In dialog with Ioanna Paraskevopoulou

Phrases by Giordana Patumi.

Making her Dance Umbrella 2023 competition debut, Athens-based Ioanna Paraskevopoulou is an award-winning dancer and choreographer who focuses on the interaction between motion, sound and imagery, and whose previous collaborators have included DU Artist Dimitris Papaioannou. I had the possibility to ask her a few questions forward of the UK debut that may happen on the Pit Theatre, Barbican on October eleventh, 2023 of her newest work MOS.

Q: How would you describe the general idea or theme behind MOS?

A: Two performers enter into discourse with a disparate sequence of photos, and search to impart their very own transcription in area. The physique and (micro-)actions co-exist with curious objects and supplies to behave as a method of sound manufacturing. The fabric is intensified, exploded, paused, repeated, and distorted with the intention to bolster the sound expertise.

Inside the scenic formulation, particular person items of knowledge are teased out of the reused supplies, thus inviting viewers members to generate new connections and interrelations. They discover themselves successively reworked into listeners of a makeshift and heterogeneous soundtrack that unfolds earlier than them. The performers turn out to be the intermediaries between archive and viewers, providing up their very own private takes, composing their very own sound adaptation of a non-linear cinematic script, and selecting, on the finish of the day, what might presumably be heard.

Query: Are you able to briefly clarify what MOS is and what impressed you to create this work?

Reply: MOS is a scenic sport. It’s a venture that arises from the mixture of assorted supplies and mediums. My try and create a dialogue between motion, sound and picture. I found the Foley approach, throughout the pandemic, from a YouTube video through which Foley artists had been recreating the sound of film scenes. Instantly this concept intrigued me and I created a video venture referred to as All she likes is popping bubble wrap, through which I experimented with this concept at a recording studio. I then developed these correlations in a reside 40-minute venture, the duet MOS.

Q: Might you share some insights into the artistic course of behind the event of this work?

A: The method was enjoyable and fairly playful. We began by attempting out video games and at first, we centered on dances that seem in motion pictures. For some time we experimented with sounds from totally different objects and which sound greatest matched the picture with the intention to produce probably the most correct texture for every of the visible elements that I had collected. I used to go to a retailer every single day earlier than the rehearsal and purchase surfaces – wooden, steel, different supplies that we stepped on to create totally different qualities of sound. We took faucet dancing classes. I undoubtedly needed the music to emerge from our dancing. For a very long time, the order of issues was scattered in my thoughts apart from just a few elements that I used to be positive of. Then, someday, I noticed the entire piece in entrance of me as a imaginative and prescient. I narrated it to Georgios, my co-dancer, and so it started to kind.

Q: How does MOS problem or push the boundaries of conventional dance types or strategies?

A: I’m not the one who can say that MOS pushes the boundaries of the standard. It’s definitely a piece that’s fairly experimental in idea, as I borrowed a sound approach and turned it right into a software for choreographic composition. The occasions are such that boundaries, id, categorization are blurred in artwork. We’re all experimenting from the second we enter the studio with an thought intangible in our minds. The phrase experiment is only a phrase and phrases are typically misplaced when it comes to content material.

For me, what issues is the immediacy and the sensation one efficiency can evoke. Many experiments have been accomplished prior to now. Many concepts have been embodied. The data round us is chaotic and unabsorbed. I believe MOS succeeds in the truth that it’s accessible and direct and that was my intention. To create one thing that may make a direct affect on the viewers.

Q: Are there any particular messages or concepts that you just hope to convey by way of MOS?

A: I’ve a robust relationship with all these issues which can be handed by, the recollections and the imprint they go away. I’m within the copy of audio-visual parts and their illustration within the current. In addition to the visibility of the processes that occur backstage. 

But there’s nothing particular that MOS offers with; it captures a operate and thru this sound course of, my intention is to create a sensorial expertise through which the senses of the viewers could also be tickled.

Q: How does the music or sound design contribute to the general environment or storytelling in MOS?

A: Sound is crucial component in MOS. The choice, the order and the composition of the scenes had been made based mostly on it. Initially, I used to be trying to find copyright-free footage from movies that contained sounds that I assumed had been attention-grabbing and that I might recreate.

