choreographic performance for 5 dancers

CHOREOGRAPHER’S NOTE

«Waste Land – AFTER» is mostly a concept of space than a specific place or site. It is about spaces where new forms of social life are tested. An essential issue of the piece is the meaning of AFTER and its transitional substance. AFTER is examined as an intermediate, processing, «station» of new social experiences where temporary balances prefigure alternative forms of living. So the performance focuses on the process of creation and not on the realization of utopia. It is not a manufacturing process, it is more an intension procedure of the future which enchants imaginary communities and explores the idea of a new nomadicity.

ABSTRACT

An allegory of the real

The choreographer/performer Spyros Kouvaras creates with this work, a visual and choreographic universe which approaches the meaning of heterotopia, as a wide field of contingencies and as a continuous transformational process of the existing. The performance, drawing material from T. S. Eliot’s «Waste Land», and the feeling of intense deprivation and depersonalization that permeates the poem, explores common references between the author’s poetry and today’s socio-political Greek landscape, focusing on the meaning of AFTER as a living heterotopia. The scenic installation of the performance does not mention a specific place and time but gradually forms a liminal, timeless (non)place. The choreography creates atmospherically a non-linear and continuous contemporary ritual of transition into a mythical and oneiric frame. In this timeless (non)place, the dancers seem to be suspended «between and betwixt», in both before and now, in oblivion and memory, in vulnerability and robustness, in trauma and its overcoming, thus indicating the potential passage from something that has existed to something that is coming…

CREDITS

Production: Synthesis 748 Coproduction – Support: Hellenic Ministry of Culture, John F. Costopoulos Foundation Concept, Choreography, Set Design: Spyros Kouvaras Dramaturgy: Nathalie Koutsougera Music Composition: George Kouvaras Dancers: Stella Dimitrakopoulou, Elli Avraam Repa,  Alexandra Rogovska, George Michelakis, Spyros Kouvaras Lighting Design: Thomas Economacos Assistant Choreographer: Korina Kotsiri Visual Material: Yiorgos Bakalis Communication Manager: Maria Tsolaki