23/09-6/10/2005 Workshop, research and rehearsal Friday 7 October and Saturday 8 October 2005 : Performance
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The Isadora and Raymond Duncan Dance Research Centre , the Municipality of Byronas and the British Council invite you to a contemporary odyssey through one of the most unique international sites for dance. Located in Athens, the Centre was built over 100 years ago by the Duncan family who envisaged it as a utopian space for dance. Today it presents an exciting research centre for contemporary performance practices.
HER TOPIA will take place on Friday 7 th and Saturday 8 th October 2005 , 19:00 at the Duncan Centre, Byronas District.
“ In truth we go as little to the theatre as to our heart and what we feel the lack of is going to the heart, our own and that of things. We live exterior to ourselves in a world whose walls are replaced by television screens, which has lost its thickness, its depths, its treasures, and we take the newspaper columns for our thoughts. We are printed daily. We lack even walls, true walls upon which divine messages are written. We lack earth and flesh.”
Helen Cixous: from the «Place of Crime, the Place of Pardon»
North American artists, Raymond and Isadora Duncan arrived in Athens in autumn 1903 on a pilgrimage to listen to the stilled images of Hellenic culture. They stayed just long enough to build a house and they sought to establish there a place for dance to be experienced in a fluid relationship with everyday living. Their utopic vision gave rise to the foundation of the Duncan Centre.
Her Topia will look again at what this means in the current condition of both local and global realities and how we can make work in conversation with the world in which we find ourselves. The Event would celebrate and assert the distinctive history and presence of the Centre, in particular its legacy as a site for an early modern experiment in utopic living, and confront this history with the present postmodern condition.
It would ask why dance? When the body is a bomb? When flesh is re-made as data? When the theatre is a museum for the dead? When we live in the ‘desert of the real'?
In addressing these questions through performance research at the Duncan Centre, the workshop would create a critical and creative opportunity for innovation and enquiry. In this way the past and present would productively inform each other.
In furthering the themes and processes initiated in the dance-architecture workshop which Carol Brown directed at Isadora and Raymond Duncan Centre for Dance 29 September – 5 October 2003, the Event will continue to foster a dialogue between past and present, between the dancing body and the built environment and between Greek and British artists.
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This site specific event is commissioned by the British Council (UK/Greece) and the Duncan Dance Centre.
Potentially, given the innovation of the project it could form a model of practice capable of being installed in other sites and locations as well as countries.
Performance design will integrate sound, video and choreography and will include projections onto the external and internal structures of the building.
HER TOPIA is a dance architecture event located in and around the Centre.
Conceived by choreographer Carol Brown and designer Dorita Hannah,
it has been developed in collaboration with producer Penelope Iliaskou,
lighting designer, Thomas Economacos,
video artist, Christos Hasapis,
multi-media artist, Makis Faros,
research assistants Efrosini Protopapa and Hannah Davies,
and dancers Frosso Voutsina, Anna Daskalou, Delphine Gaborit, Anneta Kouvelioti, Irida Kyriakopoulou, Atalanti Mouzouri, Gogo Petrali, Marilena Petridou, Evridiki Samara, Takako Segawa, Vanesa Spinasa, Ioanna Toumpakari, Giota Tsagri and Anastasia Tsonou.