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“I’m too sad to” is a multisensory, nocturnal landscape of resistance made of flesh, bones, sounds, voices, smells and objects. Three dancers and a musician seek ways to resist the kinetic inertia of grief by opening up a field of action that embraces fall, failure and darkness and celebrates imperfection, weakness and vulnerability. In a game of orientation, they choose the activation of the senses as a gateway to the world and the Other. Where the body sees its skin not as a boundary, but as a spreading surface, as a connective tissue that connects it to the universe. Rejecting the thought that the human body is a self-contained, closed entity, a body under negotiation, driven by questions, is welcomed. As Deborah Hay said: “My body in question is the dance.”.
As paradoxical as it sounds, “I’m too sad to” is a promise of light for a new start of the world, for a leap towards impossibility.

The performance is held under the auspices and with the financial support of the Ministry of Culture and Sports.

Aria Boubaki (choreographer)
Aria Boubaki is a dance artist who lives and works in Athens.
She studied dance at the State School of Orchestral Art and continued her education in the postgraduate choreographic research program Ex.e.r.ce at Ici-Ccn (Choreographic Center of Montpellier, France), as a scholarship holder of the Onassis Foundation.

Her works are characterized by their creative process and the concept of community in art. Exploring dancing bodies in different realities, he creates works of different structures and places (stage works, installations, site-specific projects, community projects, texts, videos, etc.). Fascinated by sound, language, objects and architecture, she collaborates with artists involved in visual art, music and dance. Fascinated by the body and kinetic identity, she often invites non-professional dancers to explore/re-define dancing, stage bodies and the need for physical-kinesthetic realism in dance works. He wishes to work with collectives, succumb to kinetic pleasure and awaken consciousness, while proposing tenderness as a means of revolution!

Parallel to her creative process is teaching in the form of regular workshops in modern dance technique, improvisation and choreography in educational institutions, dance studios and festivals. He has collaborated with the Athens Epidaurus Festival, the Onassis Foundation Shelter, the Pompidou Center, the State Theater of Northern Greece and the French Institute of Athens. Her latest projects have been financed by the Ministry of Culture and Sports. In 2020 she was a danceweb scholarship holder of the international festival IMPULSTANZ -Vienna (with the support of the Onassis Foundation), as well as one of the artists who was awarded the ARTWORKS prize of the Stavros Niarchos Foundation (SNF) Artist Support Program.

SCAPE [landscape] a dance performance that seeks to frame the canvas of the unknown space where human beings and actions appear and function under the regime of the timeless. The transition to matter, the evolution, the encounter, the unfolding, the search for slowness and the march as the main stage action are the main ingredients of the work, which invites the audience to a visual journey of kinetic assumptions, propositions and reversals.

“in spite of freedom where it is”, i.e. “to go where one loves/desires”

The performance is a free reading of the phenomenon of contemporary dance. Through the act of dance itself, the group brings to the stage the constantly “moving” experience of movement. In this process, we dancers change, we experience an existential opening, a “self-suspension”, while our values “move” with us. We go where stability is not necessarily more important than uncertainty, strength than fragility, objects than relationships. Seeking the unexpected and through freedom of choice, we remain adventurous, alive, vulnerable and dynamic. This course is difficult and often perplexes us. But she is also the one who shows us the way to something new and refreshing, opens up crevices of surprise and gives us moments full of meaning. Within this condition we are finally connected to the essence of art.

Note from the choreographer

The performance is the result of a five-month educational and research workshop aimed at training dancers on embodied techniques, in order to understand the importance of embodied in the act of dance itself. With an emphasis on Contact Improvisation and the Axis Syllabus, the workshop was held for the second consecutive year fulfilling a personal vision of mine.

Having experienced amazing moments of connection and presence during the workshop we felt that we wanted to share parts and snapshots of these experiences and create a performance-celebration, a comprehensive look at the performativity of these practices. Through Timos Zeha’s guidance and mine and the active participation of these always available and enthusiastic dancers we experienced the basic components of movement and found ways to move functionally, simply, quietly, and, above all, together.

Observing in particular the course of Contact Improvisation in Greece, one finds that as a practice it is connected to people and circumstances that kept it alive in our country from the late 1980s until today. Also, one can see that in the ways it was implemented it is synchronized with international approaches and is intertwined with practices such as Body Mind Centering, the Feldenkrais method and the Axis syllabus dance dictionary. Contact Improvisation, with its tools of meditation, evolutionary movement, experiential anatomy, fascial connective tissue activation and other techniques that bring us to the here and now of movement, is an important dance practice, a practice that keeps us alive, free, different.
And what makes it special is sharing, exchange, solidarity, its social character.

The performance is a practical approach to my PhD thesis, an “experiential essay” on embodied movement. Important help was provided by the doctoral research itself and especially the interviews with artists who have implemented these practices in Greece and abroad.

Biographical note of Tetis Nikolopoulos

Teti Nikolopoulou is a dancer, choreographer, dance and physical education teacher. She is a graduate of the Professional Dance School of Nikis Kontaxakis and TEFAA Athens (Master and PhD on Somatics practices). He has attended intensive dance seminars on release techniques, improvisation, contact improvisation and practical somatics (Feldenkrais, Body Mind Centering, Axis Syllabus) in Greece, New York and London. In 1992 she was awarded in the Rallous Manou and EOT competitions for the choreography of Prejudice, while in 2005, 2007, 2017, 2018, 2021 and 2022 she was granted a grant for her work by the Ministry of the Interior. He has choreographed over 30 performances and participated in festivals, dance platforms and multi-thematic exhibitions. He has choreographed for children’s musical theaters, for the cinema, for musicians and for theatrical performances. As a dancer she has collaborated with choreographers such as Dorina Kalethrianou, Angela Lyra, Dora Mitropoulou, Maxine Heppner, Christina Kleisiuni, Victoria Noumta, Natassa Avra, etc. He teaches contact improvisation in professional and amateur dance schools, while he gives lectures and conducts workshops and seminars on somatics practices. He has taught contact improvisation at the international practice festival in Freiburg, 2019, at the Jam of Arts in Halkidiki and at the contact improvisation community in Bristol, in 2022. In 2020, he prepared, at EKPA, a doctoral thesis entitled: “Improvisation with contact ( contact improvisation) in Greece as embodied practice: History, ideology and artistic creation”. In 2021, her show Diarkos me tarazes traveled to Istanbul, at the International Dance impro Festival while attending