International Platform for Performer Training | 9th edition 12 th – 15 th January 2023 Fondazione Orizzonti d’Arte – Chiusi
AFTER THE EMPTY SPACE: FROM TRADITIONAL SETTINGS TO NEW CREATIVE ECOLOGIES
Actor’s score, martial arts and the “animal turn” Workshop
Martial arts can shape an actor’s dramaturgy. Long martial forms (e.g., Tàolù, Kata, Jalan Panjang) are systematised combinations of movements with embedded fighting strategies. Actors can employ those to create scores or restructure a character’s movement, through a onedirectional or circular and continuum progression. From fighting techniques and tactics, the martial Long Forms become pedagogic strategies, allowing the storing and transmission of movements, and supporting training and composition in rehearsals and performing.
The workshop is based on movement and active participation. The participants gather in the working space. A short ritual opens the session. A warm-up prepares the bodymind. The participants learn a fragment of a long martial form, on which they work individually and collectively, exploring the various principles. The concepts of transposition, absorption and mutation of actions may be investigated. Some theoretical notions and a short time for comments are provided throughout the workshop. A short ritual closes the session.
Animal movements are preferred when integrating a post-human perspective, and postpsychophysicality and a non-anthropocentric approach pave the way for the “animal turn” and environmental awareness to be included. From bodymind to bodyworld, the space is reconsidered, and the actor participates in reconnecting humans to animals and the environment, reflecting a profound need for multispecies societies.
Marco Adda is an independent researcher, actor, director-pedagogue, somatic trainer, and anthrozoologist. Since 1994 he has worked as a professional in theatre, applied drama and cinema, and since 2009 he has relevant attention to animal behaviour studies. He is an instructor of Bangau Putih Silat, Qigong and other practices. Other areas of his interest include psychophysiology, neuroscience, and integrative health, and they are all incorporated into his research, practice and pedagogical approach.
TDPT special issue: Green Training – a call for action (and papers) Presentation
Paul Allain University of Kent
Jonathan Pitches University of Leeds
Libby Worth Royal Holloway
This interactive session, presented remotely by the co-editors of Theatre, Dance and Performance Training, will offer an opportunity for speakers and participants to propose models, themes, and questions for a Special Issue (Vol 15.3) of what we are simply calling Green Training – performance training that is informed by environmental concerns, climate crisis, carbon literacy and climate activism. For a number of years TDPT has foregrounded the need for such a special issue, and in recognition of its urgency, Libby Worth and Jonathan Pitches, co-editors of the journal, are for the first time editing a special issue (rather than calling on Guest Editors). This session will help us draft our call for papers collaboratively with members of IPPT, generating questions and themes for the call and hearing examples of green training. It will be an opportunity for colleagues presenting in this area at IPPT Chiusi to share ideas, and for us to establish a strong foundation of interest before we finalise the call and publish it in our usual channels.
Paul Allain Is Full Professor of Theatre and Performance at the University of Kent. After collaborating with Gardzienice Theatre Association, on whom he did his PhD and published his first book, he worked extensively as Movement Director for director Katie Mitchell, the Royal Shakespeare Company, the Royal National Theatre and the Royal Court. He has published many books and articles on theatre and actor training as both author and editor. He is recognized as an expert in actor training and has presented his research through practice and theory around the world, including in India, Iran, Singapore, Poland and Russia.
Jonathan Pitches is Professor of Theatre and Performance at the University of Leeds and Head of School of Performance and Cultural Industries. He specialises in the study of performer training and has wider interests in environmental performance and blended learning. He is founding co-editor of the TDPT and has published several books in this area: Vsevolod Meyerhold (2003), Science and the Stanislavsky Tradition of Acting (2006/9), Russians in Britain (2012) and, Stanislavsky in the World (with Dr Stefan Aquilina 2017). Recent book publications incliude: Great Stage Directors Vol 3: Komisarjevsky, Copeau Guthrie (sole editor, 2018) and the monograph, Performing Landscapes: Mountains (2020). His most recent publication is the co-edited Routledge Companion to Vsevolod Meyerhold (2022) (again with Dr Aquilina).
