Part of the Trails of Memories project. Read more here: http://fb.me/trailsofmemories2017
Trails of Memories is a cross-disciplinary and manifold survey focusing on the part of the city that is situated between the Municipal Gardens and Moussallas, a district that during the early 20th century became Pafos’ epicentre of immense urban landscape development. This landscape diminishes fast –even before the foundation of the Republic of Cyprus in 1960– leaving behind and bequeathing a sense of desolation, deconstruction and desertion.
This almost vacant habitat in the Old Town emerges as the echo of a bygone societal and cultural reality. Trails of Memories negotiates notions of archaeology, historical consciousness, personal and collective memory, human geography, gender relations, transition, abandonment and unavoidable evolution.
The project interfaces multiple scopes of memory through the experimentation of choreographer Arianna Economou and her team with space but concurrently activating the personal memories of inhabitants who lived and continue to live in the area of old Pafos. The inactive townhouses of the area (and also those that today are being re-used for other purposes such as restaurants, etc.) represent the memory that has uncontrollably began to be superseded by an ideological as well as a diverse economical status quo, while at the same time the semi-derelict buildings stand like vanishing traces desperately declaring “we were also here”. The conceptual mapping of the history of Pafos’ city centre expresses a wider phenomenon –a praxis of transition– also found in innumerable other urban city centres on an international scale which experience the same transition of historical memory and a flux towards something new. This is an ambivalent evolution process that leads to an amalgamation of generations, history, culture, ideology and dialectical materialism.
PRODUCTION by ECHO ARTS
Director/ Choreographer: Arianna Economou
Exhibition Curator: Dr. Kostas Prapoglou
Director of Production : Pantelis Georgiou
Video Artist: Yiannos Economou
Performers: Harry Koushos, Michail Kriembardis, Natalie Tsingis, Hasine Felek, Mikaela Michael, Nadia Georgiadou
Photographer: Ergenc Korkmazel
Projector Co ordinator / Video Support: Justyna Ataman
Workshop Image, Storytelling, Memory : Maria Kyriakou
Technical Support : Andreas Petrou
Promenade Performance_Trails of Memories 2017 from Dance Gate Lefkosia on Vimeo.
Photos from group performances:
TRAILS OF MEMORIES
Crevices of the mind: Time Lost and Time Found
SOLO DANCE PERFORMANCES BY ARIANNA ECONOMOU
Twofold sets of performances/rituals in dialogue with the archival space of Trails of Memories.
Trails of Memories: Crevices of the mind: Time Lost & Time Found consist of solo dances on the weaving and threading of fragmented stories. This research project delves into the archaeology of human emotions and the complex textures of memory.
Pafos-Ktima is a town built on layered history, filled with legends and myths particularly involving Aphrodite and her son Eros. It brings the choreographer’s research into the realm of Orphism and cosmology. The city and its environs reflect a sense of love and life on the one hand, sleep and death on the other.
A series of stepping lines, curves, swirls and swishes breathes a journey through dance. Fragmentary narratives with references to sounds and music recreate intimate moments of everyday life. Archival photographs enable us to reconstruct a society where novel ideas and sensibilities are brought over by Smyrna refugees.
Similarly, urban conventions are introduced from the Hellenised city of Alexandria, which had close links to Pafos. Furthermore, students ventured to Athens and Beirut for education, and further afield to Paris and London generated the shaping of an interesting society at the turn of the 20th century in the otherwise remote, western district of Cyprus.
Solo Performances_Trails of Memories_ Arianna Economou 2017 from Dance Gate Lefkosia on Vimeo.
Photos from solo performances Crevices of the mind: Time Lost and Time Found:
