MOS

Ioanna Paraskevopoulou, dancer and choreographer based in Athens, is coming to the Festival de Otoño for her first performance as choreographer to début her piece MOS.She performed in Madrid two years ago in the Sala Verde de los Teatros del Canal, as one of the dancers in Christos Papadopoulos's Larsen C., which we were able to see at the 39th Festival de Otoño. Other than choreographing routines for other artists (and dancing for the likes of Dimitris Papaioannou and Tzeni Argyriou), Paraskevopoulou has been looking to draw movement and audiovisual media together. Paraskevopoulou created her choreographic video project All She Likes Is Popping Bubble Wrap as part of Onassis New Choreographers Festival. She also created Battle of Fishes , which was put together within the context for a video dance festival. With her impressive performance résumé, the young artist will be a great point of interest at this year’s Festival de Otoño.

MOS brings sound, movement, and visuals into harmony. Paraskevopoulou and her collaborator and co-dancer Georgios Kotsifaki focus on the interplay between movement, sound, and imagery. The physical act of generating audio while following the film becomes energetic dance. With unbelievable precision and craft, items from umbrellas to coconut shells are used live to evoke the movie sounds made by Foley artists. The materials are put at the service of a subtle dance where there are pauses and repetitions, distortions, expanded and retained sounds, an explosive experience for sight and hearing because the public begins, almost without intending it, to generate new connections and interrelationships between objects, bodies, and images. Both playful and intense, this captivating performance will surprise you at every turn. The set of MOS resembles a contemporary art installation with a Pandora’s box of non-linear sound options. One surrenders to the performance with a mixture of perplexity and enjoyment.

Materiality and technique have an important place in the development of the piece, since in addition to bellows, umbrellas, plungers, the basin with water to simulate a dip in a swimming pool or the stoked ropes that generate the sensation of gusty wind, there are geophones, hydrophones, lapel microphones, contact microphones and the typical ones used by the sound departments in the cinema to recreate sounds. Objects are transformed into animating, sound-producing media and take centre stage for the performance. Paraskevopoulou states: “ MOS is a scenic game operating in among the conspicuous and hidden relations that exist between movement, sound, and image, amplifying narratives that arise out of the mutual interplay and co-existence of seemingly incongruous archival sources, thus bringing visibility to elements that cannot easily be seen, or heard.”

This time, alongside her collaborator and co-dancer Giorgos Kotsifakis, she’ll be gifting us an original soundtrack across a series of scenes. It will be something classic and cinematic. Not only do they create a soundtrack “live” across a series of scenes drawn from a selection of films and other footage, but the reverse is also true: the film fragments provide sound for their dance. It is above all this interaction between image and sound, between dance and sound effect, that makes the show so exciting and meaningful. An invention that drinks from what has already been invented, from the tradition of diverse arts that merge to generate something, if not original, at least unusual.