Libby Worth is Reader in Contemporary Performance Practices, Royal Holloway, University of London. She is a movement practitioner with research interests in the Feldenkrais Method, physical theatres, site-based performance and in folk/traditional and amateur dance. Performances include codevised duets; Step Feather Stitch (2012) and dance film Passing Between Folds (2017). She is coeditor of TDPT and published texts include Anna Halprin (2004, co-authored), Ninette de Valois: Adventurous Traditionalist (2012, co-edited), Jasmin Vardimon’s Dance Theatre: Movement, Memory and Metaphor (2016). Chapter contributions on traditional dance include for, Time and Performer Training (2019, she co-edited), Performance Research – On Amateurs (25/1, 2020 she co-edited) and The Routledge Companion to English Folk Performance (2021 P. Harrop and S. Roud Eds).
Space: Triple Self & Triple Thinking Performance / Lecture
Ziya Azazi Founder of Dervish in Progress, Whirling Dance Educator
This presentation looks at the transformations of humans, whose brain weight has doubled since the beginning of the thinking animal process with their ability to create myths and thus examines all kinds of topics thanks to the discussion environment it has created.
The human mind is a concrete structure that thinks about abstract eternity. It is a presentation in which this structure, which we can see as the mind-body-spirit trilogy, examines subjects of life, in rough outlines the past, present and predicted future.
The aim of this discussion-based presentation, which deals with emerging triads (son-spirit- god, animal-sapiens-homodeus, reptile-limbic-cognitive, earth-machine-data), is to prepare the mind, heart and soul for universal openness and freedom, and to look at what is happening in today’s fast life from a wider perspective.
Ziya Azazi (Antakya, 1969), a graduate in Mining Engineering at Istanbul Technical University (ITU), is an award-winning dancer and choreographer. Since 1999, he has choreographed Sufi Whirling and performed his Dervish in Progress performances in over 50 countries. Ziya has also been presenting to academic circles such as London Goldsmiths and the University of Vienna. He is the founder of DIPTEP, a two-year Instructor Training programme which has formed over 40 instructors since 2018.
Action Medea Presentation / Performance
Przemysław Błaszczak Studio Kokyu
This work demonstration by the Kokyu Studio is a statement of the latest stage of research that the team consisting of Joanna Kurzyńska, Marta Horyza and Marie Walker, led by Przemysław Błaszczak, has been conducting since the beginning of 2022. Our interest in the classic text by Euripides led us to try to confront the material standing for one of the most ambiguous figures of European culture Medea – a poisoner, infanticide, sorceress, princess, maddened with despair, murderer, and avenger, and finally a victim of the patriarchal system. Our studies, asking questions about Medea, is one part of our search, another is the question about the performer, about the possibility of reducing the stage form to the simplest one, to base the event on precise, naked performative structures. Action Medea is intended to be a model and tool for the performer to work on himself or herself, in action, with and towards the other. At the stage we are at, Action Medea is still subject to the process of constructing, creating and composing material. In the next step, we would like to check the possibility of opening a structure, so that, especially within the educational processes, Action Medea could offer a way of active participation, slowly abolishing the division between spectators and actors, in favour of participation with varying degrees of dynamics. The question we ask ourselves is the possibility of building an event based on precise acting lines, which can be opened and, as it were, created from scratch each time with new groups of participants (for example as part of the Educational Programmes of the Kokyu Studio), without losing and without damaging the main backbone of the structure. Therefore, Action Medea could combine both fulltime artistic and educational functions, which are both of great importance for the Kokyu Studio. As part of our demonstration, we want to present the first steps taken in our research in the aforementioned direction.
Marie Walker is a British actress and a graduate from Rose Bruford College in London. During her studies, she spent six months training at AST National Academy of Theatre Arts in Kraków, Branch in Wrocław. After graduating, she performed at the Edinburgh Fringe Festival in the show Limbo, directed by Teresa and Andrzej Wełmińscy. In 2019, she moved to Poland and began her work in Studio Kokyu.
Joanna Kurzyńska lives in Wrocław. She graduated in violin from the Karol Lipiński Academy of Music, Wrocław, and now works as an actress, singer, multi-instrumentalist, composer and passionate teacher.
