profile
Hello! I am a dance artist passionate about the art of creating space through the body’s movement in performance. Always fascinated by the unique ways the human body inhabits, transforms, and reinvents the space it performs in, my choreographic practice stands on movement experimentation and storytelling. Intrigued by themes of inner flow and structure, internal conflict and social interaction, self-transformation and change, my work expands through dance, physical theatre, site-specific, and screendance. In my research, I explore dramaturgical creation as a virtual space creation process, striving to conceive and architect dramaturgy as a functional fictive space, communicating concepts and emotions primarily through body movement and expanded choreography. In my teaching, I specialise in helping individuals and groups tap into their bodies’ creative potential to find flow in space while dancing. Currently, I am collaborating with emerging writer Eleni Mloukie on a new project called Dance Woman. I live and work in Aberdeen and teach a broad range of dance classes to a mixture of ages and abilities.
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).
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 