The Performance Works of Lia Haraki
After a year of organizing choreographer Lia Haraki’s private archive collection, we are glad to announce that we are curating a book about the twenty years of creation and performance works found in the collection. The book includes descriptions, views, reviews, expert essays and images of fifty performance works categorized according to the artist's focus at the time and to give an overview of Lia Haraki’s body of work. Performance works are featured in sections with different themes beginning with a focus on her Early Works, on themes of Biography, Movement Energy, The case of the Performance Shop, Interactive, Site-specific and Participatory works, Sound-based, with Devised text, works made for children, commissioned works, and a detailed archive-based index.
The book features reflections, texts, and essays from close collaborators and scholars, including (in alphabetical order) dramaturge Cathryn Robson, Erica Charalambous, Guy Cools, Louiza Papaloizou, Steriani Tzintziloni, Vasilia Anaxagorou, Yiannis Papadakis, Yiannis Toumazis, and Lia Haraki. The images were curated by Pavlos Vrionides.
Editor’s note
Working with Lia in preparation for her book has been a very rewarding experience. It is a huge challenge to reflect on one’s body of work, decide what to keep and what to let go of and define the shape of one’s artistic oeuvre. I am enjoying every moment and every discussion we have had to form and shape this book, as it brings to the surface deep-seated enquiries and explorations about dance archiving and dance performance-related conundrums. This book offers insight into Lia’s work, the themes and narratives that she has been busy with through the years, the impact, effect and affordances of her work in the broader community and the development of diverse themes and narratives with her peers. Furthermore, I appreciated the emphasis Lia gives to the many relationships and artistic networks that she has nourished through her collaborations which add to the ever-growing dance and performance communities in Cyprus. Moreover, the book forms a blueprint and future example for dance documentation and alternative archival approaches to writing about contemporary dance and performance in Cyprus.
Erica Charalambous
In her 20-year-long career, Lia has reinvented herself often and created a diversity of practices that she both integrated into her own choreographic toolkit and shared with the professional community in workshops and recently also with her audiences in different interactive presentation formats....But in all these transformations Lia went through, two elements remain at the core from beginning to end: giving voice to the multitude of personalities within herself and within society and practicing the body as a musical instrument. As such her recent work has become more and more musical and she has added a category of sound works to her rich and diverse repertoire such as Vessel - The Mantras Room (2023).
Guy Cools
Editor’s note
‘’…Idealist for having envisioned a future for dance and dance artists in Limassol and in Cyprus. Idealist for searching for her own ‘truth’ as an artist, for new sensibilities. Idealist in believing in art as a social practice and in dance as a vehicle for spiritual, social and personal empowerment.’’
Steriani Tzitsiloni
‘’It often becomes hard to grasp but, in a broader sense, opens up what it means to perform the Self in its complexity, ambiguity, and abstraction. Haraki’s commitment to performance and the biographical becomes a vital aspect of contextualising performance art in Cyprus, mainly as she embodies the true essence of the personal that becomes political through an entry into feminist thought as she attests how her life and lived theory can be situated as an experience for the next generation of performers on the island. The ability to be open, without jargon, is a critical approach to the politics of everyday life, and perhaps now, more than ever, becomes a necessity of time, considering how vastly Cyprus's political and social situatedness is based on structural (among other) inequalities.’’
Vasilia Anaxagorou
Make it stand out
‘’Voice is a powerful and probing currency for Haraki. In my capacity as vocal coach and advisor, I know that whatever I offer her, be it a breath exercise, a vocal resonance or a chain of vowels, she will spin it into gold and make meaning and the meaningful out of it. Something honest, bold and disquieting comes into being through the alchemy that happens when Lia Haraki meets voice.’’
Cathryn Robson