Joanna Kaczmarek is currently associated with Studio Kokyu. She trained in acting and singing, with special attention to Kristin Linklater method, under Polish and international teachers and as a violinist with Wrocław’s Sound Factory Orchestra, Camera Nera, Old Town Quartet and the Mamatucada percussion group. She is the recipient of the Marshal of Lower Silesia’s Arts Scholarship and of an Arts grant from the Polish Ministry of Culture and National Heritage for her research path VoiceInProgress.
Marta Horyza shares her creative experience as an actress, musician and through workshops as teacher. Marta graduated from the Fontainebleau School of Acting in France. Currently, she is part of Kokyu Studio and of the Till Tomorrow Theatre Company. Marta has been associated with Studio Kokyu since 2006. She played in Halo? And was also part of the cast of I Come to You River: Ophelia Fractured. Marta is co-leading the work on voice, singing and polyphonic songs for Studio Kokyu,
Przemysław Błaszczak is an actor, director, pedagogue, aikido and ‘shintaido’ practitioner, with a degree in philosophy,and is associated with the Grotowski Institute since 1995. From 1996 to 1999, he worked with the Song of the Goat Theatre and later joined Teatr ZAR in 2004. Przemek performed in Heiner Müller’s Mauser, directed by Theodoros Terzopoulos (2012). He is a certified teacher of Terzopulos’ original actor training method. From 2013 to 2016, Przemek was one of the leaders of the Two Paths Studio, which was part of the Grotowski Institute’s BodyConstitution research programme. In 2016, Przemek formed Kokyu Studio. He is also a co- founder of Wrocław Theatre Offensive (WrOT).
Social theatre and community spaces: a new idea of “home” Presentation
Jacopo Bottani Collettivo Amalgama
Social theatre represents a prosperous discipline in Italy from an academic perspective as well as an activity that affects politics and poetics. What matters to our discussion is that Social Theatre, by promoting agency in participants, often deals with changing everyday life’s perception that people have of spaces and of themselves. This lecture aims to offer a short perspective of Social Theatre in Italy and to move from the concept of “scenic space” to that of “community area”, questioning the need of new, more human ecologies and trying to imagine our so-called public spaces (theatres included) as new areas of interaction. To do this, a couple of case studies of personal practices will be presented.
Jacopo Bottani (1991) graduated as an actor at Civica Accademia of Dramatic Arts Nico Pepe in 2016; he has been working as an actor and director/dramaturg mostly in professional independent theatre. He got a degree in Modern Literature and he got trained in Social Theatre, developing his artistic research as conductor of groups and creative processes. His research concerns: contemporary and original playwriting, art of composition, director’s role as leader of co-creative processes, drama as practice for human development in extra-theatre contexts.
Teleleu – From an Empty Space to an Emptied Space – Greening Actor Training Workshop
Bogdan Mihai Florea, Ileana Gherghina Nu Nu Theatre Company
Brook’s empty space was a space waiting for the actor to enter and define it. But an empty space can also be a space from which the actor has exited: an emptied space. How can we create emptied spaces instead of artistically inhabiting empty ones?
Teleleu is a hard-to-translate Romanian word. It designates a worthless person, a vagabond. Used alongside the verb “to walk,” it describes an aimless sojourn through space(s). For us, as theatremakers, teleleu means to leave no traces, to create no (ecological) footprint in a performance space. Teleleu is an efficient way of emptying space(s) of possible polluting meanings, excessive presence, artificial boundaries. Teleleu is specific to children when they explore or play; to confused people when they lose their grip on “reality”; to people lost in foreign spaces; a movement proper to some artists or flaneurs. These are performers of a different order: they cleanse and make performance spaces green again. Brook’s empty space is a pre-prepared space which actors enter and may contaminate/pollute (like flattening the earth to build a factory on it), while the space emptied through teleleu-ing is one which the actor enters order to clean, to undertake a greening (after the factory has been demolished).
Dr Bogdan Mihai Florea is a professional actor and researcher in Theatre Studies, who has published and presented academic papers in the UK, USA, Finland, Switzerland, Poland, Serbia and Lithuania. He is an Associate Member of the Brokering Intercultural Exchange group, a global network of academics and cultural managers, and a co-founder of Nu Nu, a theatre company that supports professional actors who use English as a second language inthe UK.
