Symbiotic Danscapes ◦ Research Workshop

What if…

⋗ Choreography can listen to the dancer rather than serve them or use them?

⋗ The dancing body is the center of decision-making and scores reflect the dancer rather than the other way around?

⋗ The audience’s participation is more than just presence or even active engagement, but a political statement that truly mattered?

⋗ Dance was not something to be consumed, but an act of being, becoming, and encountering?

This October, Androniki Marathaki, a Greek dancer and choreographer who adopt “practice” as her main choreographing method will share her research with us in a dynamic moment where everything remains fluid and possible.

Androniki facilitates conditions from which ‘awareness’ can be cultivated for anyone that participates in a dance event. In her work, the different processes of experiencing (choreographing, performing, observing) are interwaved in order to release compositional as well as defamiliarization processes of movement that are also related in everyday life and do develop capacities in world-making and self-creation.

Below is a note from Androniki regarding the research she will share during these three weeks.

As dance artists, I have the faith that through movement and the body we are able to serve impossible ways for communicating with each other, ways that have the potential to redefine our processes as humanity to co live together in ways we may not even have realized yet.

To address that within a dance performance is a political act, an invitation to join with each other outside of stereotypical embodied selves, an act of resistance to communicate outside of the representational structures for the body and for the Dance.

Through the years that I am researching and working as choreographer, I am trying to find ways to allow these processes between me and the dancers to expand viciously and courageously and so in that way to keep alive the “Dance on stage” . To allow its experience as something that is beyond us but as well as our common ground.

Through that lens then my invitation to audience members is spread on possible alternative ways in receiving the Dance.

How can we, as dance artists invite them to observe their social embodied self, to relate to the Dance through the bodily intelligences?

How can we provoke, sensitize and activate responses before meaning-making, before neuro-perceptual pathways that may lack new imaginative potentials for a community?

In these 3 weeks residency, I am truly thrilled to share these questions with whoever is related to a choreographer’s, performer’s , audience’s research through that lens, to play and become curious about what kind of performers, choreographers and audience members we are, to unfold strategies between those and amongst all possible mixed identities by those on how to relate to each other through the Dance.

This research is in relation to my upcoming project in which its main theme is the organ of the heart and its dance. Its’ dance is expanded towards a united heart that resonates with all human beings as well as to every kind of otherness around us. Through the methodology that unfolds by the ‘body as a score’, we will research the ‘practices of solidarity’ that are teached to us by our own body and its relation to otherness, by the sensing and feeling of our hearts and its unfoldings.

As the parts and structures of the body- in order for us to move freely and effortlessly- are creating an ecosystem,aultiverse where multiple systems and textures are negotiating and co living together, in that way we question how can our selves, a group of humans and a performance be related to those practices of solidarity and an awareness that is shared.

Some phrases that may offer you a wealthier insight to the project are:

sensoriality and movement 

somatic practices

relating to scores by artists from 1960-2025

transformation of physical materiality

practices of solidarity in movement

the physical organ of the heart and its various dimensions

observing

observing the self observing

dancing

performing

viewing

imagining

creating tasks

experiencing scores

movement exploration of circulation

rotation

pumping

twisting

expanding of the heart in movement

voicing and singing of the heart

exploring the heart space

group resonating

practices of not knowing

What is Symbiotic Danscapes?

Symbiotic Danscapes is a unique artist residency series that examines choreography through three different lenses:

⫸ Dancer as both a feeling and thinking subject

⫸ Choreography as a decentralized practice for reflection and improvisation

⫸ Dramaturgy that considers the audience—not by serving it, but by unlocking its political potential for social commentary

A new hybrid program that invites one guest artist to conduct and share their research, in dialogue with a dedicated and curious group of participants. Over the course of three weeks, in the sloping forest of Paleohori, the guest artist will bring specific questions emerging from their personal practice to be explored collectively. Together, the group will engage in a process of co-inquiry, exploring scores, inventing rituals, sharing meals, and allowing time to shape their discoveries.

This series of research workshops seeks to reclaim time as a privilege: to unlearn and
rethink the ways we create dance, to acknowledge and highlight our interconnectedness and
to reimagine spectatorship beyond presentation, through dances shaped by encounters.

To remember why dance was important to us in the first place.

Androniki Marathaki Bio

Androniki Marathaki is a choreographer, performer and dance teacher. With the support of the State Scholarship Foundation she started her artistic research in choreography and dance improvisation. Maintaining flexibility in what dance can mean and pushing the boundaries in dance facilitation and choreography, she is interested in the various ways humans perceive movement and in doing so shape cultural forms and social relationships in different contexts. So far she has presented her research on movement flows, kinetic landscapes, landscapes shaped through relationships, the regulatory mechanisms of the body and the sensory communication of self and communities (Love & Revolution, it’s not about if you will love me tomorrow , holy purple, Let’s be comfortable in our own skin). For the last three years, under the title “Let’s be comfortable in our own skin” she has been developing a dance improvisation practice that cultivates the relationship between sensory stimuli and movement. Through a desire to continue moving without pain and maintaining the pleasure of dance, this dance practice informs her new research theme of the “pain-movement-pleasure” triangle. Her latest performance was presented at the Athens and Epidaurus Festival 2023 and was supported by NEON, the Ministry of Culture and Sports, Island Connection Residency Program and Unplugged Dance. This year she completed the research project “performing pleasure” supported by the Ministry of Culture and Sport, while her research and the group’s research was also hosted by Cochlea Studia with the choreographer’s workshop “On pain: sensitizing, decentralizing, transforming”. This year she organizes and curates the nightscores, thus cultivating a network of international and Greek artists, contemporary and not, through the periodic visiting of scores with a group of people from different fields and disciplines. Part of her research was presented at TWIXTlab: art, anthropology & the everyday in collaboration with the Duncan Center for the Study of Dance and her lecture is part of the online archive for artistic research in Greece.  

Those who wish to witness and actively engage with Androniki’s creative process 

register here 

Due to limited spots, participation will be confirmed on a first-come, first-served basis.

*If you encounter any problems while trying to register through our website, please contact us at paleohoriartspace@gmail.com

Contribution:

As Paleohori is an artist-run independent space, a minimum contribution of 550 euros is required to support part of the costs for your 21-day participation.

For any questions please feel free to contact us at info@paleohori.com