at SE.S.TA Centre for Choreographing Development/Interdisciplinary Incubator (March 2019, Žďár nad Sázavou, Prague). Movement experiments with tapes as scenographic objects.

The Body and the Other~ is a dance performance / choreographic installation about the multiple body as a physical, digital and hybrid in-between corporeality placed in a mixed reality topology and time capsule. There, temporal linearity is shattered and digital algorithms create random, past, present and future blendings. Through an experimental scenography involving video, projection mapping and motion tracking technologies and the use of surfaces, objects and materials that follow their own technology and potential of movement, the aim is to unfold a performance as an unpredictable and unprescribed living entity with autonomous choreographic dramaturgy. By revealing what escapes or slips away from technology, The Body and the Other~ invites the elusive real in a piece based on an interplay between tactility and emptiness, appearing and disappearing imagery, absence and presence, with the moving body as a mediator and reminder of the deep human essence.

The project is an interdisciplinary collaboration between Eleonora Siarava / Per_Dance Choreographic Research Platform and Mixed Reality and Visualization Institut / Department of Media, Düsseldorf University, co-funded by the program “Transfer International” of NRW KULTURsekretariat, the Ministry of Culture and Science of the State of North Rhine-Westphalia and i-Portunus project (Creative Europe) and with the support of Tanzhaus NRW in the framework of Temps d’Images Festival.

-Premiere at Temps d’ Images Festival, Tanzhaus NRW, Düsseldorf (January 2020)
-Presentation in the Video Exhibition of TANZ: DIGITAL, International Theatre Institute Berlin, Bethanien Art Gallery, Berlin, supported by Dachverband Tanz Deutschland (February 2023)