Projects

Dancers: Marika Meoli, Mami Izumi, Alexis Blake

Concept: Alexis Blake

In Some Things Hidden Alexis exhibits the initial phases of her current project Anthology of Anger, which would normally be hidden from public view. In this project, Alexis explores how our body functions as an archive, storing our emotions. She also examines how culture and history both influence the ways we express, and suppress, our anger and empathy, using both our bodies and our voices.

Gender, race, class, nationality and religion, and their intersections, all play an important role in the way we express our emotions. For example, in many countries it is considered inappropriate for a woman to express her anger, and its expression is often linked to terms such as ‘hysteria’ or ‘witchcraft’. Alexis is particularly interested in these socially unacceptable or prescribed expressions through use of our bodies and voices.

In times of post-truth and language impoverishment, Alexis observes a tendency for reactionary behaviour in response to the feeling of anger, often without questioning the origin of this anger or how it is expressed.
Anger can be an indispensable force behind resistance, and therefore change, but to apply this in a truly effective way, Alexis believes it is necessary to critically examine and realign our emotions based on rational reflection. What role does empathy have in this?

According to Alexis, the word ’empathy’ is bandied around a lot in left-wing politics. But what does it actually mean to put yourself in someone else’s shoes? To lay your own convictions to one side? How do empathy and anger relate to each other in terms of their physical expression? Is it possible to have empathy for someone you are angry with? Or someone who is verbally aggressive towards you?

Research shows that, alongside our appearance and character traits, we also inherit the traumas and emotions of our ancestors, carrying their anger, grief and memories within us. By releasing these emotions and (re)examining them, we can begin to trace their origins. How does the scientific aspect of this heritage, the DNA, relate to the cultural and historical context in which these emotions are formed and embodied?

Rather than analysing these questions rationally, Alexis explores them using the body and voice in a number of public rehearsals, together with the audience. What do our (intuitive) movements say about the knowledge we store in our bodies? How do we postulate using our limbs? During Some Things Hidden Alexis presents a scenario for a performance in which the relationship between ‘prescribed’ anger and empathy and their intuitive expression is collectively examined. By embodying these emotions and expressing them physically, as opposed to verbally, she attempts to free the more sensory and intuitive aspects of our behaviour.

Choreography and concept: Joost Vrouenraets Dramaturgy: Anne-Marije van de Bersselaar Dance: Maïté Guérin, Francesca Imoda, Roshanak Morrowatian, Marika Meoli and Marcia Liu. Understudy: Asuka J. Riedl, Francesca Piergiacomo. Music: Loran Delforge Costume Design: Verena Klein Light and Scenography: Joost Vrouenraets en Marc Claessens

Graphic design: Ivo Straetmans

Photography: David Peskens

Expressive, daring in representation, guided by values and goals rooted in the experience of ‘deep intuition’.

Five women represent a perfect image of different characters and recognizable situations. You think you recognize these women, but in their pursuit for absolute perfection of their own ideals, they get entangled in a distorted reality. These individual, powerful dancers are challenged to explore the boundaries of their own physicality of the formal ideal of visual feasibility in different scenes. An aesthetic world soon makes way for an absurd and disillusioned tableau of battle, pain and conflict.

NEMO BODY invites us to reconsider our everyday perception and unravel the truth within.

This dance project came out from the encounter of three different dancers: Jessica Eirado Enes, Marika Meoli and Iro Grigoriadi that, while being in one of the most popular districts of Catania, inspired by everyday life and experiences, created this project together. For them the main focus was to bring dance on the street and rediscover most of the street games played in their childhood in order to make them alive again in a colorful environment like the streets of Catania.

Charles-François Gounod’s Faust was once one of the most famous and most performed of all operas: at Covent Garden it was heard every season between 1863 and 1911. Jules Barbier and Michel Carré’s libretto is a tale of romance, temptation, and the age-old battle between satanic powers and religion. It is based on Carré’s play Faust et Marguerite, which in turn is based on Part I of Johann Wolfgang von Goethe’s dramatic poem Faust, one of the great works of European literature.

FRONTIER is a piece for three dancers, Kenzo Kusuda, Marika Meoli and Joost Vrouenraets. Theme of the work is courage and esthetic of. This performance is about having the courage to fail spectecularly when the alternative is boring conformity and dull ideas. It’s about being inspired by errors, not regretting them. It’s about risking total humiliation to create something entirely unique. About rejecting the safe and expected in favour of the exciting and unknown. This performance is dedicated to the art of making mistakes and following the believe in one idea or design which will evolve by time and maintenance, until the goal is reached.

To not dare something to do, by conviction committing the action or the practice is called courage. Courage is the driving force which make us capable to cross borders, to break with existing frontiers, and maintaining our practice, activism or action. Failure, falldown, error, mistake or ‘non-success’ are minor on our path, but atually leads us towards beauty, victory or success. As an artist we should embrace failure, embrace the cracks in the ceramics, exhibit and perform inperfection; we should unite and fight for the beauty of failure, cause this is where we find humanity, this is where we find ourselves. Error and mistake that contribute to failure are actually early indications of success.

