Collaborations

Composer and Guitarist: Guillermo Guillén / Lighting: Manu Majastre/ Artistic advisors: Chloé Brulé- Dauphin and ‘Funmi Adewole/ (Guajira recording: Rocío Márquez)

It is said that Clay is the matter that we are made of. Buried in that matter are the memories that mould our experiences, our understandings and gestures, memories that seem to belong to a time long before our very thoughts were shaped. Ancient yet familiar, they accompany us from places that only our cells have been. In CLAY Asha Thomas, American contemporary dancer and Yinka Esi Graves, British flamenco dancer, draw from their collective memory and experiences to create a unique language between them. It is their very dancing that goes in search of the past whilst being informed by it. One dancer of half Jamaican and Ghanian descent and the other from a long line of southern baptist preachers, explore the connections between who they believe themselves to be and the unconscious parts that make up who they are. CLAY asks us to locate the parts of ourselves that have formed over long periods of time, surviving the wear of migration to still be found today.

See Video here

Performance Identity:

Conceived, choreographed and performed by Christina Karampampa & Vasiliki Skordali

Music Composition & Guitar: Roland Hoffmann

Guest Star – Voice : Katerina Polemi

Trailer / Photos: Alekos & Christos Bourelias

“El Umbral” is an experiment that features flamenco dance, guitar and voice (speech and song) and explores the “threshold” as a space between two points. That place where the outside and the inside meet.

Birth and death, the two great transitions. The mediating eternal gateways, sometimes small, sometimes big and important … love, motherhood, loneliness and mating, adulthood. One can cross the threshold at an instant or refuse to move back or forth perpetually. Half-alive, half-dead, unable and unwilling  to make decisions, always on the verge of getting on with things, reluctant to lean towards one polarity…  Anyone who stands on this doorstep, amid the sense of the familiar and the unknown, the identifiable and the infinite, is in a state of constant neutrality by being the combination of his extremes. The threshold is a place of change.

The guitar, the voice and the body play two important and distinct roles in the “El Umbral” performance. The traditional and experimental one. The inner longing for that state of transition is dominant into the art of flamenco: new rhythms appear, different ways of physical expression and song are created while the word intertwines with the dance steps.

See videos here