Ileana Gherghina is an actor and director; co-founder of Nu Nu Theatre and curator at LAPER (Live Art and Performance Group) Oxford. She works with photography, collage, poetry, and video. Her most recent commissions include University of Bristol (Bread of Bristol), International Multimedial Art Festival, Serbia; Shinano Primitive Sense Art Festival, Japan; Performance Køkkenet, Norway; The Gallery Art Factory Flox Kirschau, Germany; Simultan Art Festival Timisoara, Romania; HighFest International Performing Arts Festival, Armenia; Modern Art Oxford.
Being in an Empty Space – To Hold a Lute and a Sword Presentation
Maria Gaitanidi and Maria Papadaki Collective Triptyco
About training/or the Art of seeing from the middle
How to develop a training for the performer which allows to see, do and compose simultaneously? If the point of departure is the I, Creator, the raw I entering in contact with a space, roles and themes that unravel from an artistic piece (may it be a play, a film, a poem etc) opening up an arena of exploration in the now. The land itself offers the artistic landscape in resonance with the who we are and what we do and all the social forms that entwine in a structured or un-structured milieu.
About the research
Inspired and driven by the communities, the cities, the natural reserves where people live and who are inseparable to the landscapes and us as creators and observers.
Does the cultural and artistic surrounding of man comes into conflict, complements or restructures nature?
How do the natural living beings (from sky, to sea and mountains) co-inhabit and what role do they play in the shaping of the actor-creator and their sensations (and sensory abilities)?
In which language will men and their stories talk to us about their living experience?
Does this qualitative research develop the personality of the artist in the ways he/she observes, acts-reacts, lives in a community and creates?
Maria Gaitanidi is Artistic Director of Triptyco. She led her own projects for the last ten years with the international ensemble of performers We Are Raw Material. She holds a Phd in Theatre Practice as Research from the University of Kent, UK. In 2022 she staged a composition of Chekhov’s Three Sisters at the Villa Koundourou in Chania, Crete and is currently working on Moliere’s Misanthrope for the Experimental Stage of the Municipal Theatre of Crete. Since 2019, she has been exploring Song as Action through the study of the Cretan traditional songs amongst which the Rizitika.
Maria Papadaki is the Executive Director of Triptyco. She is a graduate of Social Sciences from the University of the Aegean and of the School of Cinema Directors Stavrakos in Athens. She finds impulse in bringing together people for the Film Production, Directing and Film Editing of creations in diverse forms. Between 2011 and 2022 she has worked on short film fiction, Video Art projects, Experimental Documentary, Cinematography of Theatre plays and other. Maria loves to communicate through the philosophical nature of the individual, looking for stories which can take us a bit further in our positioning in the world.
Embodying Inner and Outer Spaces, and the Space in Between: Cultivating embodied imagination and scenic mastery for D/deaf and hearing performers. Presentation
Laura Haughey University of Huddersfield
Equal Voices Arts is Aotearoa New Zealand’s first professional Deaf and hearing theatre company. This paper will outline EVA’s approach to performance training for D/deaf and hearing performers who work with visual–spatial languages and highly physical storytelling. The performative possibilities enabled by working with signed languages on stage differ from those of spoken languages as theyexist in a visual-spatial field, and necessarily use the whole body. Performers simultaneously create and emotionally respond to the worlds they craft with their hands and bodies when working with sign language on stage. As O’Reilly writes, ‘In signed language performance, narrative is no longer linear and prosaic. The signer is the artist, the canvas, and the painting in the process of being painted – all at the same time’ (2017:106). To respond to the need for a present-centred performance practice which develops scenic mastery, EVA have been developing an accessible training which draws on embodied mindfulness practices to cultivate qualities that are beneficial for performance: present centred awareness, embodied awareness, spatial awareness, and relational awareness. This paper will outline EVA’s bi-lingual and bi-cultural performance contexts, share insights from the current European Commission-funded project, ‘Embodied Mindfulness for D/deaf and hearing Performers’, and explore how the training aims to cultivate a mastery of scenic space and the development of embodied imagination.