Dakkua it is part of Site Specific project. Choreographed by Marika Meoli in Komodo Island , Indonesia.

“We need the tonic of wildness…At the same time that we are earnest to explore and learn all things, we require that all things be mysterious and unexplorable, that land and sea be indefinitely wild, unsurveyed and unfathomed by us because unfathomable. We can never have enough of nature.” – Henry David Thoreau

Choreographed By Marika Meoli and Jessica Eirado Enes In Venice Biennale 2016.

Site-specific dance refuses the confines of a concert stage. From sidewalks to airports, bridges to buildings, choreographers are reshaping our conventional notions of performance. When a dance piece is conceived in relation to a particular place (and is therefore “site-specific”) the location becomes as much a part of the performance as the dancer’s body. Brought out into the world, dance expands its imaginative repertoire, engages with new audiences, and helps reinvigorate a sense of communal space.

We Will not Be Moved By Alexis Blake performed at Triennale Milano 2016.

The performance We Will not Be Moved is a new production intimately linked to Milan’s urban area, which opens a new phase of work after the closing of the long-term Allegory of the Painted Woman project (2012-2015). The Milanese episode conceived for the Continuous Theater creates physical choreographies and concatenations of poses that reflect on issues related to movement, representation, subjectivity and seriality. Reformulating an archive of urban-socialist, feminist, and civil rights protest – that women have taken on in the history of dissidence, performance re-activates these movements in the most recent historical times.

Hermetically sealed is the world of an industrialist family, ruled by an old patriarch who founded his wealth through arms business. A hard man, who also brutally rules over his family, but slowly loses his strength as he progresses. He now wants to transfer his empire to his second son, who is awaited after a long absence: a split fungus in a family poisoned by abuse, incest and murder.

Winner “Best film student” from Kim De Bis.

We are constantly on the move and are constantly developing new needs. And that’s good too, otherwise you could not get ahead. Although releasing and advancing is not always easy.

This dance film is about a young woman who desires happy moments from her memories. By holding spasmodically fast, the present is not a chance. Eventually, she realizes she has to give it a place. This way she can be open to positive things again.

Rakesh Sukesh and Eddie Oroyan and the dancer Marika Meoli lead the viewers through the various cultural microworlds of Zurich.

Even the relatively small city of Zurich is divided into different areas; Sri Lankan Quarter, Jewish Quarter, Paradeplatz etc.

Refugees, Immigration, religions, social status, wealth and culture – all this creates separation.

In a time in which migration and globalization characterize daily life, find Sukesh, Oroyan and Meoli a humorous way to cross the borders.

The entire performance is about breaking the bounders between people, society, religions, genders.

There is always a interesting reflection behind of it.

People are actually questioning constantly if is good to do it or not?

And also, why the people likes to put unconsciously borders. Why people don’t do want the want to do? or what they are thinking to do?

Maybe because it would be too risky or not? And then is good or not to have limit?.

With this art piece the dancers-choreographers want basically to put upside down the situation, without breaking the bounders, but going also through the limits.

The process of creation is something unique for every people, is an experience of live in order to get to know more about yourself. It is actually an exploration of yourself to lead the people in earth to a new acceptance of what it means to be human.

In Allegory of the Painted Woman, the artist Alexis Blake confronts the representation of the female body in art history.

The project has spanned over two years and began in 2012 when Blake went to Rome to research and build an archive of female poses found in historic Italian paintings and sculptures – ranging from the time of Renaissance to roughly the start of Modernism.

Blake then used the archive to create a physical choreography in space by piecing together the female poses.

Allegory of the Painted Woman translates the historical artworks into a choreography, and then into a performance, as a way to question notions of movement, representation, reproduction and seriality.

The performance is based on the choreography that studies the transitions, dynamics, direction and spatiality of the poses in motion through the use of varying tempos and rhythms. As the female figure is illustrating a role in the artworks, so will the artist be playing a role by mimicking and mirroring these gestures and poses.

In doing so, she will be questioning her own body in space and her position as an artist and woman. The performance deconstructs the female poses, thus de-objectifying them and stripping away their history and context.

It invites viewers to question the role this illustrated figure represents, and to critically examine how this is still presented today through mass media and society.

Young dancers on their way to adulthood. Gotra Ballet has for “Charlie goes’ inspired by Pop Culture , Pop Art, comic books and Animamix . He lets feed by classical and modern music , theatre, film, literature and philosophy. In this second part of the trilogy “Charlie goes home ‘ zooms in on the way to adulthood. A precarious development that primarily provides unanswered questions and unresolved feelings. A dance in which the process is visibly associated with confusion , excess of joy and sorrow, rebelliousness and rejection of the ‘ system’. Who looks especially young dancers on stage. They are athletic, young, strong and technically excellent . They personify the rite of passage , both mentally and young adults , as physical as budding dancers. Gotra dance is at the cutting edge of pop culture and avant-garde traditions and contemporary influences. Expressive, imaginary and compelling. Dance Company Gotra giving dance a new narrative. There is always a story, but the traditional narrative dance is ‘brought down’. Gotra gives a different, often surreal, face, with a contemporary shape and character.