formula < Italian formula < Latin forma and formula (general shape, outline, form, mold, example, law, method) - the recipe, the composition, the way of gathering/combining materials for the desired result. Formula is an interdisciplinary partnership of musicians, visual artists and image and sound technicians that aims to periodically organize live events where, in the context of an impromptu improvisation, the sound feeds the image and the image feeds the sound.
Three chapters from the life of a woman
RED by Christina Kyriazidis is a modular stage composition about a woman’s relationship with love, motherhood and time. Three inevitable chapters in a woman’s life that the actress approaches with the help of poetry, movement and music.
In an abstract setting, with an accordion, a chair and a jacket, and with her only accomplice the poetic word, her body and her voice, Christina Kyriazidis desires an ode to female nature.
This dance theater trilogy consists of 3 solo performances:
Th. Street
A stage dramatization of the poetry collection of the same name by X. Kyriazidis. (Pyxida Ed.), which revolves around the motif of love.
Nani mana na na na, a lullaby for mothers and daughters
A stage composition, where Christina Kyriazidis talks about the complex and precious relationship between mother and daughter, starting with her eponymous composition of poems, and lullabies from various corners of the world.
A conversation with time
A choreography based on the original musical composition [TIME] of the Icelandic composer Smári Gudmundsson, who wishes to praise the cycle of life through the female body.
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.
Album Live Presentation
On Friday 12/05, at the PLYFA Polyhous, “Stavros Allos” and Rudu Records celebrate the release of the Album “Gia Ti Nora” (For Nora) with a concert night of a live full-band presentation of it! Guest and opening act of this evening is “Logout”, who recently released his latest album “Ponemela”, from which we will have the pleasure of listening to several tracks!
Stavros Allos is a musician and songwriter, who makes a living as a sound engineer and music producer in Athens. His debut album “For Nora” is his first solo songwriting venture in Greek verse. An experiment in simplicity, with 7 rap songs, created in the summer of 2019, orchestrated by Sergios Voudris, a constant companion in honest analog sound. The disc was recorded in 2020 without the help of digital media and computer but with the help of analog machines and wonderful people in the Diskex building in Nea Chalkidona.
A documentary performance about work
This play is performed in Greek.
“Work is half our life! And what are you doing?
Do you throw it away? You don’t.”
Three actors, with unique material the narratives of people who worked, are working and will work in different professions, compose the show and ask themselves:
Can we imagine a world without work?
What exactly is a typical eight hours?
Does our work define us? And if so, how much?
What makes a man endure his work over the years?
What does he hope and expect?
Work arose as a Human need.
However, how humane the working conditions end up being for those who make up The Human Resources?
“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
Nova Melancholia presents a performance diptych consisting of the performances SEBASTIAN and VANITAS. These are two distinct parts that complement each other with common references to art history and movie stars. Two shows with a “camp” mood that play with death.
This play is performed in Greek.
SEBASTIAN
The performance is the totality of its cultural references. Reflecting on the tradition of the martyrdom of Saint Sebastian, as it is reformulated through the dense figurative representation in Western art from the early Renaissance onwards, we focus on concepts / sensations / symbols that touch our own sensibility and imagination. Sebastian is a polyprismatic archetype, a kaleidoscope, an avatar of desires and moods. We read poems, reenact paintings, act, pose, sing, dance, get inspired by the tradition of an eccentric, experimental cinema. We are interested in the co-emotional and embodied practices through which we today can relate to such a symbol.
Sebastian is associated with youth, beauty, sports, archery, carnal pain, hideousness, homoeroticism, martyrdom. A primary co-signification around Saint Sebastian (since the Middle Ages) is the Plague, the Black Death. We associate the tradition of homoeroticism around the figure of Sebastian, with the AIDS disease that was considered in the 80’s and 90’s a kind of “gay plague”. Like people at the dawn of European modernity, we too today resort to Saint Sebastian as an apocalyptic symbol of evil. The show is dedicated to those who take the risk to go from vision to experience, from representation to performance, risking the misunderstanding of existence.
