Archive / Choreography

I am Dancing in a Room

I am Dancing in a Room

Dance performance

Dance performance

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I am Dancing in a Room dance performance experiments with the concept of Resonance. It explores transitional zones between sound and performativity sublimated in a vortex of algorithmic movement and sonic frequencies. It is a performance installation that implements an interactive digital audio technology based on real-time processing. Through a system of microphones is sculpted an augmented cloud of choreography and sound. Choreographic patterns and voices echo, are repeated, re-inscribed in the space.

The performance opens an artistic dialogue with the sound work I Am Sitting in a Room by the composer of experimental music Alvin Lucier while it acquires an autobiographical character with the choreographer sharing inner thoughts about being on and off stage and shifting between embodied ‘states’ and locations ending in the creation of a paradox Alter Ego between her and the performer.

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Concept – Choreography – Artistic Direction: Eleonora Siarava
Performance, co-creation: Sofia Pouchtou
Performance participation, Text: Eleonora Siarava
Sound Design, Interactive sound technology: Yiannis Tsirikoglou
Space design, costume: Eleonora Siarava
Photos: George Stavrianakis
Production: Per_Dance Choreographic Research Plarform

MOMus-Experimental Center for the Arts, Greece, October 2024, Premiere

MOMus Museums
Stereoma2 Festival

In the framework of Stereoma2, Eleonora Siarava was invited to take part in the Essence of Sound, a collective sound piece by Stegi Radio which brings together the voices and ideas of the participant artists.

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Blue Beyond

Blue Beyond

Dance performance

Dance performance

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“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

Concept – Choreography – Artistic Direction: Eleonora Siarava
Performance, co-creation: Eftychia Stefanou
Interactive Sound design: Yiannis Tsirikoglou
Space design: Eleonora Siarava
Light design: Eliza Alexandropoulou
Set construction: Christofili Kodolefa, Athina Koubarouli
Dramaturgy advice: Betina Panagiotara
Costume: Georgia Dipla
Production assistant: Nefeli Vlachouli
Visual communication: Christofili Kodolefa
Photos: Archlabyrinth, Sophia Tolika
Production: Per_Dance Choreographic Research Plarform

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Who knows where the time goes — potential destination # 1

Who knows where the time goes — potential destination # 1

Dance performance / Choreographic installation

Dance performance / Choreographic installation

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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.

Concept-choreography-artistic direction: Eleonora Siarava
Ephemeral scenography: Eleonora Siarava
Performers: Mina Ananiadou, Natalia Baka, Nikoleta Karmiri
Music: Savvas Metaxas
Set & Costumes: Daphne Aidoni
Assistant Set & Costumes: Sofia Theodoraki
Light Design: Miltos Athanasiou
Production assistant: Danai Giannakopoulou
Photos-video: Alekos & Christos Bourelias
Production: Per_Dance Choreographic Research Platform

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The Body and the Other~

The Body and the Other~

Dance performance / Choreographic installation

Dance performance / Choreographic installation

Learn more at:
Tanzhaus NRW

Official trailer:
Temps d’ Images

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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)

Concept-choreography-artistic direction: Eleonora Siarava
Dancers: Mina Ananiadou (GR), Yana Novotorova (DE/UKR)
Digital artist: Naoto Hieda (DE/JPN)
Technology Development: Mixed Reality and Visualization Team [MIREVI]
Sound Design: Jonas Knohl (DE)
Costumes-external eye: Anne Weyler (DE)
Project Coordinator: Ivana Druzetic (DE/ΗR)

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Step-In

Step-In

Performance / Choreographic installation

Performance / Choreographic installation

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Step-In invites audience to walk into a white box enclosing bodies, shapes, sounds and movements in different parts of the time-space spectrum. It starts in the evening with daylight and finishes in dark as an atmospheric fog that covers the transition from day to night. The performing bodies move as two-dimensional playful figures on the ‘canvas’ surfaces and create impressions, proximities, imprints, traces. They meet, intersect, invade into each other as representations of the inner, the outer, the in-between. The space during the performance gives the sense of being continuously contracted and expanded while encapsulating familiar forms but also hybrid creatures, stills multiplied, fragments of memory of the near past and the future foreshadowed. Choreographic patterns in repetition and variations are interrupted by slow motion and moments of stillness. In Step-In the three-dimensional body and its two-dimensional projection, the light and darkness, the flow and the freezing time, the form and its distortion, the human and the hybrid instead of opposite poles end up points in a continuum. They become blurry corporeal landscapes to enter and wander around.

