ARTIST’S STATEMENT

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I am a dance and movement artist embracing the living body in my work through all its expressive fabrics -  its movement, its voice, its senses, its memory, its language and its poetic emancipatory potential, its imagination and its ability to interact and relate to other human and non-human bodies. Having roots in two cultures, two mother tongues and many displacements, having grown up on Leros, “the island of the mental institution” and of the Greek psychiatric reformation, and finding my own identity in a non-place and a questioning about what comprises the personal lived experience and the collective memory, the normal and the non-normative, the exploration of memory, of experiential anatomy, place and imagination stand centrally in my creative practice. My work moves within the realm of expanded choreography with a focus on socially engaged and participatory dance practices, playing with physical-emotional states in its creative methodologies and elements from theater in its aesthetics. Through my practice I pursue to challenge, deconstruct and recontextualise my own and our established ways of seeing dance, what we categorize as dance and performance and how we may participate claiming the dance event as a whole-bodied relational experience. As such a dance event in my oeuvre could include any relational communicative act in its performative expression moving both the body and the mind in big or small scale - such as writing, speaking, dialoguing, walking, reading, active listening and dancing. I apply human- and site-specific approaches in my creative methodology and pursue social and/or physical participation of various audiences in the research, creation, performance and/or legacy of the work. My artistic and physical practice is rooted in Open Training/MB (Mind Body - Muscle Bone), the physical component of Japanese Butoh dancer Min Tanaka’s Body Weather approach, which I studied close to Kitt Johnson/X-act and has been a crucial encounter for developing my personal physical and ecological approach to body and place in the performing arts. Finally, my artistic and physical research address sustainable frameworks of practicing and creating contemporary dance, while building durable bonds with and for local communities and ecologies.

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My  work develops around the artistic inquiry of how the anchoring of dance in everyday life can enable us to develop more sustainable structures for our common futures and explores this inquiry through creating, performing or facilitating dance events (performances, workshops, practice sharings, texts, performance lectures etc). I approach my artistic practice as both a physical, aesthetic and political one and through it often pursue to unpick, destabilize and repropose potentialities for the relationship between artist, audience and dance.

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Exploring the relations between dancer, spactator and dance event I position my dance practice in dialogue with the society within which it takes place. Through my endeavour as dancer, creator and facilitator I approach dance as a participatory act and thus an artform that could potentially nurture embodied democratic structures for society.

 

The dance event is to me a state of being and co-existing through which  I can invite the spectator to become a participant of the world as proposed in the given sharing, interact with it, explore it and give meaning to the promises of our encounter. I do this because I search for more sustainable and collective ways of being together and creating communities through dance. 

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