VITAE
Ephia Gburek
choreographer, dancer, pedagogue
holds a BFA in dance from Columbia University, New York City. She studied intensively with Min Tanaka and Kazuo Ohno in Japan and was a member of the Berlin-based butoh company of Anzu Furukawa, appearing in Furukawa’s final production, GOYA: La Quinta del Sordo. Following her interest in ritual dance, she traveled to study traditional dances in Ghana and in Indonesia. Guided by collaborations with mentors Nia Love and Diego Pinon, she created early works which were a fusion of performance and ritual. In 1998, she co-founded Djalma Primordial Science, a performative and pedagogical collaboration with electro-acoustic musician Jeff Gburek. From within this partnership of listening, she focused her dance on the instability of the body and its relationship to the environment: her dancing body becomes a prosthesis for the viewer to discover the space that surrounds and composes us. Between 2002-2007 their productions (MYOPIA)2, Ci-gît, and Mirrorminded Curiousitease toured widely in the United States and Europe.
Since 2007 Ephia is based in France where she concentrates her work on the relation of body and object, the flux between the animate and the inanimate world. She collaborated with puppeteer Alexandra Vuillet, followed a formation with Claire Heggen, and participated in the creations of the company Scolopendre which incorporate shadow theater, mask and object manipulation. In 2009, her project with dancer Yael Karavan entitled CONTRE-IMAGE was in residence at CCN Rillieux la Pape-Cie Maguy Marin, MICADANSE and Atelier Carolyn Carlson in Paris. In 2011 she established Les Chercheurs de Djalma; this group of ten dancers meet regularly to distort the frontiers between individual and group, body and object, dream and daily reality.
Her life bouvlversed with the birth of her first child in 2011, she created Projet M a stunning performance which explores the theme of maternity via the myth of Prometheus. Projet M played in Lyon and Berlin with live music by Laurent Grappe. Her current projects include collaborations with improvising musicians Benoit Cancoin (contrabass) and Michel Doneda (soprano saxophone). And with visual artists/filmakers CP et LP in Reims, she makes performances in public space linked to the particularity of architecture and lines of circulation.
In 2013, with visual artist Raphael Thibault, she undertakes an extensive project of rennovation : an old factory in Saint Etienne France is destined to become la fab-ka : a center for workshops and the crossings of artistic practices.
Since 2002 Ephia teaches regular workshops on various themes : of the secret life of matter (the relations of body and object), body mapping/getting lost (creating an anatomy of sensation), the corporeal landscape (exploring internal and external environments). Her workshops have been hosted by THE LAND/an art site (USA), Theater Training Initiative (London), Mime Centrum Berlin, Exploratorium Berlin, Antagon theaterAKTion (Frankfurt), Nordic School of Butoh (Copenhague), RAMDAM (Saint-foy-les-lyon). She is a guest teacher in the "Contemporary Physical Performance Making" masters program in Tallinn, Estonia.
"I can highly recommend Ephia as a teacher of great integrity. Both the content she presented and her teaching style are very special. She is a generous teacher, offering clear guidance as well as space for each participant to pursue their own journey into the world of improvisation and transformation."-- Frances Barbe, London's Theater Training Initiative
"It may take an audience member a while to get used to this new language, but drinking in the syntax fundamentally alters the way you breathe, the way you are… This work doesn’t try to make friends; it is exactly what it is, just as a hurricane or an oil spill is what it is. Ephia takes her body apart and puts it back together wrong, so that her hand receives the messages the spleen was supposed to get, so that the eyes are in the soles of the feet, leaving her blind and trembling. Captivated, we follow her on this journey across the room, and back again, and across the room, and back again, because the journey is not through space but through states of being." ---Andrew Fearnside, Albuquerque Magazine
Djalma Primordial Science is also...
Vincent Valente | accordion / stage presence
vistitez/ Compagnie La Réserve
Céline Pierre | video and sound composition
vistitez/ cplp performances
Benoit Cancoin | contrabass / stage presence
vistitez/ FIN.AGAIN (free.fr)
Jeff Gburek | prepared electric guitar / sound compostion
vistitez/ https://soundcloud.com/jeff-gburek
photo Céline Pierre