A need to return to the body

Anonymo – photo Lila Sotiriou

What has changed, what are the developments in your work, since the last interview? (productions, studies, etc.)

Lately I took Greek history classes as part of my research for the latest performative installation Synthesis, co-curated/created with visual artist Vassilis Gerodimos  commissioned by ELS on the occasion of the 200 years since the Greek revolution. The best thing about this kind of work is that you get to know things, you dive into history that otherwise you wouldn’t have done by yourself and this pushes you to see things in different perspectives. Greece is a rather new state after all and what is happening now has quite strong connections with the past. I would like to continue to study history out of interest as a human social being and citizen.

I am now also attending a soundecology workshop, a program from the Ionian University in relation to environmental sound recordings or sound art, an art that is close to us (dance) but from another perspective. I am very conscious that studying is a necessary part of feeding yourself both as an artist and as a human being; maybe through institutions or programs. It is very refreshing and pushes you to see things in a different perspective.

The last few years I also started teaching again: improvisation and choreography at the State School of Dance and at the Maro Grigoriou Dance School. I am very interested to work on how you can transfer knowledge to students within their 3 years of study, how much you can delve both into the real time decisions that are demanded in improvisation and different approaches to analyse the elements that make up a piece and to actually build a choreographic work. Especially because there is no specific methodology for teaching choreography and you don’t want to transmit just one way, your way but rather to give the students the necessary tools to find their own method and language.

In relation to my work, since the last interview, I created Anonymous. It was a great need for me to return to the body. It’s been a tremendous journey. I removed all the tools and technologies that I had used for a decade in my work tools that offered me a certain way to communicate. I removed them all and looked for how to communicate ALL I want to say solely through the body. I don’t miss the technology in work nor in my life. When I made these past projects technology wasn’t that much in our lives, while now the use of technology has already surpassed what we want. It’s very hard to set boundaries for its use, as we all know, and I don’t want it in my life anymore. Now is the time to return to physical communication, to the body, to physical space, time and place and in Anonymous I comment on this. The show starts from digital communication, deconstructs it and returns to the physical. How do we return to the body, how do we touch, how do we meet, dance together, sing together? These are things that I find always offer catharsis and collective memory. I look at Anonymous now, after the  two years into the pandemic and I see how much everything has changed. When you can’t express yourself physically at all. I remember we went to Epirus to a festival and only one person got up to dance and the band stopped playing to avoid a fine because dancing was banned at the time. After 2 years of bans, social and human behaviour is changing and I am scared of all this. Technology had already brought about a life where you were mostly alone communicating with the world through a tool, but I feel there was still somechoice, while during the lockdowns we couldn’t even go out to the public space. I wonder how much the body’s memory changes through all this, hopefully it doesn’t all go away after 2 years. The constitution of humans is changing now and I can’t even imagine what it will be like for the young people growing up within these conditions.

The next project I did, which I had a research grant for, I was meant to present it in summer of 2020, but we went into lockdown in March. I rescheduled it for September but then we went into lockdown again and I finally delivered a video. The subject matter I’m researching is huge and now I’m going to continue with it in the new project. In Anonymous I focused on the practice of dances and songs as social expression. I studied traditional dances and songs all without a signature, all of unknown authors. I studied the traditions, when people expressed themselves collectively through voice, body, architecture or even how they built houses. In the new project I’m focusing on sayings, the folk wisdom that is again anonymous, something that in its evolution might become the quotes that are nonetheless signed. I am interested in exploring how what was anonymous relates to the body as experience. How words or phrases emerged from experiences and how this relates to present times. Verbal communication and bodily expression are not coherent in our times, that is what I believe in and that is what I am searching for. What we experience alienates us from our body.

 

face to phase – photo: Dimitris Michelakis

 

