LONDON BUTOH FESTIVAL

Further Information – Ephia Djalma Primordial Science Workshop

Sat 31 Oct – Sun 1 Nov    10am – 5pm      £95/£85 conc.

Bookings:  www.thecourtyard.org.uk or Telephone +44(0)870 163 0717

The Workshop

The Secret Life of Matter: An encounter of body and object

We begin with a rigorous warm-up, unleashing the body’s energy reserves and moving this charge through the collective body of the group. Our practice continues with solo, partner, and group exercises exploring the relation of body and object. Opening our perceptions, we seek a cycle of reciprocity: our interior breathes life into inert matter, inert matter gives impulsions to our deepest interior.

We begin to look closely, to fall into the matter, to be involved, to be enveloped, to lack a point of view, to not know, to feel.

The cohesive force between the molecules of a drop of water is the principle of the identity of our human body. This matter that composes us and surrounds us has a unique intelligence: a way to express itself, a facility for adaptation, responsiveness, a memory. 

Rational beings that we are, we have the tendency to organize matter into two camps: the inert and the living. Often, the living plays with the inert, never imagining a possible sensitivity on their part. Never imagining that the inert could borrow the human body to fulfil its own desires. Hijikata Tatsumi awoke early one morning with a compulsion to bring a wooden spoon into the field to show it the colours of the sky. Yes! The raspy creaking voice of matter calls us. The marionnettiste listens. She listens with her body to the secret life of matter and amplifies this force. This dancing matter becomes a vehicle for our awakening, a prosthesis for our sensations, a poetic extension of our bodies.

I dance, I am marionnettiste. My marionnette: the currents of air.

Ephia www.djalma.com

A dream of voluntary regression, our dance is not simply through space, but through states of being.

About the Artist

Ephia studied dance with Min Tanaka, Kazuo Ohno, Anzu Furukawa, and Akira Kasai in Japan. Following her interest in ritual dance, she travelled to study under renowned teachers in Ghana, Java and Bali. She holds a BFA in dance from Columbia University, New York City. She danced in the company of the late Anzu Furukawa in Berlin, appearing in Furukawa’s final production, GOYA: La Quinta del Sordo. In 1998, she co-founded Djalma Primordial Science (www.djalma.com), a performative and pedagogical collaboration with electro-acoustic musician Jeff Gburek. From within this partnership of listening, she focused her dance on the instability of the body and its relationship to the environment: her dancing body becomes a prosthesis for the viewer to discover the space that surrounds and composes us. Mirrorminded Curiousitease, her production, which adapts Finnegans Wake and examines the relation between author James Joyce and his schizophrenic daughter Lucia, premiered in Germany in 2006, toured France the following year with the support of the Conseil Generale d' Aveyron, and was presented in 2008 at UNIDRAM 15, Festival for New Theater in Europe (Potsdam). Since 2002, she leads annual land-workshops in the desert of New Mexico, INTEGRATING WITH/ DISINTEGRATING INTO THE LAND, and in the south of France, LE CORPS: sens dedans dehors. In 2007, she was an artist-in-residence with company SCOLOPENDRE at RAMDAM (St. Foy-Les-Lyon) developing a unique approach to visual theater, centered on the use of light and shadow. In 2008, she joins the improvisation group Collectif Ishtar and begins a new creation entitled “CONTRE-IMAGE” currently in residence at CCN Rillieux-la-Pape, Company Maguy Marin, MICADANSE, and Atelier Carolyn Carlson in Paris.