Anna Tzakou
Department: Drama
Discipline: Drama
Research Centre/Unit: Perfromance Practice
Project Summary
I am interested in the somatic stories inherently held by the land; being nurtured as our ‘living myths’ (Halprin, 2005) of self and other, home and belongingness. I have been developing performance scores to create participatory experiences of the body-landscape togetherness. Based on Buddhist practice of samatha vipassana I have been elaborating a body-landscape performance practice organised as a discipline of attunement and actualization. The discipline of attunement trains the practitioner to perceive landscape experientially. The discipline of actualization structures the findings of the embodied landscape into a performance narrative score of care, relatedness and meaning. The practice is called Geopoetics. ‘Geo’ comes from the Greek ‘-γεω’, which means ‘coming from earth’. ‘Poetics’ derives from the word ‘ποιητική’, the practice for creating an artistic product. I have been elaborating a Buddhist inspired site-specific performance practice affiliating cultural geography with Mahayanian Buddhism; practicing the body-landscape interrelationship through movement and theatre disciplines focused on Anna Halprin’ s notions of living myths and rituals, Grotowksi’s Paratheatre principles and samatha vipassana movement practices. I have been investigating a body-landscape performance praxis with the interest to examine narratives of identity, home and belongingness in contemporary Greece; conducting and facilitating performance residencies in rural environments.
Supervisory Team
Supervisor 1 Jerri Daboo J.J.Daboo@exeter.ac.uk Supervisor 2 Sarah Goldingay S.J.Goldingay@exeter.ac.uk Research Mentor Bryce Lease B.S.Lease@exeter.ac.uk
Wider Research Interests
Movement as perception
Discipline of attunement; meditation as movement
Direct experience of space- the mandala principle
Devising through improvisation/ exploration
Non-linear horizontal theatre narration; the performance score
Body and space as a container for experiencing a body-landscape interrelationship; audience performance participation event
