Silent Revival team blog

Wednesday 21 October 2009

Welcome

Welcome to the Silent Revival Open Space Blog. This will be our ideas board for project proposals, links, thoughts and suggestions. Please feel free to make use of this space before, during and after the workshop.

Tuesday 13 October 2009

the new Silent Revival blog

The Silent Revival blog for team members is live!

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Bambo Soyinka

I am a film director, multimedia artist and narrative programmer. Narrative programming is a centuries old craft that involves creating stories that unfold through physical locations, paintings, sculptural works and passion plays. I have been inspired by this tradition to create narrative experiences that span contemporary creative platforms including film, art galleries, new media and theatre. I have also produced cross-platform works for main stream television stations, including the BBC and Channel 4.

Eirini Alexiou

I am a choreographer / dancer based in Athens. I am a founding member of “ohi pezoume performing arts company”, a non-profit collective of artists supported by the Ministry of Culture and the Ministry of Education and Cultural Affairs, that sheds light on the less known or salient personalities and spaces involved in the recent cultural heritage of cities in Greece. Our productions are site-specific and give simultaneous emphasis to all aspects of performing arts. My work explores the collaboration of dance with video, theatre and visual arts in the narration of old stories attached to the sites we visit. My work employs modern perspectives to “nostalgia” and “mneme” (memory), seeking the ties between the cultural fabric of yesterday with that of tomorrow. Ballet and its contemporary transmutation is often the basis of my choreography, both in “ohi pezoume” and in my freelance collaborations (Athens Concert Hall, Athens & Epidaurus Festival, regular collaborator of National Theatre of Greece).

Sean Harris

In 2005, as a result of a Creative Wales Award from the Arts Council of Wales, I made my first animated film Hela’r Twrch Trwyth (Hunting the Twrch Trwyth). As part of the indigenous oral storytelling tradition, this fragment of Culhwch ac Olwen dates back to the Iron Age. For many years a printmaker, I had found my images tended to assemble themselves into narrative sequences – like storyboards. So, it seemed a perfectly logical step to start cutting up my collagraph prints and make them move.

I was particularly interested in the way that the story is so geographically specific. You can trace the route of the hunt with thousand year old text in one hand and modern map in the other. The story also seemed to me to have much in common with the heroic epics of Homer.

This spirit – and sense of place – are central to my work.

Veneta Hristova

My key area of expertise is contemporary dance techniques: contact improvisation, release technique and body mind centering. In addition, I completed a four-year course of pantomime, the core of non-verbal storytelling. This really broadened my perspectives and creativity regarding dance. Dancing to me is just like the great choreographer Pina Bausch said “as natural as my own skin”. Dance is non-verbal communication. I can contribute to the Silent Revival project with my experience and skills in body work and the techniques which humans use to communicate through every part of their body.

Lyndon Ives

I was born in Caerphilly, Wales in 1974. As a screenwriter and director I have so far made three short films and am currently seeking finance for a feature scheduled to shoot next year, as well as developing a slate of others. My personal vision is one that combines strong character based stories with hyper real, almost absurd situations or environments to touch upon serious issues or themes. Indeed, my the interest in the Silent Revival scheme stems from my first short being silent and I’m greatly influenced by filmmakers who were students and/or practitioners of silent cinema. I also believe greatly in collaboration and teamwork, and hope that the combining skills and talents on this scheme will deliver some very interesting results.

Nick Jones

I am primarily a composer/ creater of new music. I have been writing music for theatre, television, dance, childrens projects, and for bands and ensembles for over 20 years. Over the past four years I have been writing for and leading a choir in Borth, Wales where I live. This has led to me having a particular interest in using the voice where I would have previously used instruments. Having said that, I am a musician, and have a competence in a number of instruments, acoustic and electronic, and will never rule out the use of anything which is appropriate to the task. I am also very comfortable with the use of samplers and sequencing, and have personal experience of using software for recording and production. I have always been fascinated by the effects obtained by laying music and soundscapes over visual imagery, especially since I made a super 8 film collage and recorded music for it when I was 20 years old.

Apostolos Kalogiannis

Apostolos Kalogiannis is 31 years old and lives in Athens. His main interests academically and professionally are moving images and sound processing. In 2008 he completed his MA Cultural Studies and in his dissertation introduced the concept of double writing, a methodology of visual philosophy used in conjunction with current cultural and social affairs. It is a methodology of self expression which combines academic writings with the hands on use of digital moving images to incorporate and rephrase in a creative manner the properties of the problems this methodology attempts to address. Part of this project involves digital video and digital sound processing and sculpting. What motivated him to participate in the Silent Revival project was the prospect of a cross cultural collaboration on the basis of a high awareness of the symbolic power of image and sound, either by their presence or by their absence.

