Urban Bodies, Rural Minds
A Performative Exploration of Embodied Terrains
Urban Bodies, Rural Minds: A Performative Exploration of Embodied Terrains is a movement-based exploration of the shifting relationship between body, place, and identity. Inspired by psychogeography, the piece examines how environments shape emotions and behavior, focusing on the interplay between urban and rural landscapes and the bodies that inhabit them.
It began to take form in the summer of 2023 in Papigo, Greece, where the American theatre company OYL I work with has been visiting the small village every summer for over 20 years, creating works of original theatre with American artists and students for villages in the region. While there, I noticed the overwhelming presence of temporary residents, and the ways in which they navigated relationships with the locals, the architecture of the villages, and the surrounding nature of the Vikos Aiös National Park.
It began to take form in the summer of 2023 in Papigo, Greece, where the American theatre company OYL I work with has been visiting the small village every summer for over 20 years, creating works of original theatre with American artists and students for villages in the region. While there, I noticed the overwhelming presence of temporary residents, and the ways in which they navigated relationships with the locals, the architecture of the villages, and the surrounding nature of the Vikos Aiös National Park.
The piece invited some of the performers, the temporary visitors, to play with the space and explore how they interact with it and with the long-standing residents; continuously negotiate space and belonging. Merging the corporeal with the landscape, it explored coexistence and transformation—how the human form assimilates into terrain, how identity is altered by place, and how embodied memory lingers within shifting environments.
Performed for the local community, Urban Bodies, Rural Minds invited an intimate reflection on the entanglement of self, space, and the evolving narratives of presence.
Performed for the local community, Urban Bodies, Rural Minds invited an intimate reflection on the entanglement of self, space, and the evolving narratives of presence.
The research was shared with the residents and performed through movement/stillness focusing on the alteration that is caused to the body/identity while inhibiting the landscape of the rural villages in a piece titled: “Urban Bodies, Rural Minds: A Performative Exploration of Embodied Terrains”.