choreographic performance for 3 dancers

CHOREOGRAPHER’S NOTE

Working based on Hieronymus Bosch’ painting “The garden of earthly delights”, I return to basic principles of dance such as physical contact and proximity. I return to what, sociologically, allows me to remain human and to what strengthens the embodied experience of ourselves and the world. In today’s generalised socio-political environment of violence and cruelty, this work comes to remind us that embodied experience and human proximity are vital elements for the preservation of our humanity. The corporeality that proposes the work is positioned, as a necessary condition of our existence in the world. It is the “guardian angel” that stands silently and ensures our existence, not just a place in the world but our presence within a horizon of meanings. The bodies of the performance become a source of innocence and expression, and the connection of physical freedom, bliss, and collectivity that the choreography suggests, takes the characteristics of a political act.

ABSTRACT

Inspired by the emblematic painting of Hieronymus Bosch, the choreographer Spyros Kouvaras explores the meanings of pleasure, desire and proximity, proposing the idea that delights are not a deviation or sin, but a natural aspect of human existence. On stage, an emerging place is revealed, in which the senses wander between the sacred and the profane, nature and technology, dream and reality. Through memory, archetype and the unconscious, an emotional “landscape of bodies” wraps us in its “skin” with a dance of survival. There, the three performers are not just entities, but “kinetic gardens” that seem to anticipate a delayed rebirth. Emerging community or a lost utopia ? In a world that today seems increasingly dystopian, “THE GARDEN OFV EARTHLY DELIGHTS” by Spyros Kouvaras, invites us to a biblical flight of imagination, posing a crucial question for a civilisation that is searching for a meaning again: where is pure joy and bliss, when everything around us is collapsing ?

CREDITS

Production: Synthesis 748 Coproduction – Support: Hellenic Ministry of Culture, Municipal Theatre of Piraeus Concept, Choreography, Set Design: Spyros Kouvaras Original Music: Thanasis Koumenteris Artistic Collaboration: Korina Kotsiri Dancers: Magda Argyridou, Semina Rizou, Spyros Kouvaras Lighting Design: Thomas Economacos Costumes: Kenneth Haarstring Choreographer’s Assistant: Mina Ananiadou, Video Design: DreamDropper Visual Material: Yiorgos Bakalis Graphic Design: Danae Parouniadi Communication Managers: Marianna Papaki, Nontas Douzinas