profile
Hello! I am an interdisciplinary dance artist and architect passionate about creating space through the body’s movement in performance. Fascinated by the unique ways the body interacts with the spaces it performs in, my choreographic practice sits on movement experimentation, spatial storytelling, collaboration, and reflexive practice. So far, it includes dance, physical theatre, site-specific, physical documentation, and screendance works.
Intrigued by themes of inner flow and structure, social interaction, self-transformation and change, my choreographic practice discusses achieving flow within society’s systematic structures and finding freedom from socially constructed narratives. I am currently making a new work, titled ‘It’s Time’, exploring the body’s experience of time as socially constructed, politically manipulated and place-oriented. In my PhD research, I am developing an interdisciplinary embodied practice that aims at helping performers and directors unpack dramaturgical structure through the use of architectural concepts and tools. As a tutor of different disciplines (e.g. dance, drawing), I specialise in teaching how to find flow in technical training and the poetics of spatial expression in improvisation.
I live and work in Aberdeen, creating, performing, and teaching for diverse groups, ages, and abilities, including over-60s groups.
background
Sofia Kondylia is a contemporary dance artist and artist-researcher specialising in space creation through the body in performance. Her work expands on the versatile intersections between performance and architecture as per the realisation that movement creates dramaturgical space in performance.
After completing her dance and architecture studies in Athens, Greece (BA in Dance and Dance Pedagogy from Rallou Manou Higher Professional Dance School, MA in Architectural Engineering from the National Technical University of Athens), she travelled to Arnhem, the Netherlands, to gain her Master in Performance Practices and Artistic Research from ArtEZ University of the Arts. Her further training includes a variety of international dance (e.g., Rootlessroot), physical theatre (e.g., Peeping Tom), floor acrobatics (e.g., Kennan Dikelman) and Pilates (Ellie Herman) workshops, as well as arts management, organisation, and dance and visual arts pedagogy training (Segni Mossi). She is currently pursuing a part-time, practice-based PhD in Drama and Theatre Arts at the University of Birmingham, with a focus on actor training, physical dramaturgy, and architecture.
Working between live performance, site-specific and screendance, Sofia uses dance as a dynamic spatiotemporal language narrating corporeal stories about social interaction, inner conflict, and self-transformation. Linear storytelling and characterisation have been the central dramaturgical elements of her abstract work (“Happy Together”/2021, “Asleep”/2021, 2018, “The Square”, “Squared”/2019-2020, “BodIS”/2019, “Human Constructions”/2016-2017, “Between Me”/2015). Her practice-as-research projects, “Architecture + Dance” and “Performing Geometries”, delve into the emotional and kinaesthetic interpretation of space, resulting in several dance productions, an ongoing physical documentation and dance notation research (“Pictographic Glyphs”), as well as a series of performance workshops (“Architecture + Dance”), lectures, and artist presentations.
Her work has known international representation (Scotland, Greece, Italy, Cyprus, Sweden, The Netherlands, California, Argentina) through festivals, theatres, museums and other art organisations and conferences, awarded with international residencies (Citymoves/UK, PAF/FR, Megaron the Athens Concert Hall /GR, Duncan Dance Centre/GR, Hydra Animart 2019/GR, Egomio Cultural Centre/CY), funding (NEON, Region of Attica, Greek Physica Association), an international distinction (Human Constructions, 2016) and an honorary museum exhibition (G. Gounaropoulos museum, 2021) in Greece.
Sofia Kondylia 