Friday 9 June 2017, 8pm, OTO Project Space
Please note that advance tickets will be on sale until Monday 5 June.
Butoh dance, polyphonic singing of Epirus (Northern Greece) laments and live electric violin
Butoh/voice: Eliza Soroga & Roxani Garefalaki
Live violin: Takatsuna Mukai
Costume design: Yuliya Krylova
ながれ / NAGARE
An exploration of the dimensions of time through Butoh, organic movement and sound.
ながれ / NAGARE is a semantic approach to the circle of creation; the mature form which decays and through death returns back to its primal waters.
Evidently borrowing Japanese and Greek traditional elements from Noh theatre & Kabuki dance (Japan), Tragedies and Ancient Greek mysteries (Kaviria, Eleusinia & Orfika) ながれ / NAGARE has been developed as an organic interaction between electric violin soundscapes and the slow motion movement as a response to the polyphonic lamenting.
It is an interdisciplinary collaboration between a Japanese musician and two Greek performance artists as an attempt to bring together Greek and Japanese performative and ceremonial elements, as an exploration of the common spiritual grounds of those two phenomenally different cultures.
ながれ / NAGARE is a hybrid investigation between the limits of Butoh dance and polyphonic traditional singing methods of Epirus (North Greece) accompanied by electric violin soundscapes.
Starting point was the Greek traditional lament, ‘’I am pleased when I forget’’ 1 (Greek trans.‘’Αλησμονώ και χαίρομαι’’) originally sung by the mothers in the mountains of Epirus who grieved the loss of their sons- due to the Ottoman occupation they were forced to migrate and thus considered gone. As a creative process, we incorporated the grieving via subconscious connections through movement and sound that tap into the archetypal experience of loss, grief and death and the ways in which suffering finds its way through darkness.
Eliza Soroga is a performance artist from Athens currently based in London. She holds an MA in Performance Making (Goldsmiths University of London) and in Cultural Theory (National University of Athens). She has trained in Jacques Lecoq’s physical theatre technique, butoh dance and Greek traditional polyphonic singing. Her work is considered mainly as site-specific and explores the dynamic method of shaping everyday life into a performance. Eliza was awarded as the Overall Winner in Performance & Video Art section on the 11th international Arte Laguna Prize held in Venice (March 2017) for her work Women in Agony.
Her work has been shown in galleries, museums and theatres including the V&A Museum, Battersea Arts Centre, Camden People’s Theatre and diverse non-theatre sites in London, Athens, Paris, Amsterdam & Venice. Eliza is part of Young Vic Theatre Directors Program and works for Geraldine Pilgrim’s performance company & Gesamtatelier
Takatsuna Mukai is a Japanese sound artist based in London. He has been active in his genre-defying works moving across the worlds of music, art, theatre and film, as a musician, composer, producer, director, writer, and actor. Past/Present collaborators include; British Sculptor Malcolm Poynter, poets Phil Dirtbox and Timothy Turnbull, London punk fashion label Charles of London, Croatian mime company Studio Lila, Slovenian theatre director Dragan Živadinov (NSK), Ballet Dancers Ksenija Kovač (Slovenian National Ballet/Opera), jazz flute player Rowland Sutherland, contemporary composers Alessandro Olla and Jennifer McConachie, improvisors/composers Adriano Orrù and Silvia Corda(Italy), Ben Davis (UK), Richard Pryce (UK), Genevieve Wilkins (Australia), Russian exile artist Oleg Yanushevskiy, and satirists Chris Morris and Uzi Weill (UK and Israel respectively). http://takatsuna.com/
Roxani Eleni Garefalaki (b.1983) is a performance artist from Athens now based in London. She uses a holistic approach to performance combining movement with sound exploring the connections between art and healing. She specializes in Butoh and slow motion performance using symbolism through movement investigating the ability to transform collectively the sense of the dimension time by creating space through the use of organic movement. She has performed in ancient Greek theatres (Epidaurus, Herodeion, Phillipoi etc with the National Theater of Greece and the Hellenic Festival), to street theatre, children’s theatre, dance theatre and circus cabaret, stills, aerial acrobatics and fire juggling. She has trained in music (Bachelor Degree in Harmony- Higher Theory of Music (Hellenic Conservatory), classical singing, Healing through Sound and voice (Joe Tornabene, Roy Hart theatre), and Butoh (with Moeno Wakamatsu & Sai Misima). She is currently training to become an Alexander Technique teacher and Teaches Tai Chi and Chi Kung emphasizing on healing and meditative properties.
