Gabriela Branco (BR)
Dance Diffuser
Gabriela Branco, 1992, born in Brazil. Works as an independent dance diffuser in the fields of dance production and as artistic advisor, teacher and dancer. She worked with Jorge Garcia Companhia de Dança and Fragmento de Dança, and was artistic advisor of Milionésima Cia, a feminist dance group (São Paulo/BR). Gabriela earned her B.A. (2015) and B.A.T (2016), both in dance by University of Campinas - UNICAMP, and studied Klauss Vianna Technique in Pontifical Catholic University of São Paulo - PUC/SP (2019). In her ongoing artistic research, she explores Body States through Memories.
In the frame of PReS she has taken the opportunity to interweave her previous research with her Footnotes Performance Project, which aims to raise critical political awareness. The project focuses on the struggle between democracy and oligarchy, authoritarianism and its imminent opposition, which currently spreads in a ravish way through riots, political manifestations and social/civil tension.
Nefeli Gioti (GR)
Choreography, Peformance & Environmental Sciences
Nefeli Gioti was born in Athens. She graduated from Environmental Sciences at the Aegean University, studied contemporary dance practices at Tanzfabrik in Berlin and attended "Theory of Performance Practices" at the Kapodistrian Athens University.
She has choreographed “Whoops!” (2015), "kamikazi" -work in progress-(2016), Iceberg (2017). In 2017, she participated in a residency at Kinitras Studio, where she choreographed "Conus Magus". In 2018, she received a grant by NEON Organization for the production of a new work, "Tundra". She considers dance as an area of encounter between body and mind. As far as she knows, she is exploring the areas of an intellectual body and an embodied mind, discovering the tautological and/or the divergent meaning of those. She enjoys following the procedure of unfolding questions with no possible answers. Nefeli is interested in the ethics of collaborative creation processes.
She was PReSident from Sept 2019 until March 2020.
Júlia Iwanaga (BR)
Performance
Born in Brazil, Júlia Iwanaga joined the University of Campinas, where she graduated with a B.A. and B.A.T. degree, in 2018. In the last years, she has focused on artistic research, interested in experiments with creation processes and investigations of corporeality in interdisciplinary contexts. Therefore, she co-created the project por elas to explore the intersections between dance, video and photography in the construction and notion of self-image as a woman. Lately, she was part of the Choreographic Haikais of Drª Gisela Dória’s PhD, at ECA/USP, which researched Japanese literature, philosophy and art. In this way, Júlia participated in the KeyZetta and Company's residency Campo Comum, in São Paulo, with 30 other dancers working with video, literature and dance in eastern practices. Currently, she studies at PReS (Germany), where she is engaged in expanding her understanding of performance through research based on experiences of emptiness, scrutinising our relation to space and time.
Tuija Lappalainen (FI)
Dance and Theatre
Tuija Lappalainen is a dancer and theatre artist born and raised in Finland. Her background is in studies of Fine Arts, Somatics, Contemporary Dance and Theater. She has graduated as a dancer from North Karelia College Outokumpu and from the Theatre department of Art Academy of Turku University of Applied Sciences. Tuija works as a multidisciplinary artist as a dancer, actor, choreographer and theatre maker between the fields of dance and theatre, with own artistic work, collaborations and in theatre companies. Her work embodies an interest in comprehensive embodiment in its diverse existences, scenes as images and interfaces between different art forms.