So, the sound created a sequence of various and diversified scenes that I might by no means have imagined selecting. Foley artists have created codes the place particular sounds correspond to particular parts and actions.  This glossary has been a elementary guideline for me.

Within the second a part of the efficiency, I meant the music to emerge from our our bodies, in order that we might remodel ourselves from sound manufacturing mediums to actors performing within the movie. I needed the operate of sound to be reversed and the reside recording of our faucet dance steps to turn out to be the soundtrack of our dance, exhaustion and feelings.

Q: What are a few of the key parts or moments in MOS that you just really feel are notably impactful or memorable?

A: It’s all the time attention-grabbing to look at the reactions of the viewers. They fluctuate from nation to nation. There are moments the place the viewers all the time laughs and these are additionally the moments that create the vitality, the audacity and the necessity to share. By these reactions I can revisit the work and replicate on it.

Q: As a choreographer, what do you personally hope to realize or talk by way of your work, together with MOS?

A: As an viewers member, what strikes me is to expertise a efficiency and be drawn into it, to really feel an emotion, to recollect, to narrate. As a maker, I wish to evoke feelings. I need to have the ability to convey what occurs to me on stage.

Q: What challenges did you face whereas incorporating on a regular basis objects like umbrellas, plungers, and coconut shells into the choreography?

A: The problem was in the way in which these props can be amplified within the theatre, that is the issue, as the method of constructing sound results within the post-production stage of movie manufacturing is occurring in a recording studio with the mandatory tools and technical help.

Regardless of this issue, utilizing these bizarre props can solely carry pleasure and play within the course of and the truth that we use them critically creates an much more amusing scenario. 

Q: What do you hope audiences will take away from experiencing MOS on the Dance Umbrella Pageant? What can audiences anticipate to expertise or really feel when watching MOS & how do you envision MOS resonating with totally different audiences, together with those that is probably not conversant in modern dance?

A: I welcome the viewers which isn’t conversant in modern dance to return and see the efficiency. MOS is a chunk that by nature and as a result of mixture of sound, picture and motion can appeal to individuals from totally different fields.

It is a query that considerations me anyway. “To which members of the viewers is our work and our artwork addressed to and in what method? 

How can we create a scenario the place extra spectators will really feel included? 

How does our work talk and what do the spectators take away after they go away the efficiency?”

Q: Trying forward, what future tasks or explorations are you excited to pursue in your work, constructing on the artistic ideas and strategies developed in MOS?

A: Definitely, the method of reworking sound right into a choreographic software is now the way in which I intend to consider the subsequent creation. In addition to utilizing objects to supply acoustic parts. So, I’m already fascinated about the subsequent stage based mostly on that. 

For additional information in regards to the efficiency and the Dance Umbrella competition go to: www.danceumbrella.co.uk/event/ioanna-paraskevopoulou-mos/ Header picture by Julian Mommert.

Concerning the artist:

Ioanna Paraskevopoulou is a dancer and choreographer based mostly in Athens. She graduated from the Greek Nationwide Faculty of Dance and is at present learning on the Division of AudioVisual Arts (Ionian College). Her creative apply focuses on the connection between audio-visual media and motion, reconfiguring the growth of the choreographic discipline. She has collaborated, amongst others, with Iris Karayan, Christos Papadopoulos, Dimitris Papaioannou and Alexandra Waierstall.

She was awarded the Greatest Efficiency prize for the dance movie Sans Attente by Konstantinos Rizos at InShadow Worldwide Pageant and second prize for her efficiency in mneme [action] 21 by Maria Koliopoulou at Worldwide Dance Pageant, Algiers. She was awarded the Stavros Niarchos Basis Artist Fellowship by ARTWORKS in 2019-2020. Her choreographic video venture All She Likes Is Popping Bubble Wrap was created as a part of Onassis New Choreographers Pageant 8. ALSIPBW was chosen by a number of video artwork festivals and awarded Greatest Sound Design at FIVideodanza Pageant, Mexico and Greatest Video Artwork at MIFVIF, Venezuela. MOS premiered at Onassis New Choreographers Pageant 9 and had its European premiere at Julidans Subsequent. She introduced Coconut Impact on the seventh Danse élargie competitors and received the Younger Jury award. She was chosen to current MOS at Aerowaves Twenty23.