The two-day Τouching Faultlines event is a conversation between modern artistic practices and the Roman Odeon of Gortyna. It explores geological time and movement, with a special focus on ruptures and tensions as points of contact. The relationship between geological and historical past emerges in the present through performance acts, dancing, sculptural and audiovisual installations, texts, and sound interventions. Performers react to the converging and diverging movements of tectonic plates, volcanic eruptions, and seismic vibrations, along with their political and cultural connotations.
Τouching Faultlines aims to provide space for narratives that explore the concepts of perpetual movement, release, rupture, freedom, and reconstruction. Whether regarding language, gender, or their geopolitical implications, friction and confrontation require the existence of a performative zone of contact. Within this zone, tensions are expressed where there is movement. If the points of conflict are seen as surfaces that come into contact with each other, then what can we learn by studying the geological formations and their movements in the Mediterranean Basin?
Programme
23 August 2024 | Opening 17.30 – 21.00
Performances:
18.00 Anna Papathanasiou & Inga Galinytė, Empathetic Bodies
19.00 Ermira Goro, Faultlines
Screening:
20.30 Huniti Goldox, The Dido Problem
24 August 2024 | 08.00 – 20.30
Performances:
19.00 Ermira Goro, Faultlines
Screening:
20.30 Huniti Goldox, The Dido Problem
The modern dance performance ACROSS TIME by Die Wolke Art Group explores the concept of conflict. Its building blocks are references to familiar images, texts, and sounds spanning from ancient to contemporary times, resonating with the audience.
The piece follows an original script, created by combining new texts with textual and directorial excerpts from works such as T.S. Eliot’s The Waste Land, Shakespeare’s Macbeth, Euripides’ The Bacchae, and many other references across different time periods. Moreover, snapshots from cinema, music, painting, and mythology inspire the direction and choreography of the piece, adding an element that is equivalent to intertextuality in the performance art.
ACROSS TIME includes original music, a tetraphonic surround sound design, and surtitles with the Greek translation of the texts.
Drawing inspiration from the myth of Prometheus, Spyros Kouvaras continues his choreographic explorations across our collective memory. Using movement, sound, and image as tools, he delves into the monumental struggle of the mythical hero, in an effort to uncover the parallels between ancient times and modern history. The choreographer “transports” the body to the fragile present, all the while perceiving a dream of the future concealed within the myth. As he plays with the different definitions of time, the original electroacoustic music and the surround sound installation lead the performers to a dance that evokes images reminiscent of the landscapes of the unconscious.
A choreographic uprising or a manifesto about freedom? PROMETHEUS 2024 (unbound bodies) brings to the foreground the proud independence of a form of heroism that explores the limitless boundaries of imagination and sheds light on the contemporary battlefield, which essentially is our own culture. This way, it focuses on the anthropological aspect of the myth, raising a crucial question in our modern, volatile world: Can humans save humanity?
Conflict is the situation where individuals or groups involved have differences with each other. These differences may be real or symbolic, and they could manifest as cultural or societal norms, goals and expectations, values, areas of interest, beliefs, perspectives, views, and interests. Disability and the disabled body are in themselves foreign, unknown, and therefore conflictual. And here is exactly where the conflict arises. The unknown causes fear, threatens the cohesion of identity, and creates disruptions in the prevailing normative setting. It seems that over its twenty-year course (on its 20th anniversary that will be celebrated this year), DAGIPOLI DANCE Co., has created a disruption, which is the precondition for a necessary change to come. Conflict is the starting point and the means, through which others can change, toxic and stagnant relationships can come to an end, and new, vibrant, groundbreaking, and inclusive interactions can be established.
The Dance of Death, a piece conceived and choreographed by Iris Karayan, focuses on the concept of conflict in times of war – a topical and deeply evocative theme.
Drawing inspiration from the painting Der Krieg [The War, 1929-1932] by German artist Otto Dix, as well as his collection of fifty etchings and engravings from 1924, Iris Karayan choreographs a performance that intertwines political, expressionistic, and allegorical elements, combining the art forms of dance and music. Hovering between opposite poles, such as chaos and harmony, conflict and concord, tension and calmness, the performance will revitalize the Ancient Theatre of Gythio with the energy of its four dancers’ movement, creating a powerful and dense choreographic narrative based on the concept of conflict.
The piece hot dark matter, inspired and choreographed by Zoi Efstathiou, explores the transit of refugees, drawing parallels to the passage from heaven to earth. It also compares refugee reception with the arrival of hot dark matter, a whirlwind moving leftwards and carrying information, an ambiguous mass.
Hot dark matter is a programme that tracks bodies in the deep sea, a programme that delves into the Odyssey-like journey of refugees who are driven away from foreign countries. Focusing on the body of a dancer moving leftwards as they strive to move towards the light, the concepts of exclusion and integration, intergroup contact and conflict, are being shaped. The piece treads a fine line between the presence or absence of a realistic conflict that arises during the reception of hot dark matter, as the bodies clash, align, merge, experience exclusion, and move forward together.
The new work by choreographer and dancer Dimitris Mytilineos titled Afternoon dances explores a choreographic language that is characterized by a horizontal approach, less emphasis on competition, and a lack of masks.
Afternoon dances could be described as a hybrid piece that draws its raw material from classical ballet, blending it with choreographic tools of postmodern and modern dance. Under the sounds of percussion, dancers perform in various formations – solo, as duos, trios, and a quartet –, relying solely on movement and music for aesthetic expression.