DOURGOUTI ISLAND HOTEL PERFORMANCE 2015 | PERFORMATIVE REPORT BY KATERINA KOKKINOS-KENNEDY
By UrbanDig Project
All photos by Irina Vosgerau
“Dourgouti seems to have so many faces and moods as a community. Part of me worries that it will be ‘discovered’ and gentrified. But places are like people: they are born, change, grow old, and die. Only to be reborn again, in new ways.“
Triage Live Art Collective artistic director: Katerina Kokkinos-Kennedy talks about her interaction with Dourgouti neighbourhood of Neos Kosmos.
Hotel Obscura is a four country collaboration project between Australia, Austria, France and Greece. The project was initiated by Triage Live Art Collective's artistic director Katerina Kokkinos-Kennedy in 2013 and was funded by Creative Europe for two years (2014-2016).
The Athens project, Dourgouti Island Hotel was developed by George Sachinis and Eirini Alexiou of Ohi Pezoume (Urban Dig Project). Dourgouti Island Hotel is currently being presented in Dourgouti (a suburb of central Athens) in the final two weeks of October 2015. The project has developed three site-specific performance routes (Pegasus, Isithus and Proteas) using community stories and historical facts about the local area. More than forty artists have contributed works to the overall DIH festival. Guest artists of the project include Katrin Wölger (Austria), Pauline Huguet (France), and Katerina Kokkinos-Kennedy (Australia).
For the final presentation Katerina (of Triage) was invited to work with six local performers to develop a suite of participatory live art works for sites on the Dourgouti routes. The six artists were: Agapi Douska, Nancy Boukli, Katerina Protonotariou, Stefania Kalomoiri, Anna Chanioti, and Katerina Chalkou.
In the live art workshop each artist developed a site-specific work with teacher and dramaturge Kokkinos-Kennedy. Within each of the live art works the audience's role is central and the work is often built upon a series of contingencies that give the audience a great deal of freedom in terms of expressing themselves through the encounter and dialogue with the performer. In this context the performer is a facilitator of the audience's experience rather than an expert. Such works are often highly improvisational and require the performer to adapt to the needs and capacities of the audience.
The result of the workshop was six one-to-one live art works designed for spaces such as the foyer of the Intercontinental Hotel, an abandoned courtyard, a white hearse, and a rooftop terrace. The overall frame was an invitation to audiences (on the three routes) to engage with an intimate work in a highly specific setting. Each work aimed to investigate an aspect of Dourgouti via a highly personal and tailored participatory performance event with a specific theme and/or story at its heart. Themes ranged from eternal love, sacrifice, and torture, to lucky escapes, and final journeys.
About Katerina:
Katerina Kokkinos-Kennedy is the artistic director of Triage Live Art Collective a performance company based in Australia and Germany. Triage are at the forefront of live art and innovative practice as makers and curators of intimate works which are playful, confronting and audience-centred. Katerina initiated the Hotel Obscura project in 2012 and it was funded by Creative Europe (2014-2016) with partners in Austria, France & Greece. She has artistically led the project and will direct the final performance for the Festival of Live Art (FOLA) in Melbourne, March 2016. She is currently developing two large-scale works with partners in Australia and the EU.