The Yard. Residency 2015

theYard.Residency.15

theYard.Residency.15 MITOS had the general theme Stereotypes, inviting the artistic community to take position, to challenge and criticize art itself, foundations and norms, even ourselves!

The program theYard is an active and ongoing artistic residency which completed in 2015 for the 5th continuous year, it transforms and adjusts to reappear each year under a new thematic.  It functions as a platform for artists from all the fields of the performing and fine arts. It supports and promotes originality and experimental mood in the field of the Performing Art. It enhances dialogue among artists and encourages direct communication with the audience. It is also a reminder of the need to create with no restrictions and for this it invites artists to take initiative and act freely in the space of the Old Vinegar Factory, in the center of Limassol.

For this year theYard.Residency.15 was completed with 14 participations from different art disciplines, mostly from the field of performance art. The participants where chosen after an Open Call that involved new artists and groups from Cyprus and abroad, with an original and experimental character. All participations respond to the residency’s theme: Stereotypes, with the following given text.

Stereotypes –all the impressions that have been embedded in the common opinion and will not take into consideration facts based on experience, and are used in order to judge and evaluate things based on a pre-defined view point

(html://el.wiktionary.org/wiki/στερεότυπα)

Κatathlas, written by Lena Kitsopoulou
Text: Lena Kitsopoulou, Direction: Michalis Gigindis, Actor: Kostas Silvestros,
Light: Vasilis Petinaris, Music: Alkis Agathokleous- Ariadni Papantoniou, Director assistant: Aggeliki Samara

Through the personal narrative of the hero, we take a look at the sensitive issue of mental illiness in an attemo to shoot down the stereotypes that follow it.

KassandER theatre (Cassandra’s Annuciation by Dimitris Dimitriadis)
Grotowski Institute production
Translation: Ilias Wrazas, Adaptation-direction: Io Voulgaraki, Set and costume design: Magdalini Avgerinou, Original music: Nefeli Stamatogiannopoulou, Light design: Karol Jarek
Performers: Alexandra Kazazou, Przemyslaw Blaszczak

Ιn Greek mythology god Apollo falls in love with Cassandra, the daughter of Priam and Hecuba, and gives her the power of prophecy in order to seduce her. Cassandra takes the gift, but refuses to go to bed with him, so Apollo curses her of telling the truth about the future but never being believed. This is the ancient myth: a “love story” that never started. Today Greek play-writer Dimitris Dimitriadis creates a new myth: this time Cassandra sleeps with Apollo and praises Desire.

KassandER’s text is a “river” of words and emotions. We dive into its waters and search for playful ways to save its poetry on stage. At the same tie we wonder: isn’t Cassandra’s meeting with Apollo a fragment of everyone’s past or everyone’s future?

SPACE IN BETWEEN – two-day theatre workshop
Alexandra Kazazou (Studio Matjeka) and Przemyslaw Blaszczak (Teatr ZAR)

The aim of the workshop is to make us forget the body as we know it and make us listen to the here and now, in relation to ourselves, the surrounding space, our partners and the group. By focusing on solo, partner and ensemble training we discover new modes of perception, communication and improvisation that brings together, in a creative process, co-action, co-creation and co-existence. Without forgetting that the Individual Power arises from the Ensemble energy.

Visual and Oral stories Μusic and Visual performance
Dimitris Spyrou- Christina Papakyriakou

Christina Papakyriacou and Dimitris Spyrou meet and share visual and music stories with the common element of using objects as picture and sound derivatives.

Using an "overhead projector" the artist Ch. Papakyriacou animates images , landscapes and colors that dress the music of D . Spirou who tells stories and poems through sounds , voices and objects that transform to songs. The whole action is done live through an improvisational character where sound and image interact by asking questions without answers and giving answers that have no questions

Stereo Typing Multimedia Art Installation
The Family Noise Project

The artist trio The Family Noise Project experiments with text, video and sound to create a multimedia installation in the space of The Old Vinegar Factory

Deconstructing Electra vol.1 – performance
Nadia Mowafy, Aggelos Michaeloudes, Marios Ioannou

In search of a way to express these tragic heroes, we are trying to listen to what they would say with their bodies, with their minds. Ancient Greek tragedy is sacred, is classic, we perceive it as a rock poem. We wish to break the form.

Gender Joy - work in progress
Eleana Alexandrou- bytheway productions

Eleana Alexandrou enters the Old Vinegar House as a guest participant of the programme theYard.Residency.15 to develop her research on the topics of gender and sexuality. This research began in April 2014, became part of her studies at the DasArts Master of Theatre program in Amsterdam and will be completed in 2016.

