The 15th anniversary edition of the International Contemporary Dance Festival ARC FOR DANCE FESTIVAL is kicked off on September 6 to “fall into place” in several different venues across Athens.
The festival organizer, DAN.C.CE Unitiva, a member of the European network of contemporary dance Aerowaves, says about this year’s theme: “Many languages, the Greek one amongst them, connect ‘falling’ and ‘place’ in a weird move of grounding. #ARCFEST15 considers this while engaging with various critical shifts, geopolitical realignments, environmental changes, war disasters, and refugee flows.
In this violent movement and ‘falling’ of bodies, the festival considers ‘the terrifying concupiscence of belonging.’ It proposes the various ways in which dance tells us what it means to take up a space and take a leave; to fall into where you belong at a given time and move on; to fall into place without being bound by it.”
Realizing its programmatic goal to help foster a rich ecosystem for dance in Greece, ARC15 presents works that cross boundaries between artistic expressions, creative languages and conditions of experiencing artworks. The ARC_hitects module of ARC15 inhabits the spaces of art institutions and museums, film and virtual reality, and suggests a displacement of dance that helps empower its presence and broaden its perspective.
PERFORMANCES
ALESSANDRO CARBONI
THE ANGULAR DISTANCE OF A CELESTIAL BODY
ATHENS PREMIERE- 17.00 – DURATION: 40′
2nd FLOOR
The Angular Distance of a Celestial Body is a transversal reflection on the cartographic process. If this process involves “the reduced representation of the Earth’s surface, as well as of the events that are observed and occur on it,” Carboni’s work replaces the graphic sign used on maps with the body.
On the floor, a geometric modular structure counterposes the vertical tension of two symmetrical, specular — but never identical — bodies with no identity or gender.
The “fragmented” costumes that wrap the bodies tell us about the chaos that rules our world and the lack of continuity between the objects. They are disguises of a metaphorical carnival aimed at de-structuring the established order of things, to investigate unstructured forms of discourse and make them visible through the ritual act of representation. The sound follows and leads the actions, outlines a variable horizon, thus relating the numeric (cartographic) dimension of the world to an archetypical, organic, analog landscape that describes and measures the world without contemplating numbers.
The Angular Distance of a Celestial Body is the definition of azimuth, that angle that allows us to measure everything that is in the terrestrial sphere. Starting from the idea of numerical convention, through the drawing of a line that allows to represent everything, Carboni admits to having arrived at the voice of a member of the Pirahã community of the Amazon rainforest who speaks in a language in danger of extinction. The performance emerges as a declaration of uncertainty that becomes a possibility: it condenses on stage a long artistic research and comes across as an imaginative tale that critically claims back the complexity of the world, thus declaring the impossibility to reduce and control it.
ANASTASIA VALSAMAKI
BODY MONOLOGUE
VR PREMIERE, 18.00 – DURATION: 20′
FOYER
What can a body do? This is the unanswered and self-evident question that Anastasia Valsamaki’s solo Body Monologue brings to the stage. Through this research, Valsamaki explores both the body’s expressive abilities and the narrative function of the dance language. Following the structure of the monologue, this work moves away from the wording of meanings, towards the pre-linguistic, eloquent silence of the body that speaks through movement. A silence made of gestures, pauses, malleable forms and unfamiliar body states, attracts our gaze and enters into conversation with what escapes the solidity of verbal expression to enter the fluidity of meanings that bodies convey through dance.
The work has been transcribed in VR form, presented here in its world premiere, so that the body’s powerful monologue is also shared as a private and intimate solo experience for each of the audience members.
The International Festival of Contemporary Dance ARC FOR DANCE FESTIVAL is realized within the context of the Operational Program ATTICA 2014-2020 and is co-funded by the European Union (European Regional Development Fund) and national resources. The realization of the 15th International Festival of Contemporary Dance ARC FOR DANCE FESTIVAL is in compliance with accessibility provisions, in order to ensure accessibility to PWD.
CΟNTACT & RESERVATIONS
All performances and parallel activities of the festival are open to the public, free of charge. For all performances and parallel activities, pre-booking is required to secure a seat at the respective venue.
PRE-BOOKING: 693 145 9880
ARC Official Website: www.arcfordancefestival.gr
VIDEO TEASER
COLLABORATORS ARC FOR DANCE FESTIVAL
