ARTinTRA | ながれ / nagare

Eliza Soroga | Roxani Garefalaki | Takatsuna Mukai
ながれ / NAGARE
Performance, 2015
Duration: 50′
Friday, 17 March 2017, 6pm
Part of the Stragelove Festival
http://www.strangelovelondon.uk
@Brewery Tap Project Space
53 Tontine Street, Folkestone
Curated by Vassiliki Tzanakou

ながれ / NAGARE (Japanese for ‘flow’) is a performance by Eliza Soroga, Roxani Garefalaki & Takatsuma Mukai incorporating Japanese butoh dance, polyphonic singing of Epirus (Northern Greece) laments and live electric violin. The performance explores life through its relation to time, butoh dance, organic movement and sound. It is a semantic approach to the circle of creation; the form which decays and through death returns back to its primal waters.

Fusing Japanese noh theatre and kabuki dance with traditional Greek tragedies and mysteries (Kaviria, Eleusinia and Orfika) and the polyphonic singing methods of Epirus in Northern Greece, ながれ / NAGARE has been developed as an organic interaction between electric violin soundscapes and slow motion movement as a response to the polyphonic lamenting. Starting with the Greek traditional lament, ‘’I am happy when I forget’’ (Greek trans.‘’Αλησμονώ και χαίρoμαι’’) that was originally sung by mothers on the mountains of Epirus grieving the loss of their sons during the Ottoman occupation.

The interdisciplinary approach and collaboration between a Japanese musician and two Greek performance artists attempts to bring together Greek and Japanese performative and ceremonial elements, as an exploration of the common spiritual grounds of these two phenomenally different cultures. Via subconscious connections of movement and sound that tap into the archetypal experience of loss the performance will explore grief and the ways in which suffering finds its way through darkness.