artistic statement
“Hi! I am a choreographer, performer, and architect interested in how movement creates space in performance. In my research, I explore the unique ways the inner world of a body occupies, transforms, and creates the performance space by being and moving in it.
The core of my work lies in movement experimentation and storytelling, expanding through dance, physical theatre, site-specific performance, and screendance work. In my choreographies, the body is the mind, and vice versa. I am dancing to express, act, connect, and provoke. Also, to listen, learn, reflect, and change. So far, I have been creating work about internal and external psychic conflict, exploring ecologies of learning, self-transformation, and social awareness.
In my cross-disciplinary research, I bring the practice of architecture (as in theorising, conceiving and designing the space) into movement-based performance-making devising an original dance/architecture practice on performance creation and character development”.
aRTISTIC background
Sofia Kondylia (she/her) is a choreographer, performer, masterclass/workshop leader and architect. Her work expands on the versatile intersections between choreography and architecture, through dance, performance, physical theatre and screendance work since 2015. Motivated by the fact that movement creates space, she uses dance as a dynamic spatiotemporal language to narrate corporeal stories about internal and external psychic conflict, social interaction, and self-transformation.
In her works, linear storytelling and character development have been central choreographic elements of the abstract nature of her dances (“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 13 dance productions, an ongoing dance notation research (“Pictographic Glyphs”), a series of workshops (“Architecture + Dance”, “Spatial Flow”, “Dancing with an Object”), as well as lectures and artist presentations. Her work has toured internationally (Scotland, Greece, Italy, Cyprus, Sweden, The Netherlands, California, Argentina) through numerous artistic residencies (Citymoves/UK, PAF/FR, Megaron the Athens Concert Hall /GR, Duncan Dance Centre/GR, Hydra Animart 2019/GR, Egomio Cultural Centre/CY), festivals, and conferences. She has been awarded governmental, as well as private funding and international awards, as well as an honorary museum exhibition in 2021 in Greece.
She holds an MA in Performance Practices from ArtEZ University of the Arts (Arnhem, The Netherlands), and an MA in Architectural Engineering and a BA in Dance (Athens, Greece). Her further training includes a variety of international dance, physical theatre, floor acrobatics and Pilates workshops, as well as cultural arts management and dance pedagogy training. She currently lives and works in Aberdeen, Scotland.
Sofia Kondylia 