ABOUT THE TRANSNATIONAL RESIDENCY

The piece was developed as part of our Transnational Residency organized and hosted by Dance Days Chania Festival & Dance House Limassol. This residency brings artists together from two different countries, cultures, artistic contexts in order to facilitate a space of mutual exchange and embodied dialogue through each artist's personal artistic practice and what might surface as a common one.

As Dance Days Chania writes on their website:

"The idea of this transnational residency has been around for many years before its realization in this year’s DDC programming. It is seen as an investment in the potentiality of research and development of young Greek artists through the opportunity to engage in an embodied dialogue between movement artists/researchers from different cultures, backgrounds and techniques.

The aim of the project that is implemented for the second time at the festival is to contribute to the exchange of ideas and artistic practices, creating a network of support."

Thus Styliana Apostolou and I, never having met each other in person and ignorant of each other's artistic endeavours, met for the first time in a common Zoom meeting in May 2023 after being selected by the respective organisations. Our task at hand was to build our bridge to each other, across countries, across media and distances, in order to acces each other's artistic standpoints, yearnings for this residency, ways of communicating but also the person each of us are, because as it turned out for us the quality we carry as an artist cannot be isolated from the quality we carry as a person and this weaving colours and surrounds the potentialities of our artistic encounter.

Thus taking part in the Transnational Residency of Dance Days Chania x Dance House Limassol, the fundamental question motivating the first steps of our research with Styliana  was how we, through the condition of distant communication – a condition so common in the contemporary work ecologies – and through the invitation to collaborate with a so far unknown colleague, can create a common ground that hosts listening, exchanging and encountering in a mutual and equal collaborative framework.

As such we decided to put the inherent conditions of this Transnational Residency, the distance and the invitation or challenge to collaborate and coexist, as the base of our artistic research, approaching them as a potential to progressively mold new collaborative methodologies of research and creation. Our initial exchanges set off in experimental methodologies of exchange that aim to invite us to collaborate and develop relational intimacy, creating leakages between the professional, personal and sociopolitical spheres of our lives and disregarding the resistances of distance to meaningful connection.

We created a contract: each day we set an alarm at a time appointed by each other alternately. Any time of the day. As the alarm rings we either write non-stop for a certain amount of time or record ourselves telling what we would write. We write about our current state, what we notice, what our relationship to movement, society, life is at this given time. And then we send it to the other.

This approach evoked thoughts and questionings around topics related to artistic vulnerability, when working with a new collaborator, around how to nurture trust and how we infuse the in-progress work with the qualities of an emerging friendship and the attempt to build a common, non-hierarchical world that, more than the individual voices of each of us, listens to and bridges the space that arises in between us.

Through this process we reached the topics of our in-progress piece Vacationists in the absurd that deals with the attempt to find or create meaning in a world that serves absurdity, with friendship as a weapon to toxic times and a supportive cradle for solidarity. Navigated through sociopolitical and relational matters, the piece thus results as an artistic necessity and need and a solidarian quest for redemption, when confronted with the fear of a world that is changing rapidly and audaciously insists on neglecting its collapse.