borborygmi
2024
CREDITS
Performance – Movement Material Co-creation Christina Skoutela, Chara Kotsali
Assistant Choreographer Vassia Zorbali
Dramaturgy Advisor Konstantina Georgelou
Music – Sound Design Yannis Kotsonis
Lighting Design Eliza Alexandropoulou
Sound Advisor Brian Coon
Artistic Consultant Periklis Pravitas
Costumes Erik Annerborn, Chara Kotsali
Executive Production Delta Pi
DATES
Athens Epidaurus Festival-Grape Showcase 19, 20, 21. 7. 2024
Borborygmi explores the beneficial power of noise in the way to generate joy, solidarity, and a sense of community. Two bodies on stage, a potential extension of an endless human chain, engage in an unproductive dance, in a counter-concert dedicated to the pleasure of disintegration.
Setting off from the political, anthropological, and philosophical aspects of noise and drawing inspiration from the noise music scene, Chara Kotsali invites us to attentively listen to the ‘noisy social bodies’. Using noise as an artistic counterexample, the choreographer pays respects to the noisy – cacophonous, incoherent, paradoxical, discordant, illiterate – voices that, no matter how powerfully articulated, in the end, must always make too much ‘noise’ to be heard.
Borborygmi received the third audience award in Athens Epidaurus Festival.
Choreographer’s note:
Noise as an echosomatic state always articulates something and invites us to listen carefully. It is a sonic form of knowledge. The historian Saadiya Hartman speaks of the “(…) imperative to respect black noise – the screeches and groans, the gibberish and nonsense that always surpasses legibility and law and embodies expectations that are wildly utopian, that have been ruined by capitalism (…)”.
The concept of noise is intertwined with disharmony. It invites us to decolonize our listening and disrupts the economy of attention. As an artistic counter-example, it disobeys the dominant demand for ever greater clarity and transparency. Borborygmi attempts to listen to the noisy social body and it’s unheard voices. It is a celebration of a genealogy of “social noise” which is full of those inarticulate, unreadable and anechoic voices.
REVIEWS
Anastastio Koukoutas, Springback Magazine
“The performance is ‘outrageously poetic’, an antidote to white noise, a powerful lament emerging from a storm of inaudible voices. The two performers aim for a playful yet highly energetic approach, a way to resist the sonic warfare of today’s blasting and numbing reality (there will bits of it on a wide screen, if you manage to catch a glimpse). But if we breathe with and in chaos, then there might be unimaginable ways to reactivate our bodies, to think of limits not as mere boundaries but, on the contrary, as signs to explore things outside the space of limitation, just like the two as they hold hands and for a while exit the stage, galloping in unity – empowered and outrageously bold.”
https://springbackmagazine.com/read/athens-epidaurus-festival-greek-dance-artists/\
Natasha Tripney, Café Europa
Personally, I was most taken with the showcase’s two enjoyably noisy dance pieces, both the work of young female choreographers. Borborygmy is – delightfully – the Greek word for the rumbling sound our stomachs make when they’re empty. (…) Ending with “one minute’s noise for one century of silence”, the piece was cacophonous and unpolished with a celebratory rocking-out-in-your-bedroom vibe coupled with a sense of defiance.
https://natashatripney.substack.com/p/fruit-of-the-vine-the-grape-agora
Ariadne Mikou, Hystrio magazine
[…]they rhythmically gallop across the stage, oozing a lost romanticism, a
violated innocence and a raped adolescence. With an inventive mix of found movements
from Greek popular culture that are dynamically performed, they utter their wild poetics,
deafening like the noise of a busy city, harsh like the scratching and beating of the
microphone on the muddy ground. With uncontained anger, they produce "one minute of
noise for one century of silence" to give us a strong wake. Bombarding us with sound,
borborygmi takes us into a breathless and impetuous ascending climax to give us a punch
on the stomach, to build a “collective tachycardia”.
Gerrge Voudiklaris, Artivist chief editor
Chara Kotsali is consistent with every promise she made in her previous steps. Borborygmi is magnificent. If you miss it , youi’ll be missing!
https://www.facebook.com/share/p/3Sf91o7asVqysiZQ/
