“Hyperion – Higher States Part 2” Antibodies/Kiriakos Hadjiioannou
June Johnson Dance Prize 2017
Following “Mysterion” (2016), “Hyperion” is the second in the Antibodies company’s “Higher States” series on altered consciousness. The work, which premieres at the Mousonturm in Frankfurt in November 2017, is created by Kiriakos Hadjiioannou together with Fabrice Mazliah. They are joined in their minimalist dance and music performance by Tamara Bacci and Nancy Stamatopoulou. Taking its cue from Friedrich Hölderlin’s eponymous 1799 epistolary novel, “Hyperion” deals with human communication and our ties to other people, and is a close collaboration with Ensemble Modern, who provide the accompaniment. At its heart is the exchange of letters between Hyperion and Diotima: an attempt to achieve mutual understanding across distance and express feelings through the code of language. The pair communicate in a made-up idiom, employing a code that combines phonetic and gestural signs. The performance follows its own internal logic, leaving the audience to find their own way around the communicative situation. Two further entries in the “Higher States” series are in the pipeline: “Erotikon” for 2018 and “Pharmakon” for 2019.
Kiriakos Hadjiioannou was born in Greece in 1979 and studied dance at the State School of Dance in Athens, followed by applied theatre science / choreography and performance at the University of Giessen. He now lives in Basel. He is interested in exploring current developments in the visual, performing and performative arts: questions of communication, specific production networks and developments in socio-cultural activities. The core team of Antibodies includes production assistant Katerina Drakopoulou and dramaturge Bernhard Siebert.
