STREAMS & OVERFLOWS - a command for CNSMD de LYON 01.2024

Second piece on point shoes for CNSMD Lyon, Streams & Overflows anounces already by it’s title the energy that will be unfolded on stage. My profound love for the academic vocabulary and the endless possibilities it contains will be translated in a wild choreography. We will aim for the joy of the dance and make the stage look like a paganic fest with ballet vocabulary. The reverence i make to classical dance is reflected by the musical choice. In his almbum Book Of Ways Keith Jarret makes his own reverence to baroque music even if he unframes it slightly. My goal is to show that this technique is no dusty at all. It a can be seased in a modern way expressing the excitement and pleasure to be alive.

Chorography : Harris Gkekas

Performed by: 6 Students of CNSMD de LYON

Music: Keith Jarret & Underworld

Production : CNSMD

CROSSOVER - a command for Greek National Opera School 06.2023

The piece is about a big group breaking on through to the other side. The pleasure of crossing , meeting, following, lifting, learning, enjoying is alla round the piece. Expressing the power of young bodies this piece is a real fresh maker. They turn chaos to an organized place in order to be together and demonstrate that nothing is impossible to them at this point of their lives. An optimistic and dynamic vision of the youth, experssing their hopes and showing us how they make it happen; through joy, communication and mood for action.

Chorography : Harris Gkekas

Performed by: 22 students of Greek National Opera School

Music : Didier Ambact & Harris Gkekas

Light Design: Dimitris Koutas

Production: Greek National Opera & STRATES

INFINIR in collaboration with Elise Alloin 03.2023

Visual artist Elise Alloin is working on radioactivity for more that 10 years now. Recent observations during the dismantling of Nuclear Power Station Fessenheim pushed her to focus on the very specific role that human body takes in the nuclear industry’s environment. In order to deepen this investigation she approached chorographer Harris Gkekas and together they created INFINIR. Didier Ambact and Silvi Simon joined in this collaboration by creating the musical score and video. The four artists visted the Nuclear Station in order to absorb the specificities of this world. The transdisciplinary aspect of INFINIR associates sculptures, dance, music, visual arts, video. The poetic investigation of the paradoxical aspects of Nuclear Industry aims to bring visibility to the materials, spaces and challenges related to the mental and physical conditioning Nuclear Industry imposes to us. INFINIR recalls the human desire and quest of mastery and embodies this ultimate challenge: taming the eternal and everlasting. Setting our existence in the fine line between risk and control.

Conception : Elise Alloin & Harris Gkekas

Art installation : Elise Alloin

Chorography : Harris Gkekas

Video Creation : Silvi Simon &Elise Alloin

Sound Creation : Didier Ambact

Performed by : Harris Gkekas &Elise Alloin

Production : La Kunsthalle, Centre d’Art Contemporain – Mulhouse and Compagnie Strates

Coproduction : Désoblique-Lyon.

With the financial support of CCN de Mulhouse-Ballet du Rhin,

With the financial support of Région Grand Est, financial support of Fondation Daniel et Nina Carasso-Fondation de France.

Thanks to : CND Lyon, Studio CHATHA Lyon, Studio UMA LAVAL/ DADR Cie, Bénédicte Blaison, Gilles Tardy, François Kormann et Nicolas Busser

Eclipse - command for Greek National Opera Ballet 03.2023

This piece is a parallel study to the Alchemists images and vision of perfect human represented by an hermaphrodit creature. The dancers express the urge of meeting their partner, their missing part. The duets express the violence and emergency of the desire. Once their energies met the slowly dive into an other dimension of love. they are no more two, they became one. Stronger , tighter, unbreakable. Being one, just one.

Chorography, Set & costumes : Harris Gkekas

Performed by : Greek National Opera Ballet

music: Apostolis Koutsogiannis

Light Design: Christos Tziogas

Production: Greek National Opera Ballet & STRATES

UNE 10.2022

UNE is a lonely body, framed and tested by her environment. Methodically she analyses the difficulties imposed to her and overcomes them. Each step until she finally manages to stand on her two feet demonstrates a silent force of resistance that never gives up. Lassitude and weariness turn to a legitimate feeling of inner revolution.  First portrait of a serie called Framed. Medeas, Une reminds the fragility of freedom and reflects our individual and collective battles. More than an allegory about the female condition and struggles Une is an alert since nothing will ever be totally acquired but always the result of a constant and perilous fight.