Laura Haughey is a theatre maker and researcher. She is the artistic director for the Deaf and hearing theatre company Equal Voices Arts. Working alongside Deaf colleagues, she explores and creates sites of cross cultural and cross linguistic exchange, devising original theatre productions that are accessible to both D/deaf and hearing audiences. Laura has recently been awarded a Marie Skłodowska-Curie European Commission Fellowship to develop accessible mindfulness based performer training modalities.
Groping and Fumbling with Hands: How could we learn to become primates? Workshop
Pauliina Hulkko Tampere University
In this workshop, the participants are invited to participate in embodied enquiry into hands and touch, and how they relate to questions of spatiality, such as:
– In everyday life, how do we relate to one another, and to the surrounding cosmos, through our hands and the manual practices in which we engage?
– What kind of spatial arrangements do these relations entail and evoke?
– What are the material prerequisites and implications of these arrangements like?
– How could we, by means of hand-related research, imagine and establish new kinds of relations, also with life forms and materialities different from us?
– How could these relations be experimented, reflected, and manifested by means of performer training and performance practices?
More generally, we discuss the role and significance of hands and the tactile in performer training. Through small exercises and experiments, performed with hands and through touching, we investigate how they affect our sense of space and the way in which we are together. We hope this enquiry provides insights into how we, in the future, could create and institute virtual and actual spaces and places of performer training, and for it. These spaces, I believe, should entail more sensible and sensitive encounters, and thus, enable us to see, sense, and perform in novel and unexpected ways.
Dr. Pauliina Hulkko is a director, dramaturge, artistic researcher, and Professor of Theatre Work at Tampere University, Finland. She makes material theatre which combines different materials, languages, and forms of expression. Her research interests extend from dramaturgy and composition to ethics and the performer, always with a hint of musicality. Recently Pauliina commenced a research project entitled “Primates: What do we do with hands?”, which focuses on hands, manual techniques, and touch.
Gather (g)Round Presentation
Gather (g)Round is a multi-iterative project seeking to redefine concepts of community, ecosystems, and gathering. Its incorporation of regenerative practices within sustainability models allows for adaptability in a constantly shifting cultural and social landscape. As a performance-based artist I am interested in engagement, relationality, and time also in relation to seasons and an everchanging social and ecological climate. Ecosystems are ever-evolving. They rely on biodiversity to remain healthy and productive. Recognizing the significance of biodiversity within the field of sustainability I find it necessary to acknowledge and encourage a similar strategy amongst collaborators, both human and non-human. Striving to create communal ecosystems reflective of the society we live in and experience, how can the development of artistic work and practices reflect this? During this presentation, I will examine the following questions: How do we ethically and conscientiously engage with landscapes? Who is invited to engage and how are these invitations extended? As collaborators with both the human and non-human, how are others considered when making choices? As engagement is expanded with non-human species, are equal efforts made to engage and understand fellow humans from marginalized cultures? Are efforts extended beyond familiar social, academic, and artistic circles? Without critically addressing issues of oppression, can the non-human be honestly and ethically addressed without replicating or further reinforcing colonial approaches?
Ayesha Jordan is a Black American, multidisciplinary performer and creator based in Oslo, Norway. She has a Master’s degree in Performance from the Norwegian Theatre Academy. Her current research interests are applied permaculture studies, regenerative community/ecosystem formation and adaptation, event curation, and how these can be explored through performance, or how they can inform performance methodologies. Previous iterations include In Relation and Observe & Interact.
Deterritorializing Language in Acting Training: Training Through and For Multilingual Theatre Presentation
Kasia Lech University of Amsterdam
This presentation will discuss different strategies and opportunities that training through an for multilingual theatre making can offer to deterritorialize creative ecologies of Europe. The paper will particularly argue for training reimagined as a collaborative web of tasks rooted in ontologies and epistemologies taken from many languages, places, and many production roles, which develop translocal imagination and speak to geopoetics of today’s and future Europe. Specifically, we will share our reflection on the Jeune Théâtre Européen Jeunes Publics (Young European Theatre for Young Audiences). This Creative Europe’s project is currently in its first year (out of two). It is run by France’s Espace des Arts, Scène Nationale de Chalon sur Saôn in cooperation with ArtVeda (Tunisia), Artfraction (Serbia), Jeune Théâtre National (France), Staatstheater Mainz (Germany), Pedio Texnis (Greece) and National University of Ireland Galway. Its aim is to create models for making multilingual theatre for young and new audiences by multinational and multi-European theatre companies. We will speak about practices we have developed so far, issues encountered, and what we have learned. Each of us will speak from the perspective of her own position in the project: Anne Bérélowitch as director; Marianne Ní Chinnéide as producer, and Kasia Lech as an engaged evaluator. The paper will be presented by Lech with Bérélowitch’s and Ní Chinnéide’s contributions being pre-recorded.