Thessaloniki Concert Hall, September 2019

Step-In was awarded and funded by Thessaloniki Concert Hall in the context of Enclosures / Pass-throughs Project.

Enclosures / Pass-throughs invited artists to experiment ‘with the creative crossings of the distinct fields of artistic production, with the aim of inter-artistic works that lead us to a reconsideration of every type of frame or limit and the possibilities to escape’.

Concept-choreography: Eleonora Siarava
Performers: Evangelia Vasdari, Giorogos Panopoulos, Viki Hatzi
Sound Design & live performance: Georgia Pazarloglou
Guest Performers: Faedra Charalambidou, Kostantinos Kotsos
Production: Per_Dance Choreographic Research Platform

Photos by Lefteris Tsinaris, Amanda Protidou

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Smini

Smini

Performance

Performance

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A performance that experiments with visual and kinesthetic perception of motion, time and intersections developed in space. The bodies of the dancers with their own movement language meet, develop interrelationships and interact following one another. The performance unfolds in a mesmerizing dream-like atmosphere of symbolic images that invite multiple levels of interpretation to emerge. Key elements are the interactive part with the audience members performing a score in order to transform the two-dimensional sense of space into a three-dimensional experience, the unexpected interfaces between visuality and kinesthetic empathy and the role of lighting as a performer. Smini is an outcome of structured improvisation while the creative process for the performers and the process of attendance for the audience resemble to the stages of chaos, composition, deconstruction and reconstitution in a perpetual rotation.

Presented at BlackBox Theatre, Thessaloniki, Greece, 2015

Choreography-direction: Eleonora Siarava
Performers: Viki Hatzi, Faedra Charalampidou, Eleni Valkani, Efi Vedinoglou,
Light Performance: Athanasios Alexopoulos
Costumes: Marialena Chrisogonidou
Production: Per_Dance Choreographic Research Platform

Photos by Tasos Thomoglou, Alkis Tsorlinis

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Co-Topia II

Co-Topia II

Site-specific movement performance

Site-specific movement performance

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Co-Topia II was part of the WOW exhibition organized by the Architects Association of Thessaloniki. The performance came as a result of a field study of the structural, functional and aesthetic aspects of the space aiming to map landscapes of coexistence and enrich the physical experience of urban every day life. The concept was to allow the community get familiarized and embody the public space through an experiential approach suggesting new ways to use and interplay with that. The choreographic composition was based on structured improvisation with interactive elements and movement study of “unexpected events” and the temporal and spatial interrelationships of performing bodies.

Presented at Thessaloniki Concert Hall, Thessaloniki 2016 in the context of WOW Project
With the support of Thessaloniki Concert Hall and Architects Association of Thessaloniki

Co-Topia II follows Co-Topia that took place in Germany (2015) in the framework of stART Fellowship Program of Robert Bosch Foundation in cooperation with the Goethe Institute of Thessaloniki and the German Association of Sociocultural Centers.

Concept-choreography: Eleonora Siarava
Performers: Faedra Charalambidou, Viki Hatzi, Elena Tzanavalou
Soundscape: Nefeli Dimitriadi
Production: Per_Dance Choreographic Research Platform

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Untitled

Untitled

Real-time interactive 3D visual performance

Real-time interactive 3D visual performance

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Warehouse C, Thessaloniki, Greece, 2017

For START – Create Cultural Change
With the support of Robert Bosch Stiftung, Goethe-Institut Thessaloniki, German Association of Sociocultural Centers, John S. Latsis Public Benefit Foundation.