Eleana is currently looking at the existence of the subjects of gender and sexuality within the performance industry, the local context of the Cypriot society, the notion of the self and how she relates, filters and translates her findings in a performative context.

Strings - Devised Theatre
Neck of the Woods

Performers: Photini Michaelidou, Pablo Berzal Cruz, Directed by: Mariana Sastre, María José Martínez Sánchez, Movement director: Alkistis Polychroni, Texts: Adriana Marín Urrego,

Scenography: María José Martínez Sánchez, Produced by: Neck of the woods

A devised theatre piece that deals

with the idea of breaking the mental health stereotypes. In this context, we create this piece based on real stories, trying to show the most intimate, human face of one specific mental disorder: depression.

Enclosed in walls of Stereotypes | Theatre Workshop
Constantinos Papageorgiou | Theatre of the Oppressed practitioner

Whereas stereotypes function as a form of organizing information, they could gradually transform into prejudices, actions of discrimination, hate-speech and racism. The social stigma that follows being labeled behind a superficial stereotype could be very harmful for the wellbeing of an individual. It’s as if society builds these stiff walls around him/her assuming his/her identity based only on a characteristic they have. The walls of stereotypes enclose people and block them from freely exploring and accepting their identity.

The objectives of the workshop are the following:- participants to practically explore feelings of stigmatization and reflect on them- participants to realize how stereotypes could become oppression - participants to practice ways of responding to socially prevalent stereotypes- participants to get sensitized and re-evaluate or deconstruct their own stereotypesThe workshop will utilize tools from Theatre of the Oppressed (Augusto Boal) such as Image Theatre, Forum Theatre and Rainbow of Desire.

All dogs must be muzzled Contemporary dance performance
Ewa Dziarnowska and Patrik Kelemen

“Αll dogs must be muzzled” takes a bite on mythologies of companionship. It sinks its teeth right to their bone and makes them bleed until a new system of whatever-hood can be created from the foam of the day.

In the beginning there was a mess. The mess gave birth to a contract. In the mess, there was a better mess.
1. –ing: - practicing partnership- decentralizing desire- dissolving regimes of dependency- exorcising personal mythologies
2. a…:- a set of contracted exercises - a horizontally structured duet- an on-going point of departure

An organizational study, that’s my work Dance performance
Choreography: Cecile Bally, Dramaturgy/ Assistant: Alexandre Viard

“If you understand what I say you will realize that I am not saying so much, if you don’t, you might guess that I try to say a lot. From the inside, I just try to follow an idea until the end and it is already a good challenge considering that I am looking at the stage from above in order to be sure to end at the front right corner.

In 2013, I wrote a master’s thesis in decision theory on how ideas, in a creative process in contemporary dance, emerge, develop and blend into a piece. What is negotiated and who is deciding? I was looking at dance through ethnographic glasses in order to better understand its organization und created a model conceptualizing my observations.

In this solo, I try to understand what it means to have a physical

reaction to a methodology of researching and presenting academic results. How can a dramaturgy embody the conventional shapes of academic writing but not the meaning of its content? How to have as a content for the work the frame of my text and the titles of my model?”

Acordes Guitar Ensemble – music

The theYard.Residency.15, presents a concert of Acordes Guitar Ensemble.This multifaceted musical ensemble breaks the barriers of prejudice and stereotypes that the society might have about the Classical Guitar and its sound. The ensemble can sometimes be as big as 8-12 guitars performing a repertoire that is unconventional to the typical. Acordes introduce us to a new world, a world that we do not meet very often, especially in Cyprus, a world that brings together tradition and history with the present and the future of Cyprus.

me@t – video installation,performance
Direction: Constantina Peter, Performing: Alexia Leonida, Artistic Direction: Julia Georgiadou Music Production: Demetris Spirou , Video: Konstantinos Konstantinou- Constantina Peter, Poster: Eva Korae, Technical support:Lukasz Walewski, Interviews: Rajan (India), Sahand (Iran), Janakie (Sri Lanka), Lukasz (Poland)

It is a visual comment, where image and sound will carry the memory and life of four immigrants that live and work in Cyprus. Within this framework the "behaviors" of Cypriot society will be transferred, through the reactions and the speech of a child, which participates live and reflects at the audience the contemporary image of the Other.The performance negotiates subjects as: Place, Displacement, Memory.

                Office Address:

Center of Performing Arts MITOS

Astiggos 1, 3016 Lemesos, Cyprus

Old Vinegar Factory Address:

Genethliou Mitella 34,

3036 Lemesos, Cyprus

      Telephone:

(+357) 99 985232