ELEFSIS
ELEFSIS: Minotaur Arrival is an interactive artwork. Visual art installations, video, sound/music, dance theatre and performance art are challenging the participants’ perceptual systems.
The audience is a key part of the work as this piece is designed to enable participants uncover and perhaps discover interesting aspects of themselves – taking the time to notice the workings of human mind.
The experience uses the concept of the Minotaur as a starting point and focuses on the moment that the creature arrives at the labyrinth. Each participant is, at the same time, a visitor and the Minotaur and its labyrinth is both a physical and mental operational frame.
A number of sensory stimuli, acts and games throughout the performance lead or enable each participant to make choices and this is the point where the experience becomes totally subjective and open to diverse narratives and interpretations. The aim of the piece is to initiate self-discovery and put forward questions such as:
What is the relationship of Presence and Absence and how it defines my experiences?
How can I deal with a sense of constant move and ambiguity – how does this influence my perception and mental state?
Let’s say I am arriving in a place, a time-frame, a relationship or a goal; arriving in life itself. How do I deal with the act of being here? What is the reality that I chose to experience and how my choice shapes my relationship with myself and others? Where am I really, right now?
"The life of an individual in any society is a series of passages from one age to another". This term has been used primarily to refer to life crisis rituals such as: birth, death, puberty and marriage. The common element in such rites takes place in three stages: a) separation, b) transition and c) aggregation. This pattern is more clear in initiation rites, where the symbolism of death and rebirth is more clear, the separation thus enact a symbolic death which removes the individual from society and his social status before is transformed into a transition (liminallity) and finally reborn into the community again.” By Alvaro Henao
Performers & creative consultants: Juliana Yazbeck, Olga Masleinnikova, Thais Mennsitieri (now known as Kyara Orlando), Alexis Kraniou.
Video art: John Ian Yannacopoulos, Katerina Barampouti. / Photographs: Alvaro Henao, Iria Pizania.
Sound engineering: Ilias Andrianatos, Thomas Chapman. / Co-produced with The Koppel Project 2017
“…You may come and rest; your presence is already here. You may come. And perhaps remember. Or feel. And chat - about life.
I remember - when the earth was born. It was hot. It was cold. It was a struggle and a song.
So much laughter...
Then, thousands of lights blinked and
inhabited this place. You were there. And then you weren’t.
Who will join this thunderstorm of play? Let’s make the script.”
