Meet Market
Infecting the City Festival, Church Square, Cape Town, South Africa
13 to 20 February 2010
Athina has been selected to take part in an eight week creative residency in Cape Town to collaborate with performance makers from South Africa, Zimbabwe, Australia and the Netherlands to make a brand new site-specific work for Infecting the City festival.
A week-long festival of outdoor work taking place all over Cape Town, this year’s Infecting the City takes the theme of Human Rites.
On the Square that was once home to the ritual of slavery, a new rite is exercised. An infected wound is lanced, disinfected and then sealed to allow healing.
The procedure is not pretty; it concerns dis-ease. The active disinfecting agent is a radical swing between the opposing dynamics of the violent and the funny, the extraordinary and the mundane. Stillness in the midst of vigorous movement. The putrefaction of centuries of denial and shame requires removal. It is painful and yet, strangely, it provokes laughter: both are necessary for complete healing.
Summoning the conflicting memories and the fragmented histories of the people of Cape Town to Church Square, this ritual weaves one story from many truths.
Fight Club (work in progress)
A Homelands Dance Festival commission
Chisenhale Dance Space
7pm, 8 November, 2009
www.chisenhaledancespace.co.uk
For Homelands Dance Festival, Athina will be working with a dancer (Leon Baugh), a dance scientist (Emma Redding), a film-maker (Monica Alcazar) and a photographer (Helen Burrows) alongside a boxer and his trainer from Repton Boys Boxing Club in Bethnal Green to investigate boxing training, structures and rituals.
The creative team will work together over two weeks in a short, risk-taking process that will look at transforming elements of boxing training into performative action and touch upon state of mind in both training and contest. On Sunday 8th November, they will show and discuss their work to date at Chisenhale Dance Space. This is the second phase of research and development towards the Arenas project.
The photographs by Helen Burrows are part of her current project No Guts No Glory at Repton Boys Boxing Club. www.helenburrows.com
The Splinter in the Flesh (2008/09)
Originally commissioned as a work in progress by British Council, Greece and Isadora Duncan Institute, The Splinter in the Flesh was further developed by the Hellenic Dance Company at the State School of Dance, Athens in Summer 08 and is currently being developed for international touring. In its first incarnation, The Splinter… focused on issues of immigration, otherness and cultural identity. Later, the piece dug deeper into opposing forces living inside human nature.
Arenas (2008/12)
A body of work to be developed over the next five years focusing on the concept of the arena as a playground to investigate the idea of sport-theatre and physical and mental exertion and the threshold of pain. The first phase of research and development, Agon, took place at Greenwich Dance Agency in 2008.