Kasia Lech is a scholar, theatre maker, and Associate Professor at the University of Amsterdam. Her research explores theatre through practice-based and traditional scholarship, focusing on verse, multilingualism, migration, and cross-cultural encounters. Kasia published Dramaturgy of Form (Routledge, 2021), acclaimed for its critical quality and decolonizing scholarship on verse. Her second book Multilingual Dramaturgies: Towards New European Theatre is forthcoming with Palgrave.
Echoes and Traces Workshop
Valerio Leoni, Sofia Guidi Labirion Officine Trasversali
In this workshop we will propose some exercises that we use to develop the psychophysical tools of the performers we work with in connection with the unpredictability of outdoor stages and environments.
THE GIFT
- Personal warm-up: what do I need today? How big and warm is my own bubble?
- Connection with my partner’s needs: opening gazes, the bubble of each individual opens and prepares the work of the ensemble.
- Heat and eat the space: the whole space is prepared to welcome the work.
THE ALIVE SPACE – The participants explore the space of work, observing and naming all the objects that surround them. When the space is well known, a part of the participants can transform it to stimulate the group.
PERCEIVE, FOCUS, ACT – The participants are divided up in groups of 5 people, 4 of them have a tennis ball. They move one by one through the space. The person without the tennis ball has to pre-perceive the movements and go toward the ball dividing the physical action in three parts: Perception, Focus and Action.
THE SPACE, AFTER – The actors of our residential company will perform a brief scene in a generical space, transforming it.
Some participants, which were blindfolded, will have to tell a story about that space.
How to relate to a space without just using it? Every space tell us a story, it keeps the traces of actions, the echoes of sounds and relations. Feeling them is the essential starting point to bring there our presence, our breathe, our dance.
Labirion Officine Trasversali is a centre of cultural and educational meetings in the fields of Art, Dance and Theatre led by Sofia Guidi and Valerio Leoni. It collaborates with companies and practitioners from all over the world to create performances and host workshops. It is the base of a resident group of researchers whose work focuses on developing a practice concerning the meeting between physicality and minimalism in Theatre, passing through street and digital arts.
Valerio Leoni is an actor, director and dramaturg who leads his research on Theatre among Italy, Poland, Denmark, Germany and Spain. In 2020 he wrote and directed the performance RUINS|Souvenirs.
Sofia Guidi is an actress and trainer. She studied abroad and started a collaboration about actor’s education with companies and institutions from Poland, Denmark and Germany. She is currently working in the organization of Festival Romaeuropa.
On the a-loud voice; Trauma-masking technologies, Third spaces and the Mythological voice Performance / Lecture
Katerina Maniou University of Thessaly
Voice is a space-signal, a space-keeper and a capsule of ephemeral imaginary topoi. Echoing Guatari, bare voice “re-signalizes space”, clearing it from capitalistic aesthetics and goals, and let’s silence, “the bearer of truth” (Wittgenstein), to become audible. Into silent space, the ‘vocal spaces’, composed by the performer’s activity, unmask agony; this “ecumenical human attribute” (Sartre) that ‘breaks’ us, connects and democratizes. In this performance lecture I capture a bipolar tension between the perception of physical voice as insufficient or even unnatural and the physicalization of mediation. I conjunct the immanent connotational nature of voice with the multi- disciplinarily theorized notion of the “third space” to discuss emerging problematizations in embodied voice performance and training, practically examined through Aeschylean Cassandra’s pre-death text. I compare mediated and bare voice’s presence/absence to examine aesthetic/gender colonization, fictional escapism, third spaces’ homogenization, co-vibrational and meaning reductionism. I conceptualize mediated loudness as a trauma-masking effect increasingly ‘a-loud’ counter to physical voice’s dynamic, to filter radical amendments in performing praxis, experience and social position. Cassanrda’s multimodal textually-witnessed loudness, reflecting migrant/gender/insanity/divination/homo sacer conditions, is examined as a grain of expelled phonetic streams, gender marginalization and of mythological voice (Cavarero) sustaining; A voicespace-knowledge synergy able to unlock role’s potential, body as social memory (Axelos), uncover cancelled vocal spaces and enhance new creative ecologies through contemporized performative awareness, by unveiling in voice/silence as here/now repatriation a political element that maximizes worldly antihumanism.
