Engaged Scenography

Dates: 17–18.06.2024
● Artist: Director-performer Euripides Laskaridis moves at the borders of dance, theatre, and the visual arts. His works are hosted by leading performing arts institutions around the globe, such as the Barbican Pit in London, Théâtre de la Ville in Paris and the Public Theater in New York, showcasing an amalgam of genres and styles that are humorous yet strangely poignant. Referred to as the “enfant terrible” of Greek choreography by Libération, he has also been awarded an inaugural Pina Bausch Fellowship.
● Description: In his workshop, Laskaridis combines performative tools derived from his extensive research into the themes of ridicule and transformation, along with his background in physical theatre, contemporary dance, and ancient Greek drama, encompassing both tragic and comedic elements. Taking the grotesque and everything considered ‘external’ as his starting point, he works from the outside in, creating the ideal conditions for the development of ‘osmotic’ characters through the use of wigs and play. With a keen focus on the unique artistic texture of each participant, this workshop aims to guide the imagination towards uncovering the poetry beneath absurdity, offering a fresh avenue for unleashing creative peculiarity in all its majestic potential.
● Language: English and/or Greek
● Target Group: Specially tailored for scenographers and visual artists interested in performance and everything bouffon
● Number of Participants: 18 max

Dates: 17–19.06.2024
● Artist: Doris Dziersk is a visual artist and scenographer. She designs stage sets and installations. She uses spatial and haptic approaches to deal with topics such as home, community, materiality, and transformation.
● Description: Air is all around us and moves through our bodies. Clean air has become a scarce resource, and the degree of exposure to pollution corresponds to our socioeconomic status, while the COVID pandemic literally travelled through the air and made us cautious of what we breathe in and out. On the other hand, floating air can set things in motion beautifully, create light volumes in inflatables, and revive us if we are lucky enough to catch a fresh breeze. In this workshop, the participants will discuss, reflect, and broaden their personal and artistic relationship to air. Together, they will create a situation that puts air in the focus as a performer and scenographic element. In a site-specific approach, staged situations of display and perception will be developed, and the role and placement of an audience will be proposed and tested during an open time for the public at the end of the workshop. *The workshop’s outcome will be presented to the public.
● Language: English
● Target Group: Scenographers, directors, choreographers, performers, costume designers, video artists, and musicians (voice/wind instruments)
● Number of Participants: 10–15

Dates: 20–21.06.2024
● Artists: Théo Mercier is a sculptor and stage director. Claiming formal freedom, he sets out to deconstruct the mechanisms of history, objects, and representations, in which he recreates harmonious contradictions. By turns explorer, collector, and artist, his work is at the crossroads of anthropology, geopolitics, tourism, and landscape. Arthur Hoffner is a sculptor, designer, and craftsman. Through diversion games and absurd humour, he stages everyday life and mingles the notions of preciousness, formality, superficiality, and even triviality. In his work, matters collide and combine to question the aesthetic emotions of banality.
● Description: How can we move, valorise, and re-enchant the city’s waste, the remains of the world? How can we make visible and modify our vision of the devalued materials, although they are available in abundance? What role should we assign to what we put aside? We invite workshop participants to create a space of reconciliation with what is usually neglected, to highlight and put back at the centre what is condemned to the peripheries. An imaginary piece, the writing of which remains open, will be the pretext for the collective creation of a scenography designed in only one day. We will imagine and create a collection of monumental sculptures intended to take into consideration one or two bodies per object. There are many performative devices to activate, animate, dance, or sing. This collective work will be articulated in two distinct moments of research: the first phase will be the search and collection of materials across the city, which will be reinvested in a second phase, devoted to the design and creation of these scenographic devices. We will consider them as an evolving and unique space, likely to be nourished by its location and the transience of its appearance, as well as its disappearance.
*The workshop’s outcome will be presented to the public.
● Language: English
● Target Group: 10 sculpture/scenography students and 4 dance performers
● Number of Participants: 14 max

Date: 26.06.2024
● Artist: Adonis Volanakis is a visual artist. His practice is a collaborative amalgam of human relationships and aesthetics, poetry and politics, visual and performing arts. Establishing safe spaces for exchange and creativity is part of his artistic focus.
● Description: In this workshop, participants will explore the spatial potentials of the things we carry in our everyday life in our bags and the narratives that connect us to the community creating a floor sculpture.
● Language: English
● Target Group: Open
● Number of Participants: 15–20

Dates: 27–29.06.2024
● Artists: Mario Banushi is a director and performer. As an artist, he is interested in photography and visual arts. Sotiris Melanos is a set and costume designer.
● Description: This workshop delves into the intricate interplay between space and personal memory within the context of performance. It explores how the transformation of space and objects can serve as pivotal storytelling devices. The focus lies at the intersection of several research fields exploring the influence of memory on the creative process of a performance, investigating the possibility of resurrecting personal memories embedded within a space, assessing the malleability of architectural elements in conveying memory, examining the poetic potential of memory’s space to intensify emotional connection with it, and analysing the dynamics of bodies within the spatial context.
● Language: Greek
● Target Group: Open
● Number of Participants: 10–15