Conception: Harris Gkekas with the partcipation of the performer

Lights , set & costumes : Harris Gkekas

Performed by : Alex Blondeau

Music: Laëtitia Hern

Production STRATES

2020 Toute l’eau et rien que des gouttes 10.2020

The most personnal and mysterious work Harris Gkekas delivered untill now. Claiming the power of poetry and it’s capacity to modify time and create a special spaces for the mind to escape the ‘‘real world’s acceleration’’. The music and light create a unique atmosphere and a mystical experience. This piece creates wonders and feels like going through a dream. Each time a dancer meets another manages to provoke a radical change tp him. Unity, friendhip, love and death are central words that appear to us during this special experience.

Chorography: Harris Gkekas

Performing: Clémence Dieny, Nathan Freyermuth, Harris Gkekas

Music: Didier Ambact & Seijiro Murayama, Pink Floyd

Lights: François Maillot

Production: Strates with the support of Fondation Cléo Thiberge-Edrom - Fondation de France

Coproduction: Fondation Royaumont-Pôle de Création Chorégraphique, POLE SUD-Centre de Développement Chorégraphique National-Strasbourg, Support of Centre Chorégraphique National d'Aquitaine en Pyrénées Atlantiques – Malandain Ballet Biarritz, Accueil Studio season 2019-2020, Network Les Petites Scènes Ouvertes , with the support of ADAMI

Produced with the support of Théâtre du Marché aux Grains, Atelier de Fabrique Artistique, Bouxwiller, Friche Culturelle L'Antre Peaux Bourges, Studio UMA Laval , la Fonderie, le Mans.

Thanks to CND Lyon, Studio Danse & Cie , l'Académie Nini Theilade

Oraison Double - a command frome Ballet de l’Opéra du Rhin CCN Mulhouse 04.2019

Part of the mixed bill ‘‘ Danser Mahler’’ Oraison Double is a command by CCN Ballet du Rhin. The piece started with a wonder: Could there be a similarity between Orpheus and Gustav Mahler even if one belongs to mythology and the other really existed? I’d rather suppose that yes . Somehow both of them set up the loss in order to sing about it, they orchestrated love traumas and turned it to elaborated lament. Both musicians shared troubled heart situations and took it to the highest level of lyrical expression. This piece is a diving into Mahler’s innermost feelings and trying to undo the mystery of this singing soul. The dancers express desire, despair in a strong way before they finally reach inner peace.

Chorography : Harris Gkekas

Performing : Ballet du Rhin ensemble

Music: Seijiro Murayama, Didier Ambact , Gustav Mahler

Lights : Gabriel Chan

Setting: Marjolaine Mansot

Production: Ballet de l’Opéra du Rhin & Strates

Plateaux 10.2018

In the same way we can only witness the wrath of nature, we can only let the vitality of this dance express freely. Plateaux is an explosive choreography performed by 4 amazing dancers. Probably the most popular piece of the company. Live music by drummer Didier Ambact defines perfectly the big bang mood of the piece. The piece is a study of the open. How to open and keep opening? The inner structure of the piece costantly opens and turns what is fragile to stunning power. Pretty much something like an atomic experience full of poetic moments and thrilling images.

Conception : Harris Gkekas

Performing : Jamil Attar, Lee Davern , Harris Gkekas , Vera Gorbacheva

Live music : Didier Ambact, Harris Gkekas , Jamil Attar

Set: Gabriel Foussard

Supported by Fondation Cléo Thiberge Edrom-Fondation de France, CCN du Ballet du Rhin dans le cadre de l’accueil studio 2018 , CCN de Tours -direction Tomas Lebrun, KLAP Maison pour la Danse à Marseille (résidence de finalisation) , Théâtre la Coupole -Saint Louis , Centre National de la danse à Lyon, Cie Propos , Danse et Cie , Maison des Efflorescences

Mille. 10.2017

A radical and astonishing definition of freedom.

