Ioanna Paraskevopoulou: MOS (2022)

Friday, 24 November 2023 at 8:00 p.m.
Dance Theatre Ljubljana

MOS is a choreography of a corpus (collection) of movements, objects, sounds and images that begin to transform into unexpected interrelations and form an uncommon dance ensemble in selective authorial time.
In the pandemic year 2020, we structured the CoFestival programme into a choreo-vocalist curatorial strand, which we entitled The Amplifiers of Voices. In the special issue of the Maska journal entitled The Voice of Dance, in which we offered some basic tools for thinking about the relations between voice, sound and choreography, we also called a phenomenon the subsonority of dance. This is based on the belief that dance history could also be written in terms of the specific sonorities that different dance paradigms have produced over time. Throughout history, dance movement has sounded different, but at the same time, each new dance invention produces its own particular noise or “white noise” of movement. The performance MOS (an acronym that has more than 20 different dictionary definitions, among which technology and the relationship between the whole and the extracted part are constants) by the choreographer Ioanna Paraskevopoulou, known to us as a member of Christos Papadopoulos’s dance company, is interesting precisely from the point of view of subsonority, which seems to be rooted in a certain disposition of modernist radiophony. Choreography is the visible, active and moving part of what usually reaches us over the airwaves exclusively in the form of sound: the effect of activity. But MOS does not stop at the relationship between the action and its sound effect: in the performance optical information also resounds in its own ways, moreover, optical materials resound with their sound substitutes, images get their “sound falsifications,” in their optical-sound composition they reveal themselves to us as constructions of illusions. Brechtian choreography or performance work in MOS addresses in a very fundamental way the problematic relations between all production and its various effects, using very simple, material or even virtuoso means to address the relations between old age and its performability in its possible mediation (mediatisation). This “choreography of efficiency” surrounds our contemporary reality of moving images with issues of sound effects and the (fictional or real) sonorities of our lives.

Concept and choreography: Ioanna Paraskevopoulou
Performance: Georgios Kotsifakis, Ioanna Paraskevopoulou
Audio technical support and live sound design: Danis Chatzivasilakis
Dramaturgy: Elena Novakovits
Lighting design: Eliza Alexandropoulou
Tour lighting design: Eliza Alexandropoulou, Tzanos Mazis
Video engineer: Konstantinos Asimakopoulos
Set and costume design: Ioanna Paraskevopoulou
Video editing: Ioanna Paraskevopoulou
Wooden constructions: Miltos Athanasiou
Poster design: Bois Futuri
Photography: Pinelopi Gerasimou, for Onassis STEGI
Production management: Ioanna Paraskevopoulou
Tour management: Cultopia & Ioanna Paraskevopoulou
Tour coordinator: Christina Liata (Onassis STEGI)
Special thanks to: Eleni Tzarou, Thanos Daskalopoulos, Alexandros Tomaras
Produced by: Onassis STEGI
Touring supported by: Onassis STEGI’s “Outward Turn” Programme

Duration: 40 min
Entry: 8/10 EUR

Touring is supported by: Kino Šiška, NDA Slovenia, Dance Theatre Ljubljana and En-Knap in collaboration with Aerowaves platform that represents fresh European production.

 

A discussion will follow the performance, moderated by the Systering Collective. The discussion will be held in English.