Aris Papadopoulos

Aris Papadopoulos is a dancer, maker and performer based in Αthens.

He studied at the School of Architecture Αthens (NTUA, 2009) and the National School of Dance, Αthens (2012) and has since been active in the fields of dance and performing arts in Greece and abroad, alternating between the roles of dancer, devising-performer in collaboratively-created work as well as maker of his own work.

Aris is very keen on the notion of landscape as a cultural construction and juxtaposition of both man-made and natural environments, therefore seeing it as a heavily charged field of potentiality for action, exploration, playfulness and composition, and is distilling that into his own experimentations through visuals and movement. His current personal interest and artistic research explore the multitude of visual and physical representations of everyday encounters with the urban landscape, the designing of processes and concept-writing, interdisciplinary approaches in the urban landscape as a field of potentiality, and the reciprocal scheme of embodying landscape vs shaping an experience.

He is a co-founder of the artistic collaboration arisandmartha through which he has presented, alongside his artistic partner Martha Pasakopoulou, the dance works “Lucy. tutorial for a ritual” (2019), “Five Steps to Save the World” (2018) and “touching.just” (2017). Selected as Aerowaves Twenty18 Artist on its first creative attempt, arisandmartha has toured locally and internationally and continues to develop new work in the fields of dance and site-specific performance, exploring togetherness and ‘performing friendship’ on stage while searching for an expanded common ground with every new performative encounter.

As a dancer and performer, Aris has collaborated with diverse dance companies and choreographers in Greece and abroad and is a long-time collaborator with the Onassis Cultural Centre, Αthens, for the Dancing to Connect educational program held annually. Over the past few years he has engaged himself with multidisciplinary groups, such as Arbonauts (UK), HIMHERANDIT Productions - Andreas Constantinou (DK), Pietro Marullo (BΕ), with foundations and art institutions, including Flux Laboratory (CH, ATH) and Palais de Tokyo (FR) as well as with individual artists, such as Stefanos Tsivopoulos, Vitoria Kotsalou and Dora Garcia.

Scanning my Self_Scanning the Walkscape

Scanning the Walkscape

(working title)

an audio-guided performative walk

"Cities have endless layers. Longer and shorter histories are written constantly in their paths. They are composed by visible and invisible traces that continuously re-configure their existence, and our courses in them. In this danced audio walk, Aris proposes to reveal a certain number of them: architectural choices and left-overs, vernacular habits and trades, national ideological narratives and their imprint on humans’ lives. With the use of movement and words, he guides us through a section of the city, joining together highly technical information and personal narrative."

Lenio Kaklea, 25/06/2020

scanning the body

Would you please lie down on your back

and let your legs and arms rest loosely on the floor

Allow some comfortable space between your legs

If you need to, now or during any rest, you could always bend your knees

and stamp your feet for comfort.

* pending notes or on the walk

– The audio begins as I exit my house and I’m climbing down the stairs. they are scanning their bodies. Once I’m on ground level I watch them as they listen to the audio with their eyes closed, from behind the glass door of the street door. As they open their eyes again, I’m exiting the building, and go to sit on the small staircase outside the kinder garden.

– They ring the bell as we hit play on our audio devices. They are downstairs, I’m upstairs. 12m above ground level.

– Walk path: a fixed element since it is already “written” in space and on the terrain.

Body: an element moving in the space, writing and re-writing the path.

Trying to stay true to the first path I walked and trying not to deviate from it. This is the 69th time I’m walking the path with you. How does the body move, feel and document the landscape it traverses?

– I am appropriating the urban landscape, I am appropriating the urban fabric. this is my field of work.

– The reciprocal relation between content and container. Which (in)forms which?

Landscape shapes Body and Body shapes Landscape

– My body is the unit of measurement. Consequently each one of our bodies senses, absorbs and collects different elements, different information and in a completely different way.

– My body traverses the fixed points–fragments in space. The intersections of my linear live movement with the photographic fragments of the walkscape is the common place between content and container.

– FICTION–connecting the fragment: The importance of the fictional landscape as a continuum only understood while moving, from one fragment to another. There is already a degree of interpretation while taking the photo. Giving it a name or categorizing it is already a huge step, one which involves the use of metaphor.

– An articulation of the gaze.

– Multiple viewpoints in the same frame–spatial arrangement of object and viewer. Multiple viewpoints in different times —different moments of observation (Marcel Duchamp's ‘Nude Descending a Staircase’).

– Stretching the void. The cavity of the tombs in parallel to the void of the lungs when empty. Breathing in and breathing out briefly. Stretching the breath. On the uphill path take a deep inhalation, hold the air in your lungs and start walking. Try to hold your breath and stretch the holding time for as long as you can. When you cannot hold any longer, gradually start to exhale prolonging the exhalation for as long as you can.

– KEEP UP ON THE WALK: I’m a fast walker and usually I’m always ahead of others, stopping to wait for them, turning to check if they are keeping up. Today’s walk is no exception, I’m tending at you every now and then, checking you’re doing all right, even if we are not on the same pace.

– BREAK A LEG: on another Friday, the first Friday I did this walk with participants and friends, an ex-boyfriend wished me to break a leg replying on a post I’d done earlier. The post was accompanied by a photo juxtaposition of landscape and myself. It wrote: Keep up on the walk. Those two phrases summarize the story of our walks. He would always walk his own pace behind me and I would check if he’s keeping up. On another occasion I literally broke my leg rushing to meet him.

– Walking by definition means one foot is always in contact with the ground you’re stepping on.

– Running is an accelerated walking and the gain of speed lifts the body momentarily up in the air disconnecting it for a fracture of a second from the terrain. A discontinued contact with the earth.

– Like the flipped stop motion images by Muybridge, running sets collected fragments, images, stories, thoughts and new ideas into motion.

Mentors: Lenio Kaklea, Dimitris Theodoropoulos