Katerina Maniou: Athens-based vocal performer, independent researcher and musicologist (Ph. D Department of Music Studies of the University of Athens/State Scholarship Foundation). As a practitioner, she has collaborated with Greek National Opera, Onassis Foundation, MedeaElectronique, AleaIII, dance/performing/conceptual art groups, she has interpreted workpremieres of Greek composers etc. She has published articles and participated in conferences, lectures, sound installations, experimental movies and broadcasts in Greece and abroad. Currently she is an academic scholar in the University of Thessaly.
The Dream of Space an introductory dialogue
Enrico Piergiacomi Technion | Israel Institute of Technology
Adonis Galeos Technon 100 Greece
An Italian Historian of Philosophy and a Greek theatre practitioner dialogue on Space in the Theatre and its roots within Classic Latin and Greek Philosophy and Rhetoric. In that spurious ground between speculation and practice, in the dreamy space that stems from the ‘mixture of all things’, we will encounter notions that since Plato, Aristotle, Quintilian and Chrysippus have always been part of the toolbox of the actor, and that will accompany our reflections throughout the Conference.
Enrico Piergiacomi is assistant professor in history of philosophy at the Technion | Israel Institute of Technology and visiting researcher at the Center for Religious Sciences of the Bruno Kessler Foundation of Trento. In 2021-2022, he was fellow at Villa I Tatti | The Harvard Center for Italian Renaissance Studies. He published two books: Storia delle antiche teologie atomiste (Rome 2017); Amicus Lucretius. Gassendi, il “De rerum natura” e l’edonismo cristiano (Berlin-New York 2022).
Adonis Galeos has translated and adapted 160 plays for the professional theatre. He works as a director, dramaturg, and intimacy coordinator. He is the programme leader of MA Acting (Metropolitan College/ University of East London), and he also teaches History of Acting and Literary Studies at Technon 100, and the Athens Conservatory of Dramatic Art. His research is into the interrelation of Rhetorical studies and Actor Training and the Theatre Rehearsal. He is completing his Practice as Research Phd in Rhetorical Acting at the University of Athens. He collaborated as the Head of Dramaturgical Research for the Opening Ceremony of the Athens Olympics.
Haunted spaces and bodies. Inhabiting the friction between the virtual and the material Workshop
Ambra Pittoni Kunstuniversität Linz
My proposal pertains to my ongoing Art Based PhD project The promise of the abyss, Body practices and new spaces of knowledge. My research focuses on the relation between body and space and how, specific spatial conditions are able to foster the emergence of specific corporealities and sensuous modalities of knowing/learning. Starting from the idea of choreography as a technology of transmission of bodies through space and time, I propose the idea of body and of space as haunted territories in which the body/subject is always inhabited by more instances at the same time, humans and non, organics and inorganic, dead and living. To this extent I would like to address the body-space relation as a dialogue between the virtual and the material, operating within the divide between what is visible and what is invisible in a performing body/space relation. The term virtual is purposely used beyond the digital sense of it, to address the sum of forces, memories, multiple corporealities constantly affecting bodies, hence blurring the boundaries of the body-subject.
The workshop will consists of exercises engaging active meditation, entangling imagination and movement through a practice developed from various experiments carried on the threshold between somatic practices and choreographic training.
Ambra Pittoni is a performance artist and researcher. She co-curate the projects The School of the End of Time and Workspace Ricerca X – Research and dramaturgy. Since 2022 she is a PhD candidate at the Linz University of the Arts. Among others she performed and exhibited at Fondazione Baruchello (Rome), Crédac (Ivry sur Seine), De Appel (Amsterdam), OGR (Turin), Maga Museum of art (Milan), CCA Zamek Ujazdowski (Warsaw), Ashkal Alwan (Beyrut), Roberta (Frankfurt), Sophiensaele (Berlin), PAV (Turin).