I also did some works with Vassilis Gerodimos on the relationship between performing and visual arts. We are looking for a dialogue between them because it’s interesting how something ephemeral interweaves with something permanent; (it is only performance art that is ephemeral in the visual arts). We created, face to phase, which was presented at the School of Fine Arts and this work was the beginning of the question: what can the performativity of the visual arts be? When you see an exhibition you walk in and you see the final product, you don’t know anything about the process of setting up the exhibition nor anything about the person who made the works. I find the process of how an exhibition is set up and how a work is set up in the here and now, interesting. When does the installation that I am creating now end? This activates the viewer/spectators relationship to the process of creation: is this finished or will something change? Will something be added or removed? face to phase also led us to the idea of Synthesis, the project on the Greek revolution. The revolution itself is a synthesis, as is the work itself which was a very large live synthesis. With many lines running in parallel at the same time; so alive, so big. And we did not have two years of rehearsals to coordinate this creation with a three day duration. It was a live score with many individual scores inside it created by the (over 30) artists themselves and with many other contributors. Many parameters, all on stage and the composition was done live. We started with the following premise- our canvas is the space and we would have our materials already there. The materials were selected by the visual artists from the storage of the national opera house (old props from old operas etc.). We wanted to reuse things, as in your weapons for this revolution are your tools, it is whatever you find in here that is relevant to our times. The visual artists chose different things, anything made of wood and fabric, all natural materials. We decided that we would figure out how to construct and deconstruct them in ways that conceptually or symbolically refer to the years of the revolution’s timeline. These materials were initially all covered up, as if there was a project at stake that had not yet begun. As makers, we focused on the period from 1814 (Filiki Eteria) and went all the way to 1830 in this piece. Historically, the first 2 years of the revolution is when it started and succeeded, it was established and the national assembly happened. Then there were civil wars and there are almost always civil wars and conflicts after revolutions because that’s when something new is on its way to become established. In this next phase, a total destruction is at work and so ultimately our state starts from ruins. This is what we wanted to communicate through the materials’ costructions and deconstions; we were creating different compositions which were finally assembled into a pedestal. The creation of all of the above and the size of the space ultimately determined the time for this work, the duration was dictated by the needs of construction. We invited actors, choreographers, directors to create art fragments that correspond to specific moments or events from the historical research we did for the project in collaboration with guest research historians. Each artist created something for a moment in time within the time and space we defined as a timeline, each corresponding to history. And the work itself corresponded to the revolution, so many people had to meet, work together, disagree and negotiate to create the state. The technical part and the technicians were also important in this performance/ visual performance installation. Just as each role, whether protagonist or unsung hero, is equally important to the whole in a revolution, the technicians were part of it. As a spectator you didn’t know and could not discern who was an actor and who was a technician because ultimately you can’t have one without the other. We all tried to do something we’ve never done before. We as creators hadn’t done anything like this before either, we didn’t already have a methodology in hand, it was all unknown to us. The very process of making the work had a correspondence with the very creation of a revolution.

 

Synthesis

 

I also created Inventory in Elefsina, shortly after Anonymous and in connection with the Memorandum as it was somehow like a more complete version of it. This project had 2 parts; performance and exhibition. We went to Elefsina and collected ourselves memories of the labour movements that had taken place there and exhibited them in a container-an alternative exhibition space- in its harbour. In order to collect the memories we addressed the residents with posters and indeed some people came of their own accord to share their stories with us. We also visited old people’s clubs and clubs from different areas such as the Smyrna club and the workers’ centre. We approached the citizens of Elefsina and interviewed them, which gave us a lot of material. The performance started from Heroes Square and ended at the port in the containers where all this research was composed in a visual way. The performance opened the exhibition in the containers which, as an alternative exhibition space, remained there for about a month.

 

Inventory — photo: John Kouskoutis

 

After a decade of successive crises (economic, social, environmental, health) what changes and developments do you notice have occurred in the contemporary dance scene in Greece and what do you think is missing?

One thing that has changed is that I feel that Greek choreographers have entered more forcefully into a wider dance market abroad. This is partly due to their personal efforts and partly from collaborations with managers from abroad. The Onassis Cultural foundation has supported the touring of works abroad and also in finding co-producers e.g. Christos Papadopoulos, Euripides Laskaridis, Dimitris Papaioannou and Anonymous have toured. This time the presence of Greek dance abroad has a continuity, it is not isolated cases or events as before. It is as if we are trying to find a pace in this field, there has been an opening of 3-4 artists at the same time touring more and more consistently.

Institutionally there have also been some changes, funding for the arts is available again, and during the pandemic support to the artists was offered. No real solutions are there yet on how a dance artist can survive in Greece. This is still very hazy. There is a need for a baseline and some groundwork on how the field is moving that some works will definitely be produced and that some dancers will definitely work. Moreover, there are no proper performance spaces but there are also no places to work. Yes, there are theatres but not a single dancehouse and dance studios in order to survive usually have mostly classes so ultimately there are no rehearsal spaces. As artists I believe that there are so many empty spaces here, we could inhabit some and take care of them, and create meeting places for our field. What is missing? A more mature strategic organisation of the dance field as a market. There are people who make a living from this profession, and there is no other plan than the option of annual planning. There could be partnership programs, maybe some kind of fund that has to do with collaborations and not just independent productions. Such meetings should not be just isolated occasions that we have organised even ourselves.

 

Synthesis

 

How might we imagine the landscape of dance in the next ten years?

It is very difficult for me to imagine it. I feel that nothing will change radically. Everyone is doing the best they can and somehow we are all creating something together. I hope that dance can remind people of physicality and it could evolve into becoming more appealing to audiences. After a pandemic maybe it is also the responsibility of dance to find how to keep the body and the physical interaction alive. Maybe one thing that could work is, if apart from what we do as choreographers in theatres, we start making more use of public space. Because encountering things that involve the body can awaken memories of the body; even unconsciously. I feel that -after lockdowns and fear- this is a time that is asking for that: to return with more freedom to the public space, to redefine its use in a meaningful way, as a place to meet not just transit.

 

Inventory

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