Workshop
2022/2023/2024 Ongoing
The residency caters to artists of all disciplines, but with a focus on actors and performers. It takes place in Vikos-Aoos National UNESCO geopark where the residents attend daily workshops.
This workshop explores performing in public spaces, treating them as living, breathing theaters. Rather than staging the environment, we allow it to shape our presence, exploring what it means to perform in "alive" spaces—places that exist before we encounter them and continue evolving after we leave. We consider *arrival* as both literal and metaphorical, questioning whether a performance starts when we arrive or if arrival itself is part of the act.
Through improvisational exercises and kinesthetic mapping, we explore the body as a dynamic instrument in dialogue with its surroundings. We examine how a space’s history—its past and projected future—invites or excludes us. This workshop invites us to move beyond the stage, adapt, reflect, and transform, developing a heightened awareness of the body's interaction with place. By the end, participants will have challenged traditional notions of stage, performer, and audience, fostering an adaptive approach to site-specific performance.
An imagined place, a crease in the continuity of distance?
How do you connect with something deemed a thing for eons, even as eons are alive in its very material?
How do you feel its rhythm, its time signature—a different baseline?
‘Let your imagination change what you know.
You are all different, with different experiences therefore your experience of the space wil be different.
I insert my body into the visual field (tracing the horizon with my hand) and literally slicing the horizon line in a large–scale projection.
These strategies invite an embodied, subjective experience of place into the work—one that goes beyond the visual apprehension of landscape, bringing awareness to the body and its proximal relationship and connection with place.
*OYL has been active in Greece since 2007 with the unique, at a global level, residency program that takes place every year in Zagorochoria. In this program, emerging performers from the USA and other countries attend a variety of theatre seminars by members of the members of the group and its artistic partners. During the program the English-speaking residents are trained and perform in a Greek-language performance, based on an original greek text created specifically for the needs of the programme.
The performance is presented on tour in various villages of the region completely free of charge as an offer and a gift to the local residents, most of them elderly, for their hospitality.
The aim of the residency is to bring performers in contact with different ancient theatrical traditions.