Ecosomatic Persephone: The Earthly Spaces of Theatre Performance / Lecture
Raffaele Rufo, Flavia Gallo Humanitas Mundi Teatro
This performance lecture presents a theoretical and practical dialogue between ecosomatic and dramaturgical practices. Working on the Greek myth of Persephone, we explore the thresholds between the dancing body and the dance of words to reveal the wounds of separation from the nonhuman and the inability to grieve for anthropogenic ecological disasters. Drawing on the relational and decolonising tensions in Peter Brook’s philosophy, we propose that theatre can be approached as an immersive ecology of non-anthropocentric spaces and training practices. This ecology integrates the sacredness of trees, rocks, sand, and other earthly forces through processes of crossing, assembling, and remembering our neurobiological heritage.
Why interweave the myth of Persephone between dramaturgy and ecosomatics? She is the mistress of the threshold between life and death, moving fate through words and touch. Her dramatic passage to the underworld – Cora becoming Persephone – exposes death as the most scandalous separation for the mind while revealing traces of the human within the nonhuman. Engaged as a metamorphic source, the myth softens the grip of our patterning instinct and takes us into the imaginal spaces between sensing and naming. Borrowing Brook’s terminology, the emptiness of these spaces has the quality of an intensified haptic presence. We are faced with a kind of naming which defies cognitive-linguistic abstraction to reclaim the more-than-human healing power of vulnerability.
Raffaele Rufo is an artist-scholar in the fields of somatics, dance and performance. In 2020 he was awarded a PhD by Deakin University (Melbourne) for the study of touch in Tango. His research on improvisation was published internationally. After travelling across Europe, Africa and Australia, Raffaele lives in the Natural Reserve of the Roman Coast (Italy). He explores the more-than-human ecologies of embodiment in collaboration with the theatre ensemble Humanitas Mundi.
Flavia Gallo is a dramatist, lecturer in Theatre and Education and research fellow in Pedagogy of Expression at Roma Tre University. She is the author of numerous prize- winning plays awarded by, among others, Sipario Prize and European Prize for Theater and Dramaturgy Tragos, Piccolo Teatro di Milano. In 2022 she was selected as playwright for the Biennale Theatre Authors in Venice. She cofounded Humanitas Mundi Teatro, ensemble of performance research and dramaturgical cooperation in Rome.
Emerging Hybrid Workspaces: New Practices in Performer Training Presentation
Magda Tuka University of Kent
In theatre or performance I am interested in the space in between, the vague, the indefinable, the undefined and the one where ideas can have their origin. Technology in theatre has become a matter of course, we go to ‘experimental’ VR performances which are often so focused on the technical side of the event forget about the actor, the audience and their relationship to each other. What kind of preparation of the actor in the face of a dynamically changing relationship with the notion of the stage and thus the relationship with the spectator would be adequate while at the same time delving into the ideas formulated around Grotowski’s Poor Theatre? I think that the idea of Sergei Eisenstein and later Jerzy Grotowski in terms of Montage, with its particular emphasis on the clash of opposites in order to create a new quality in thinking about the dramaturgy of the performance is very relevant here, needs to be recalled and further developed in context of the performance.
Another reference will be Duchamp’s painting Nude Descending a Staircase, No2. The work concentrates on the conflation of the static painterly image with movement, creating through its juxtaposition a third quality of the delusion of the materiality of movement and the body. Other inspirations are the works of Bill Viola and his video installations referring to liminal states: life, birth, death and memory. Presentation has a performative character.
Magda Stawman-Tuka: theatre maker, performer, researcher and performing arts teacher. She began her career in Warsaw’s Studium Teatralne. In 2012 she co-create Ja Ja Ja Ne Ne Ne. Currently she has completed her PhD at the University of Kent. Magda is the Head of Devising at London’s Drama School Fourth Monkey and the teacher at East 15. Her work has been supported through grants, scholarships, residencies, co-productions and festival selections in Europe and US. She is the artistic producer at the Horsedonkey.
INTERNATIONAL PLATFORM FOR PERFORMER TRAINING 