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Aria Boubaki presented the world premiere of the work and we are not at the same place (a work in progress) at the Athens and Epidaurus Festival on 29 and 30 July 2016. From different countries and artistic backgrounds, the developers of this work, Aria Boubaki, Pauline Brun, Noga Golan and Calixto Neto, chose Athens as a meeting place and creative locus. The work is inspired by walking as a daily human movement, while members of the team wanted to get to know Greece and work here; a country they had dreamed of as a place which countless individuals have crossed.
The creative process and, above all the fact that choreographic decisions were taken by all four, soon shifted their centre of interest to migration, the dynamics of coming together, decision-making, manipulation and changing environments. The specific choice of on-stage action and the seating of spectators around the edge of the stage just a short distance from it, gradually eliminated the distance between them, leaving the audience greater freedom to participate in and connect with whatever was happening on stage.
The concept for the work belongs to all four creators. Aria Boubaki, Noga Golan and Calixto Neto were responsible for the choreography/performance; Pauline Brun for the set design. Music was composed and performed and soundscape devised by Konstantinos Skourlis. Eliza Alexandropoulou was lighting designer.
Aria Boubaki has collaborated as a dancer with the Lathos Kinisi (Wrong Move) Dance Company and with Konstantinos Michos, the Creo Dance Company and Paulina Kremasta, and has taught modern dance in dance studios and schools, such as the Duncan Centre and the Lathos Kinisi Collaborative Studio. She studied in France for two years at the Montpellier National Choreographic Centre as an Onassis Foundation scholar, on the ex.e.r.ce postgraduate choreography course. She met and was taught by leading lights from the field such as Simone Forti, Deborah Hay, Mathilde Monnier, Valérie Castan, Antonia Baehr and La Ribot, and soon began creating her own personal pieces.
She has staged her works at various festivals and dance centres abroad (National Choreographic Centre, CND Paris, Ufer_studios Berlin, Montpellier Dance Festival and the Uzès Dance Festival, among others). She has participated as a performer in works by others such as Caen Amour by Trajal Harrell at this year’s Avignon Festival. She taught modern dance and improvisation at various dance centres and studios, and has also been a speaker and guest teacher at university dance conferences, where she presented her theoretical research.