Concept-choreography: Eleonora Siarava
In collaboration with the performers: Mina Ananiadou, Vicky Hatzi, Sonia Ntova
Ioanna Papadopoulou
Real-time Interactive 3D Visuals Design: Nefeli Dimitriadi
Vertical Dance: Kirko (Daniel Arrando, Rodoula Gouliaberi)
Sound Design: Nefeli Dimitriadi
Artistic Direction: Olga Tabouris-Babalis
Assistant Production: Theodora Matziropoulou
Production: Per_Dance Choreographic  Research Platform

Photos by Lefteris Tsinaris, Stefanos Tsakiris

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Co-Topia

Co-Topia

Performance

Performance

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A site specific performance that takes place in the 13th century’s St. Nikolai Church. Dealing with the concept of reformation the piece invites the audience to approach a space with a very specific function and identity with a new gaze. By experimenting with creative movement canons the aim is to multiply the performing body and add to the notion of ritual a new substance. At the same time, typical features of gothic architecture such as verticality, high linear structures, play with perspective, expansive interior light allow new performative possibilities to emerge. Movement that fills spaces and creates empty spaces to be filled. Minimalistic repetitive patterns building a rhythm and unfolding perceptual echoes. Set roles are challenged as the audience is asked to interact and follow a performance moving itself at three different parts of the church which under the sounds of an organ live concert is being transformed into a non-conventional scene.

Premiered at St. Nikolai Church, Stralsund (Germany, 2015) after a residency at Perform[d]ance Centre.

With the support of stART Fellowship, a program of Robert Bosch Stiftung, Goethe-Institut Thessaloniki and the German Association of Sociocultural Centers.

Concept-choreography-artistic direction: Eleonora Siarava
Performers: Dörte Bähr, Marlene Kaun, Christina Rödel, Bithja Rothe, Nele-Marie Suhr, Dajana Voß
Music-Buchholz Organ: Matthias Pech
Production: Per_Dance Choreographic Research Platform

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Co-Topia on screen

Co-Topia on screen

Video dance

Video dance

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The video was filmed in the 13th century’s St. Nikolai Kirche (Stralsund, Germany). The idea was to transform a church into a performative space and create a ritual which demystifies performing bodies. Based on typical features of gothic architecture such as verticality, high linear structures, play with perspective, expansive interior light, the concept was to experiment and allow new performative possibilities to emerge. The choreography is composed of minimalistic repetitive patterns that build a rhythm and invite movement to unfold as a perceptual resonance, a movement that enters and amplifies the empty spaces while spectators interact with the moving image and move themselves in different parts of the space.

With the support of Goethe Institut Thessaloniki, stART Fellowship Program, Perform[d]ance, Robert Bosch Stiftung and the German Association of Sociocultural Centers.

‘Co-topia on screen’ has been presented at:

  1. Off Borders Festival at MOMus-Experimental Center for the Arts/Metropolitan Organization of Museums of Visual Arts of Thessaloniki (Greece, 2018)
  2. Wicklow Screendance Laboratory (Ireland, 2018)
  3. 1st International Screendance Festival Freiburg, Theater Freiburg (Germany, 2019)
  4. 28th Quinzena de Dança de Almada –International Dance Festival, Video Dance Showcase at Goethe-Institut Lisbon, Session dedicated to artists & productions from Germany Screening & project presentation (Portugal, 2020)

Concept-choreography: Eleonora Siarava
Performers: Dörte Bähr, Marlene Kaun, Christina Rödel, Bithja Rothe, Nele-Marie Suhr, Dajana Voß
Buchholz-Organ: Matthias Pech
Editing: Eleni Chrysomalli
Sound Design: Eleni Chrysomalli
Camera: Max Gleschinski, Roy Liedtke
Production: Per_Dance Choreographic Research Platform

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