Onassis AiR collaborates with Athens Festival at "The Workshop"

25-30 March 2019

Onassis AiR collaborates with Athens Festival and creates an intensive six-day workshop on dramaturgy, production and curation. From the 25th to 30th of March, the Artistic Research & Inter-national Residency Program of the Onassis Foundation, organizes a workshop in which six artists will work through their projects in development with the three invited international mentors. Approached through the filters of dramaturgy, production and curation, each of the six artistic projects will go through a step-by-step re-imagining. The projects will be presented at the Athens Epidaurus Festival 2019.

Three directors and three choreographers will participate on a series of intensive workshops by the dramaturg Peter Stamer, the producer Silke Bake and the curator Satu Herrala. Three 6-day cycles of intensive workshops will take place at the School of Fine Arts in Exarcheia - Circuits and Currents.

The "Workshop" is the first professional development workshop in the framework of Onassis AiR, a year-round artists-in-residence program, located in the center of Athens. Onassis AiR is an initiative of the Onassis Foundation aiming to support local and international artists, curators and thinkers working in time-based artistic disciplines, who wish to deepen, reconsider, or transform their practice or methodology without expectations or restraints of the production frenzy.

Photo: Evi Fylaktou

The mentors

Dramaturgy

Peter Stamer works as director, performer, mentor, and curator in the field of contemporary theatre and performance. His performance and theatre projects often take on strategies of story-telling and dialogic improvisation.

Producer

Berlin-based curator, dramturg, and mentor, Silke Bake often collaborates with international artists and institutions around the world. She develops topic bound programms, talks, and research formats in the field of performing art.

Curator

Satu Herrala works as a choreographer and curator, and since the beginning of 2015, as the artistic director of Baltic Circle international festival of theatre and performance in Helsinki.

Athens Epidaurus Festival 2019 Program

THE ERGASTIRIO: March 25 - 30, 2019

Designed & facilitated by: Silke Bake, Satu Herrala, and Peter Stamer

Participants: Sofia Paschou, Androniki Marathaki, Little Things Orchestra, C. for Circus, Kostas Tsioukas, Aris Papadopoulos, Martha Pasakopoulou

With THE ERGASTIRIO, Silke Bake, Satu Herrala, and Peter Stamer jointly create a working environment for six performing artists whose works are going to be presented in June/July 2019 at the Athens Festival. During the week we propose an open working field to share respective artistic concepts and approaches with each other. Despite our fields of expertise in dramaturgy and choreography, in dancing and directing, in programming and curating, we don’t conceive of mentoring as a help for participants to become more successful artists. We rather want to provide a working atmosphere within which the participants are enabled to render their ideas visible, sayable, and thinkable.

Monday (3/25) & Tuesday (3/26): Group Sessions

On Monday and Tuesday, we want to engage with you in a group and introduce exercises or tools which are designed to reveal intrinsic conditions of the art works’ concepts. With these methodological contrast agents we aim at enabling and empowering the group to talk about your works and research, to take seriously the work of the other, to understand ourselves as being part of a community of researchers, and to help comprehend that artistic research is nourished by a collective, and sometimes not always visible world of concepts and hidden gestures.

Wednesday (3/27): A Day Out

How do you look at your living environment? What do you find inspiring, urgent, frightening, joyful about your co-citizens and the city you live in? For Wednesday we will ask you to prepare a field trip or studio visit, a walk or any kind of encounter with your daily lives. A Day Out wants to leave the lab behind and delve into the pulsating heart of lived lives. The group does not necessarily have to stick together. If someone wants to invite a limited amount of people into their studio space, if three people take a walk whereas the others go to a museum – this is all fine as long as these parcours reflect perspectives, deflect ways of seeing and being in the context in which you live and work.

Thursday (3/28) & Friday (3/29): One-on-Ones

In order to give individual feedbacks and engage in personal exchange on Thursday and Friday we propose One-on-One Sessions with each mentor for maximum 90 minutes. Which are the topics (related to curation, dramaturgy and production, and further) you want to access and share with us? We will create this schedule when we meet in space on the first day of the workshop.

Saturday (3/30): Group Wrap-Up

To give a good look back we leave Saturday open for self-organised feedback where we assess the week together. The end of the workshop slides into an open Apéro and snacks where guests can also join.