Quick Facts

• Number of people traveling: 3–5 persons
• Minimum space requirements:
  • 20m width, 20m length, 12m rigging height of the projection screen
  • 30cm square truss with dimensions 8.73m by 4.73m
  • Need to rig a mirror with dimensions 5.00×2.13m (approx. 100Kg)
• Visual equipment: Projector, 4K Video, 25000–30000 ANSI Lumens and hazers
• Audio equipment: 12 speakers (6.5 to 8 inch) and 2 subs
• Set-up time: 3 days of set-up (3rd day could be a premiere if after 8:00 pm)
• Set-up crew: 4 riggers, 4 stage hands, 2 video technicians, 2 sound technicians
• Cargo: 515cm length × 80cm width × 250cm height / approx. 500Kg

Description

LAPSE is a sonic-cinematic installation created by renowned artists Stavros Gasparatos and Lars Jan. The work traces the journey of an anonymous woman over vast stretches of time and distance, conveyed by way of an audio time-lapse technique, in concert with a visual installation balanced between a film and a cloud.

Inside the single vaulted space, visitors are immersed in a vivid surround-soundscape of metropolitan life — recordings made by Gasparatos in more than 30 cities, including New York, Berlin and Dubai, in the months just before the transformed landscape of lockdown. These journeys are conveyed in a compressed timeline and played back with an added layer of composition through a surround sound speaker system.

The stark contrast that these sounds provide with the atrophied city and social life of the past two years is unavoidable – one that is visualized by Jan's hour-long film of a woman floating down hundreds of kilometers of Greece's longest river and, literally, out to sea. She is swept up, isolated, yet animated, and ever in the flow of things. Given the geographical location of the waterways in question, any sense of serenity is unstable — in the woman's clothes, the viewer may register life-jacket orange or an emergency-blanket shimmer. The film is reflected off a massive mirror onto a vertical screen hovering above the audience. Striated haze shapes the volume between these two surfaces as the visual landscape oscillates between the photographic omnisciency of Google Earth and the diffusion of a cloud.

Description

Six years after premiering "Expanded Piano" at EMPAC - NY, Stavros Gasparatos has started working on a new project that continues the research on the first installation as well as the way music is written and performed with it.

Expanded Piano consisted from a series of signals coming from the piano to the computer and from there to the multi-channel audio installation. This new updated version provides another option: piano sounds can activate signals from the computer back to the piano, creating feedback loops of sound flow and vibrations that open more opportunities of sound experimentation and composition tools.

The goal of this new musical work/performance is to approach and use the piano as a sophisticated piece of machinery medium technologically integrated with a computer, that lets the composer delve deeper into the ways a hybrid score (half acoustic, half electronic) can be performed live, in a way that gives the performer complete actions and control.

Description

Can we invent new dances expressing us and new rituals uniting us? Could we all 'lend a hand' in creating such a celebration? This is what 'mintati' means in the villages of Epirus: the gathering to create, with everyone's help, a work needed by the community.

Tzeni Argyriou's MINTATI, inspired by the legacy of traditional and folk Greek dances as well as of contemporary choreographic practices, was born in the light of these questions. Dancers and musicians create a record of sounds and movements carrying memories of dances from the depths of time but also from the present, and gradually widen the concentric circles of a collective celebration, placing the concepts of community and solidarity right in the centre.

MINTATI is a dance performance for 9 dancers and 2 musicians, designed for a large theatre stage or alternative space. The core performance lasts 90 minutes.

Participation

During the preparation and rehearsal phase, Tzeni Argyriou initiated a series of workshops open to professionals and amateurs of all ages and backgrounds. From this diverse group, 30 individuals were selected to participate in the closing section of the performance.

Following the main part of the performance, the artists turn to face the audience and subtly invite those interested to step onto the stage and join in a communal dance. This moment highlights the significance of dance as a social tool for fostering community connection and collective expression.

When the piece is performed on tour, this can be replicated through an intensive, one-day workshop with local participants, lasting approximately four hours. These participants will then attend both the dress rehearsal and the performance(s). Throughout the show, this group remains part of the audience until the moment they transition into "mystics," extending an invitation to fellow audience members to join the performance.

Chara Kotsali's 2023 dance solo is a rehearsal of demonic rituals. In 'To Be Possessed', she summons spirits that haunt our language, our scriptures, our knowledge, our minds, and the material world itself.

By exploring women's testimonies from different cultural contexts, Kotsali lets herself become a mouthpiece for these stories about demons, exorcism and the invocation of spirits. Doing so, she presents a moving body that is forever outside the self, a form of experience that calls into question the self-sufficiency and autonomy of the individual woman.

To Be Possessed experiments with the creation of rituals of remembrance and the stirring of the multiple voices that dwell within us. Kotsali indulges in the demonic as she attempts to animate the archive she encounters, inviting the testimonies to reveal their overwhelming yet subversive character.

ANΩNYMO takes the form of a physical ceremony, a contemporary ritual that recalls the power of bodies dancing together. Based on extensive research, the work draws from traditional folk dances from all over the world to articulate the social disconnect that has become all too familiar to many in recent times. The result is a celebration of human connection through shared joy and collective dance.

ANΩNYMO invites the audience back to a time when art did not bear a creator's name, but was a heritage that brought people closer and maintained social cohesion – the earliest rituals of initiation and participation. The first dances did not belong to anybody because they belonged to everybody. Someone made the first move, another picked it up and step by step the different components formed a pattern. From one body to the next, dances moved through the centuries.

ANΩNYMO is a dance performance for 7 dancers, designed for a medium-large theatre stage.

Film Details

• Original Title: Mothers of Daughters
• Director: Elke Margarete Lehrenkrauss & Youla Boudali
• Duration: Short film
• Year: 2023

Film Details

• Original Title: My Mother is a Saint
• Director: Syllas Tzoumerkas
• Duration: Short film
• Year: 2023
• Festivals: Locarno Official Selection (Pardi di domani), Sarajevo Film Festival Official Competition