DJALMA PRIMORIDAL SCIENCE/ Ephia Gburek




 

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DJALMA is a Javanese word for metamorphosis. Applied to the transmigration of souls, it signifies transformation towards the human. When applied to chemical processes, it means fermentation. A crossing of metaphysical and mundane meaning.


Djalma Primordial Science was founded in 1998 by the choreographer Ephia Gburek and the experimental musician Jeff Gburek. Through this partnership of listening emerged a physical practice focused on the fragility of the body and its relationship to the environment: an act of embodiment, penetrating the very physicality of emotion, moving beyond expression into metamorphosis. Their collaboration spanned ten years of performance and pedagogical experience throughout the United States and Europe. Ephia Gburek, now based in France, continues the company's trajectory, creating delicate and disturbing works which blur the distinctions between theater, dance, and performance. The creations of Djalma Primordial Science-- appearing in theaters, galleries, derelict buildings, gaping holes in the earth-- draw on the particulars of landscape and architecture in order to dismantle the illusory space of "theater" and arrive at an unstable predicament, a vulnerable posture, an intensely felt experience.

 

Our research is a discipline of madness for human evolution, permitting one to climb over the walls that society has constructed around the body.


Through minimal and intimate actions, Djalma seeks to open the limits of the audience's perception. Playing with the elasticity of Time, their works provoke a delicious confusion between animate and inanimate worlds. In their practice, the body (extended) becomes ear. And sounds evoke states of physical transformation (decay, agitation, coagulation, immersion). The dancer’s bones reluctantly wring themselves out leaving a trail of moisture on the brow, her limbs become delicate tissue paper catching fire, her form evaporates and condenses again. Like the origin of all sound in movement: the dance is not only seen but felt, transmitted directly from the body of the mover into the body of the viewer in this last and first frontier of connective tissue.


 

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TRANSMISSION

In addition to her choreographic creations, Ephia Gburek leads regular workshops exploring... 
the secret life of matter ( the relations of body and object ), body mapping ( creating an anatomy of sensation ), the corporeal landscape ( exploring internal and external environments ).  For more information visit workshops.

 

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