Michalis Kokkoliadis

Michalis is originally from Greece, but for the last 10 years has been based in London where he lives and work as a Theatre Designer\3D Visual Artist. As well as set and costume designs, he also does time-based media installations, sculpting and prop making.
Michalis has designed a diverse range of live shows form classical theatre, touring, musicals and opera to site-specific and dance. His criterion for spectacle is sensory enchantment aiming to evoke simultaneously the human psyche and mind where their collaboration would bring about a harmonious, unified understanding of the experience.
During recent years he has been researching for a mapping exercise of how existing performance practices are responding to the multicultural and multiethnic profile of the contemporary world

Harry Lagoussis

Harry Lagoussis is a filmmaker and cartoonist based in Athens, Greece. His short films and videos include works for The Residents’ Commercial Album DVD (2004) and the Abbas Kiarostami Film Workshop in London (2005), and in 2008 his video art was featured at the XIII Biennale of Young Artists from Europe and the Mediterranean in Puglia. His comics have been published in various international anthologies and exhibited in Greece and abroad. He is a co-founder of inkPRESS, a publishing effort focused on translating great works of the international comics scene in Greek, and also works as an illustrator, animator and web designer.

Vartan Maroukian

Vartan Maroukian has a BA in Film & TV Studies from Brunel University and has worked in the Greek TV industry, mainly with the state broadcaster ERT, as Assistant Director, a production assistant and as a music selection supervisor. He has participated in the making of documentaries (some shot on film, a rarity nowadays in Greek TV) and was Assistant Director, and occasional segment director, on more than 130 episodes of the weekly cultural programme "Images from Greece" for Cypriot state TV RIK.

Vartan was also involved, from the planning stages onwards, as a translator/ production assistant, with the live broadcast show "24 heures à Athenes, ça me dit!", produced for French satellite TV channel TV5 in 2001. He is used to working with people from different countries/ cultures and his personal vision is to create, to innovate and to contribute to world culture, especially film, as much as possible.

Rossen Mihailov

I have worked throughout Bulgaria and abroad as a dancer, teacher and choreographer for the last 19 years. Recently I finished a Film Directing and Screenwriting course at the New Bulgarian University. Creating a narrative based on physical action and using the body as a media of narration has always interested me as an artist working in fields of dance – and silent and non-verbal art forms. How can we impress and touch the audience just using the timing and expression of movements of human body? The language of the silent films is as universal as the language of dance. Another challenging aspect for me in working with silent but visual media is how to be narrative without being illustrative, literal and obvious?

Zhana Pencheva

I am a dance artist who graduated at NBU, Sofia in 2007 in dance and theatre. I am a member of OHG Innovations (Organization for Contemporary Art) and from 2007 until 2009 was a dancer in the Dune dance company. In 2009 I became a scholarship student at the Nomad dance academy. Recent activities include the dance performances “Glass of Love” and “His Favorite Songs” and “The Factory”, a future video dance project.

I'm inspired by people, love, the sea, motion, energy, feelings and emotions. Through my work I aim to communicate with and without words and to ask: How can you be sufficently clear and powerful using the body? How can you bring the body to extremities. Is expression of the body enough? How should we communicate with other bodies, audiences and words.

Moni Sheehan

I am half British and half Bulgarian and director of and storyteller/performer with A Spell In Time, a unique British Bulgarian performing arts group. We present tales from Bulgarian myth and folklore in English to UK audiences through a mix of traditional storytelling, ritual, music and singing. Our aim is to make Bulgarian material accessible across cultures through integrating different artistic forms and modes of expression. My interest in Silent Revival stems from my interest in stories that stir the mythic imagination, that tap into the source of being and thus have the capacity to transform our relationship to the world. My main area is traditional story and mythology but I also trained as a dancer and currently sing with the London Bulgarian Choir.

Momchil Tsonev

Momchil Tsonev was born in 1983. He has a bachelor degree in journalism and is about to graduate from the MA Arts and Contemporary Times (20th-21th Century) at Sofia University. His professional activities include art studies, literature, film reviews and visual arts, but his key area of expertise is literature and collaboration between literature and other arts and media forms.
He won a literary competition in 2007 and the Hermes Publishing House recently published his first book, “Homo Pseudo. Pseudo-ethics of tea with biscuits” - a conceptual hybrid of poetry, short stories, art manifestos and political constitutions of false states. His second literary project, entitled “Multimedia Novel”, was made in collaboration with French-Bulgarian painter Nikolay Panayotov, White School Foundation and "The fabriC” Regional Cultural Resource Center. “Multimedia Novel” is the first multimedia novel in Bulgaria and combines differing forms (text, audio, photos, paintings, short movies, schemes, tables, etc.) to tell a story.

Tina Walker

I am a freelance screenwriter and multimedia designer. I write episodes for the BBC drama 'Doctors' as well as features and short films. As a multimedia designer I have developed interactive audio-visual training materials, marketing tools and system simulations for banking and telecommunications companies. In addition to my writing career, I run workshops on screenwriting. Most recently I have helped a local youth group to develop and script three short films. I'm keen to explore creativity in all its forms and to help others explore and enjoy their own creative talents.