Alkmini Damianakou
she/her
Maker, Scenographer, Researcher
alk.dam@outlook.com, +306999273753
https://www.researchcatalogue.net/view/2708116/2708117
Annual Course in Theatre Design and Scenography October 2021-July 2022, Annual Course in Performance Design October 2022 – July 2023
Interior architecture graduate (UWA, Athens, Greece) with a fascination that led her towards Theatre Design and Scenography, starting with the Practical Scenography Workshop organized by David Negrin, at the theatre academy of Katapacti. After a very interesting collaboration with the scenographer, as his assistant during the theatrical production of Alimono stous Neous in 2019, and with the suspension of theatre performances due to COVID19, she explored the opportunity to expand her knowledge on scenography through the annual courses of Theatre Design and later Performance Design in LSA. With LSA she participated in the Greek student’s contribution to PQ23, a process that shifted her focus towards artistic research as a scenographic practice. With this new direction and the valuable help of LSA and Maria Chaniotaki, she was accepted to the HKU Master of Scenography in Utrecht, Netherlands, starting a new course towards an artistic research practice around expanded scenography.
During the annual course of Theatre Design I worked on Aeschylus’ tragedy, Prometheus Bound. Some historians attribute its creation between 479 and 424 BC and it is based on the myth of Prometheus, the Titan who stole the fire from mount Olympus to give it to mankind. For this act the Olympian Gods chained him on mount Caucasus and cursed him of eternal torture. It is believed to be the first tragedy of a trilogy that Aeschylus had written. In the text we view Prometheus strength to stand across Zeus and refuse to surrender his beliefs, deciding to withstand the torturous punishment. An ancient greek tragedy full of mythological creatures, gods and personifications of concepts, that deals with the relationship between god and man, power and progress.I positioned my proposal in the patio of the old Bageion Hotel in the center of Athens, a space used for performances but not a designed theatrical space. The reason for this choice was my inquiry around how could this non-theatrical space be used as an element of the performance rather than a background to it?
“The closed house” is an experience I created during my master in HKU in the Netherlands at a point where my artistic research was taking me into a journey through time, archives of stories and memories of displacement routes. I created a narrative around a closed house in my neighborhood in Utrecht, in an attempt to address it through three different lenses: the actual history of the house, the stories I encountered and my personal story. Joggling with past and present but also memories of other places projected in a new one, the three stories were a way to talk about the fluidity of memory; on the verge between reality and fiction, and the different layers of perception of the passing of time. All three stories were collected in a handcrafted book that guided the experience. In it the stories developed like fragments, with gaps and spaces between the words and phrases, an unconscious attempt towards directing the pauses and the flow of time through the experience. The audience was introduced to the book in a small talk before the performance. Then, the participants were invited to form pairs of two, each pair was given a book and was guided to two seats positioned in front of the closed house. “Share the stories with the person next to you, the space around and in front of you, and you”, was the score. In each pair there was a reader and a listener, one would read out loud to the other, and they could switch roles at any time.