On the occasion of the closing of the score Geography-Athens, 2017 by Annie Vigier & Franck Apertet (les gens d’Uterpan), a public conversation will take place between the dancers Stella Dimitrakopoulou, Emmanouela Pechynaki, Vasilios Skarmoutsos, and Nikos Kalivas, curator Pierre Bal-Blanc and Franck Apertet from les gens d’Uterpan.
Geography-Athens, 2017 is a score for a group of performers designed to take place within the spatial limitations of the place where it occurs. The performers are chosen from the country where the choreographic work is presented. The perimeter of the floor occupied by the performers’ movements determines the plan to build a structure (with the means and materials available in the space) that will contain the choreographic work. The presence or absence of the performers inside follows a rhythm that is not made public, and is only perceptible through the use of sound and vibrations caused by the dancers’ movements and displacements within the structure.
The event takes place on the 4th floor of EMST.
Geography-Athens, 2017, rehearsals at EMST, March 2017, photo: Franck Apertet
Annie Vigier & Franck Apertet, born respectively in 1965 and 1966, have been working out of Paris since 1994 under the name les gens d’Uterpan. They are choreographers who construct a critical dialogue between performance contexts, live spectacle systems, spaces, and plastic art practices. By intervening in different exhibition frameworks or adapting their work to them, they formulate new modalities of appearances, production, and interpretation of dance (les gens d’Uterpan term it the re|action process). Their interpretation of physical presence questions the positions occupied by both the spectator (Parterre, 2009) and the choreographer (Caster, 2009) in this process. Further, by initiating collaborations between cultural workers from different sectors, their approach also integrates economic structures as an artistic component of the work.
