Euclidean Space
Will Premiere at UMBRIA FACTORY FESTIVAL
in Cantiere Oberdan, Spoleto, Italy
23/09/2023 at 9.30 p.m.
24/09/2023 at 6.30 p.m. and at 9.30 p.m.

Choreography and installation design: Eden Wiseman
Dancers: Alma Maria Simon, Inbar Walter Kalfa & Eden Wiseman
Music: Rebonds B (1987-89) by Iannis Xenakis
Parts from Calla album (1999) and Low drums and guns Braeker (2021)
Costume design: Sara Wiseman & GROUND Movement fashion brand
Assistant director: Shai Cohen
Artistic consultant: Shiri Sabach Teicher
Produce by LaMaMa Umbria Internasional & ZUT
Supported by the Embassy of Israel in Rome

This project is a new version of the work “Xenakis 100,” a dance installation created for a museum space on the occasion of the 100th birth anniversary of architect and composer Iannis Xenakis last year. The language of the work is visual-architectural, making use of iron beams, wooden blocks, silicone thread, reflectors, and explores varying degrees of tension/laxity in materials relative to the body’s tonus and location in space. The installation draws references to the architectural works, sketches, musical compositions and life story of Xenakis.
Concept and choreographic approach:
The musical compositions generate a sense of friction between something violent, wild, and something held, clear, mathematical. Like the music, the choreography of the body, which wavers between two opposite planes, tries to find a way to exist in this conflict between gripping and letting go.
Xenakis’ works are versatile and very challenging. Some have elements of violence and aggression, which are explored by our bodies and movement on stage. Masculinity is a very dominant theme in his pieces, and a new layer of meaning has resulted in feeling and relaying this via female bodies. Throughout the performance, we treat the body like a tool of combat, and at times practice positions and ways of holding weapons, even if we aren’t actually holding them. In other parts, we surrender or become wounded in the face of weapons and combat from the outside. Finally, from underneath all these layers, gentleness, softness and great sensitivity are revealed.
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For every one of my projects, I begin the creative process with some material, accessory or installation, and these come to influence my body and movement. Working with material relaxes and grounds me. Sometimes I control it while other times I feel like I become it. A large part of the project involves trying to understand and feel what the material wants to say and how we as performers can bring this content to light.
The world of imagery created within artistic space provides a bridge into ourselves, through which in this work we grapple with the complexity of relationships, power dynamics, control, submission, desire, longing. What happens to us when we step out of ourselves and meet the world outside, the ground, society, life … Feelings of belonging as well as of alienation rise to the surface, feelings of coming together and dissolving, and every transition in between. down into chaos revealing a new possibility – or maybe chaos fashions a new kind of order in which we can experience an authentic meeting and encounter.
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At the start of the piece, we are together, ostensibly, but feel separate from each other. Throughout the work and our encounter, we undergo a transformation, starting with a clear shape but then we slowly break down and become material, liquid, dust and sound, making communication possible, as we ride the waves together. At times we work symbiotically while at others we confront a boundary – we learn to acknowledge it, move with it, break it, take some distance from it and then approach it, as it provides refuge, a strong hold on the familiar, existing and structured. We move between varying states of matter, sometimes in sync with each other and other times not, which creates a conflict that disrupts the pattern, clear boundaries break



