TEATROSKOP Dialogues with Athina Moraiti on movement, visibility and artistic process
As part of TEATROSKOP Dialogues, we meet Athina Moraiti, a dancer whose practice unfolds through research, collaboration and constant questioning of movement and identity. In this conversation, she reflects on artistic process, international exchange and the ways in which dance can open space for both personal and collective inquiry.
Your practice often develops through research and collaboration. What draws you to this way of working?
Once, one of my teachers told me, “You always need to enter a class as if you are researching”. I honestly cannot understand art without the elements of research and collaboration. I think of art, in any form, as the reclaiming of our experiences. To reclaim something, a feeling, a situation, a presence, I need to go beyond what is given. I need to deepen, deconstruct, and form again. I have to use the elements of research because they allow me to get closer to whatever I am doing, and perhaps this is what draws me to art. I find myself very vulnerable and simultaneously very strong in it.
Collaboration is also a way of researching for me, in the sense that I go further from what I knew since then. When you get in touch with other artists, you can observe their own ways of viewing and analyzing, and it can really change how you think as well. Even if you only observe their body language, you connect deeply to them. Art is honest, or at least it needs to be. You must be open, searching, and connecting, so that you can make something that moves.
How have international exchanges and residencies influenced your artistic language and the way you think about movement?
As I mentioned above, one of the most important aspects of art, if not the most important of all, is to dig into your experience. International contacts give you the opportunity to place yourself in different ways of viewing this experience. For me, they offered the space to share and collect multiple practices that I never knew before. I trained in physical theatre where we worked with the connection of movement and intention, met choreographers who involved us in their creative processes, and explored the use of voice, literature and photography in performance arts.
The practices of these artists were not only methodological or technical tools, but they also held significant perceptions of our bodies as expressive forms. To get in touch with the work that someone has been practicing and developing is something very emotional and essential for your own practice. It opened up a place that said, art is not only your previous professional training in techniques; it is something much bigger than what I know, than what we all know. For me, art needs to be unstable; it needs to come from a personal place but trouble us in a collective way.
What are you currently exploring in your work, and what questions are driving you at this moment?
I am currently developing a solo piece that negotiates the relation between visibility and identity. It is research on how we exist through our visibility or in fact, through our multiple visibility. I am exploring my body as a field of looking, where different gazes perform or sometimes, they are even requested. On the one hand, the creation process is very personal, and it opens a chaotic space of back-to-back representations, expectations, and behaviors. On the other hand, it is very interesting as it constantly reveals questions about our social and political reality.
Some of the questions that have come up concern the effect of images and control systems in the ways we imagine our bodies and thus, we behave. I feel that it is a very important issue, especially in an area where we are constantly exposed to different roles, models, spectacles, images, and technologies. What is the role of physicality in this visual culture? How oppressed or liberated do we feel about our visibility? Is visibility a relation we can possibly break?
Is there a film, piece of music or artist that has stayed with you and influenced the way you think about movement?
I believe that in every period there are different art forms and artists that influence me, depending on what I am interested in at the moment. But I should mention Marina Abramović, because she was an artist that I spent a lot of time thinking about. I was going to high school, and one person that I was really close to at a young age introduced me to her work. Abramović‘s art was something I have never seen before, and it was shocking, as it is probably meant to be.
It was not only the brutal or violent images (see Rhythm 0 or Balkan Baroque), but the fact that her art was so personal that it made it personal for you. It was something I could not forget or pass; it was true because it exposed me. It revealed trauma, but in a way, it could heal it as well. I think it was the first time I connected art to significant emotional and political matters, and so since then movement has become essential as a way of searching and reclaiming this world.