VANITAS
The performance of the group Nova Melancholia is a stage meditation around the concept of vanitas. The performance is articulated through the (counter)juxtaposition of the emotionally charged sound of the electric guitar and Andy Warhol’s cynical and often funny speech. The performance VANITAS wants to become an ephemeral mirror of our “vanity”, its illusory shine. At the same time it works like a seductive baroque painting: it exorcises the fatigue of the days and restores faith in the beauty of life!
In art history, vanitas is the symbolic work of art that shows the transience of life, the futility of pleasure, and the certainty of death; these concepts are presented by the juxtaposition of a skull with symbols of wealth, affluence, and luxury. The Latin noun vanitas comes from the adjective vanus (void) and refers to the phrase from Ecclesiastes “vanitas vanitatum, et omnia vanitas” (vanity of vanities, all things vanity). Vanitas still lifes, a popular genre in 16th- and 17th-century Western Europe, often depict luxurious vessels on rich fabrics, musical instruments, books, scientific instruments, smoking paraphernalia—everything that can bring joy and pleasure to man—together with hourglasses, fragile glass objects, skulls. All this suggests the futility of wealth, the passing of beauty, the inevitability of time. These paintings call for contemplation, they act as a memento mori (reminder of death). However, the flip side of vanitas could be carpe diem (seize the day). A celebration of the ephemeral and the senses, an affirmation of the uncertainty of existence, a memento vitae (reminder of life).
From the natural sound of impact and vocalizations,
in the polymorphic dimension of electronic music
The pioneering electronic jazz duet of vocalist Angeliki Toumpanakis and
drummer Ilias Doumani is coming to the PLYFA venue for the first time, on Friday April 28,
inviting individual artists to an intermedia audio-visual performance
composition and interaction.
The two musicians in their concerts present personal compositions and her pieces
bebop, modal, hardbop jazz scene. Through the lyrical theme of the originals
of their tracks and the assembly of a drum voice eletronica sound universe, they quote
their personal reading of contemporary socio-political reality.
In this performance they invite the jazz trumpeter Dimitris Papadopoulos and the
photographer Giorgos Vitsaropoulos to compose, experiment, and present
their own aesthetic reproduction in the concepts of the pieces and their sonic polysemy
“Drums Voice Jazztronica Duet“.
On Friday, April 28 at the PLYFA venue, the public will have the opportunity to experience a
special artistic collaboration where digital soundscapes, vocals and frequencies
explosions transform into shadows, movement and video projections that coexist in absolute
coordination with the performers, sometimes mirroring their action and sometimes
"acting" autonomously as another performer on stage.
A few words about “Drums & Voice Jazztronica Duet’ (@2014)
Angeliki Toumpanaki – vocalist, voice teacher, sound experimentalist, Ph.D.
Molecular Oncology – explores and teaches the mechanism of phonation, studies them
“extended” vocal techniques, traditional musical idioms and phonemes
through improvisation, artistic expression and the interdisciplinary path.
Ilias Doumanis – drummer, composer, drum teacher, mixed-media practitioner, sound
designer – systematically investigates, through composition and orchestration, the combination
of drumming with technology.
In February 2014, they create the Nu Jazz drum-vocal duo ‘Drums & Voice
Jazztronica Duet” from their need to experiment, to explore sounds
capabilities and limits of their instruments. Design a multi-layered sound environment with
the use of electronic media & programs and the live looping technique.
The two musicians are exceptional in their genre, presenting innovations in their technique
of their instruments, overcome limitations and constantly evolve.
DOORS OPEN 20:30
Elles The Doll : 21:30 – 22:00
Thaleia : 22:15- 22:45
Vassilina : 23:00- 23:50
Donation: suggested price 10€
Saturday 22.04
Amka (Live)
Keppler is Free (Live)
Bhukhurah (Live)
Veego Records (Andreas Mitrelis & Mr.Z – DJ set)
Sunday 23.04
Veslemes (Live)
Tendts (10 yrs anniversary Live)
Entropia Records (DJ set)
Needless All-Star DJs (DJ set)