Dates: 27–29.06.2024
● Artist: Nadia Beugré is a choreographer and dancer. Her choreographic works relate to freedom struggles, conversations around gender identity, and the fight for equality. Her practice merges traditional folk dances, contemporary experimental dance, and urban/hip-hop influences.
● Description: Are there spaces where we cannot go? Places that we do not have the right to explore? And if we penetrated them, what would we do with that? What would we become? Quartiers libres explores those peculiar spaces we are forced to remain, those forbidden places in which we choose to wander: spaces made up of free expression, submission, and revelations. And then, when faced with an obstacle, the unforeseen, the unexpected, how to bounce back, branch off, adapt, get around it. By listening to others, to the music of bodies, to space, but also to the invisible, Engaged Scenography – Open Call [ENG] 5 participants will learn to confront what was not foreseen, to let it go by allowing themselves to embark on other destinations, unknown journeys. *The workshop’s outcome will be presented to the public.
● Language: French (with the possibility of a Greek or English interpretation)
● Target Group: Open
● Number of Participants: 10–15

Dates: 27.06–04.07.2024
● Artist: Yorgos Sapountzis is known for his interdisciplinary approach to art. He creates works in which video, sound, sculpture, installation, and performance come together to form complex spaces that explore how we interact with our environment. His artistic vocabulary includes coloured textiles, aluminium tubes, newspaper, and plaster sculpture casts combined to produce temporary structures.
● Description: Yorgos Sapountzis’s course, which focuses on stage design and performance in the city, is directed at creative artists, performers, designers, video artists, light artists, sound artists, poets, dancers, and/or actors. The central point is the stage – a place for possibilities and experiments, a place for wishes, a place of longing – which becomes real through scenic design. Known for his performative installations, Sapountzis is fascinated by the self-abandonment of an actor or performer at the moment when they enter the stage before an audience and embody a role. This is the essence: the ability to feel through and with others. Starting from this, the production, design, and material will be constructed in order to convey the story and the experience entailed in it. The workshop offers the opportunity to find – irrespective of any genre limitations – a personal performance and installation language, leading in group discussions to a joint performance. *The workshop’s outcome will be presented to the public.
● Language: Greek and/or English
● Target Group: Performance, theatre, dance, visual arts, installation, sound art, cooking art (culinary) practitioners
● Number of participants: 8–12

Dates: 27–28.06.2024
● Artist: Samuel Valensi is an author and theatre director. He plays an active role in the think tank “The Shift Project” reports, where he researches and documents the ecological transition in culture.
● Description: The road to hell is often paved with good intentions. Especially when it comes to limiting the impact of a scenographic creation: avoiding the purchase of new materials or renouncing the use of plastics, turning to ‘bio-sourced’ or ‘natural’ materials... there can be a lot of false good ideas. Using role-playing, each participant will work in a group to consider different ways of producing the same scenography. As the workshop progresses, each participant will discover the ecological consequences of each decision... over the entire life cycle of the work.
*The workshop’s outcome will be presented to the public.
● Language: English
● Target Group: Professionals working in the field of scenography, such as organisers, programmers, administrators, technicians, directors, and anyone involved in the performing arts
● Number of Participants: 20

Dates: 01, 02, 04 & 05.07.2024
● Artist: With a background in architecture and the visual arts, Nefeli Papadimouli works across media, from participatory actions in public space to sculpture, photography, drawing, costume design, moving image, installation, and performance. Inspired by phenomenology, feminism, and contemporary political theory, her proto-architectural approach explores spatial configurations of distance as essential elements in processes of social conflict, negotiation, and equilibrium.
● Description: Partial Stars, Transposed Cartographies is a workshop inspired by the ongoing artistic research Relational Cartographies and based on the project Etoiles Partielles. Etoiles Partielles is a site-sensitive project created by the artist in 2023 on the occasion of her solo exhibition in Le Credac as an honour to the utopian architecture and revolutionary urban design that compose the city-centre of Ivry-surSeine, a district in the Parisian suburbs, France. With the desire to open a poetic dialogue with the landmark spaces and forms created by architects Renée Gailhoustet and Jean Renaudie, the artist reinterpreted the influential avant-garde architectures. Inspired by the built environment, she created a large-scale textile work with wearable sculptures functioning as second skins. The sculptural works inspired by the architecture of the city centre were presented in the exhibition until the realisation of a public performance reintroducing the works in the context they originated from. The participant performers marched through the city centre, creating a sensitive cartography relating their bodies and the urban environment.
*The workshop’s outcome will be presented to the public.
● Language: Greek, English, and/or French
● Target Group: Open ● Number of Participants: 10

Dates: 03–05.07.2024
● Artists: Florentina Holzinger is a choreographer who consciously plays with the shifting boundaries between high culture and entertainment. In her works, she explores different modes of female representation. Nikola Knezevic works at the intersection between architecture and embodied practices, closely and regularly collaborating with choreographers and performance artists.
● Description: Florentina Holzinger has produced extensive and widely discussed theatre productions and works across artistic disciplines. Since 2020, Holzinger and her team have been organising experiments in public spaces, creating compositions between bodies, sound, and architecture. Under the title Études, those one-time performances take place on lakes, parking decks, streets, and public squares. Holzinger’s artistic practice brings together live musical elements, performative gestures, and stunts – an extreme form of physical activity that requires precise, technical training. For the workshop in Athens, long-time collaborator and set designer/architect Nikola Knezevic will join her. The workshop aims to expand the research and interest in skateparks and construction sites as public, interactive sculptures. *The workshop’s outcome will be presented to the public.
● Language: English
● Target Group: Skaters, musicians, and parkour practitioners
● Number of Participants: 15 max