With Mille Harris Gkekas focuses on the idea of '’tune’’, the way Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari describe it in their book Mille Plateaux : an ensemble of expressional materials that define a territory, followed by a mouvement of deterritorialisation.

Attached to the idea of shifting either mentaly or in demography , the choreograph sets up a long path, a journey that questions  resistance and transformation.

Like the snake's skin during the moult, he introduces a skin meant to explode, in order to translate the mutation.That activity is as demanding as quiting skin does for the reptile…Harris Gkekas allows himself to make a score totally opposite to the purity of his inner approach, and each step of the portrait he makes, demonstrate the vanity of those  preceding. He tracks the paradoxal potential of an obsolete and desperate beauty, consumed  by it’s self. The leftovers of it will be fertile  mold pour another advent. In Mille annihilation becomes foundation, chaos gives up to mastery, impulsiveness to maturity.

 Letting back the idea of organic phrasing as a link, he concentrates to the micro-intervals that give to a danse it's consistance. Through repetitive, oscillatory, cyclic or pendulum mouvements, Harris Gkekas hunts between the forms the necessity and the chances that define each living form's trajectory and invents a machine that produces differences. Determined by rythm rather than the mouvements, seeking the density of each counter point.

Conception, Performing , Costumes: Harris Gkekas

Music : Didier Ambact

Lights:  Gabriel Foussard 

Supported by : Pôle Sud, CDC Strasbourg, KLAP Marseille, Subsistances Lyon, Fondation Cléo Thiberge -Edrom-Fondation de France, CND Lyon

Arsis/Thésis.                                               command for CAD Châteauroux     02.2016

Greek words lifting and putting down, are used in musical terminology. They contain the meaning og gettingcollectively together in order to start something. It has a relation to breath and this was the heart of the work. Breathing together , meeting through the breath and it’s special way to connect us profoundly.

Chorography , music and lights : Harris Gkekas

Traverser le visible.                               command for  CNSMD Lyon    06.2016

First piece on point shoes, the chorographer made an abstract study about how to appear and how to disappear. Under the light and through the shades 4 dancers mix their tarjectories and explore a gentle approach of the unknown, feeling the pleasure of starting something brand new.

Chorography, music and lights : Harris Gkekas 

Costumes: Pilippe Combeau

VWA.                                                                   10.2016                              

Besides a natural poetic potential, and the constant reminder of any existence or human accomplishments fragility, the idea of ruin carries disconcerting paradoxes. What can you see and what is invisible? What revealing could hide, and hiding could reveal ? The unquestionable presence of what is absent, provides space to interpret , space to wonder. A kind of dramatisation, where reason is no longer dominant and only the activity of feeling could guide you, a sort of half-light . Could there be a way to see what it is not there, what doesn't show ? VWA is a landscape which is dreamed, which is nowhere. Immensely extensible it could express the essential incompletion of any life form. Such like the idea of ruin, the choreographic strategies hold their building properties out of the state of uncertainty . The deconstruction guides to an intimate path, you feel the resistance of each fragment, you advance towards knots, towards some truth deeply hidden in our center.

Conception: Harris Gkekas in close collaboration with Ashley Wright

 Performers: Harris Gkekas, Ashley Wright

Costumes& lights: Harris Gkekas

Music: Didier Ambact

Production : Strates

Corpoduction: CCN Ballet du Rhin

Encore.                                                                          06.2015                       short length film - duration :10'

Encore is a very unexpected project mixing dance film making and litterture. The college students make a text to appear by wearing letters on their chest and back. Samuel Beckett’s Worstward Who oppening paragraph appears thanks to their movements in space. They carry Beckett’s words not as a riot, not as a complain but a radical act of expressing their necessity of freedom, time and self achievement.

Direction, costumes and lights : Harris Gkekas.

Command of the Cultural Developpement compartment of Lyon Opera House

Performers: 19 students of Collège Ampère Lyon

Text : Samuel Beckett's "Worstward Who"

Music: Harris Gkekas & Nicky Bruckert