BIOS

Ephia studied dance with Min Tanaka, Kazuo and Yoshito Ohno, Anzu Furukawa, and Akira Kasai. Following her interest in ritual dance, she traveled to study under renown teachers in Ghana, Java and Bali. She holds a BFA in dance from Columbia University (NYC). She danced in the company of the late Anzu Furukawa in Berlin, appearing in Furukawa’s final production, GOYA: La Quinta del Sordo. In 1998, she co-founded Djalma Primordial Science, a performative and pedagogical collaboration with electro-acoustic musician Jeff Gburek. From within this partnership, Ephia’s physical practice came to be called the UNSOUND BODY. This moniker "UNSOUND BODY" focuses her dance on the corporeal qualities of instability, frailty, and magma, a desire to scratch away the veil of illusion from theater, leaving only a potent encounter of body and environment. Djalma’s performance Ci-Gît: six pregnancies for Antonin Artaud toured the USA during 2004 and was presented throughout Europe the following year (Nieuw Atlantis Festival, Amsterdam; ODIN Teatret, Holstebro; Les Explorateurs Associés Festival, Le Thoronet; Espace Antonin Artaud, Rodez; Les Voûtes, Paris; LaLeLy, Berlin). Their creation (MYOPIA)2 was featured in UNIDRAM 13, Festival for New Theater in Europe (Potsdam, 2006). Mirrorminded Curiousitease, a production which adapts Finnegans Wake and examines the relation between author James Joyce and his schizophrenic daughter Lucia, was presented in 2006 (Galerie Rachel Haferkamp, Köln; Theater Kapelle, Berlin). This latest work will tour Aveyron, France in 2007 where Djalma will be a company in RESI-danse. In addition to their annual seven-day workshop in the desert of New Mexico, INTEGRATING WITH/ DISINTEGRATING INTO THE LAND, they regularly lead workshops for actors, dancers, visual artists and all those interested in exploring unconditioned spaces internal to the body.

In 2007, continuing her research into the secret life of MATTER, animating the inanimate, Ephia began collaborations with marionnettist/actress Alexandra Vuillet and musicians Audrey Rocher and Roland Devocelle (ODBO théâtre de sons). She will be an artist-in-residence at RAMDAM (Lyon) in November 2007.

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

Jeff Gburek is a guitarist /electronic music composer/sound artist currently living in Berlin. He employs extended & prepared guitar techniques, signal processing, open source applications and phonography to create richly textural music, wherein extreme pianissimo, organic object manipulation and silence contrast energetic swells of excited electronics. For 8 years he has worked with dance/theater artist Ephia in Djalma Primordial Science, evolving a praxis of body and sound through performance and pedagogy. Appearances with Keith Rowe, Tetuzi Akiyama, Michael Vorfeld, Kyle Bruckmann, Pascal Battus, Tatsuya Nakatani, Annette Krebs, Raven Chacon, Tom Carter (Charalambides) and the Belgium-based Variable Geometry Quartet, show him crossing many strains of improvised, electro-acoustic and experimental music. New CD’s from Nur Nicht Nur and Foxy Digitalis are forthcoming. Net releases include Mass & Momentum, published by Basque sound artist Mattin at www.mattin.org/desetxea.html Recordings on his own label Orphan Sound are available through Metamkine in France, La Mediatheque in Belgium and Erstwhile in the USA. He has recently been re-orienting his electronic environment at STEIM in Amsterdam, September 2005 and was awarded a scholarship in 2006 to study composition in Darmstadt with Helmut Lachenmann. Visit www.futurevessel.com/orphansound/ to listen in...

For other recordings/to purchase CD's by Jeff Gburek visit his label Orphan Sounds

For a list of solo concerts visit Jeff Gburek Sound Events

Re: ENERGARIUMS, Nur Nicht Nur / Metal Box Series 2004:

Gburek’s voice is a compelling one. With his ear for the spaced-out and the ethereal, his playing will delight fans of contemporary electroacoustic music; but with his radical preparations and additions to the instrument, you could almost see him as a kind of lab technician, a Harry Partch of the guitar.
---Jason Bivins, Bagatellen

...I must say that this CD inspires me a lot; even surprises me at times! I knew or thought I knew - that this was supposed to be a guitarist CD; kind of a solo venture. Yet the sounds and the concepts were so varied and smoothly disjointed; beautifully arbitrary that I just couldn’t merge with the inner picture of a lone guitarist and I sense a long American will-do tradition from Harry Partch, Robert Erickson and John Cage. But it is still a mystery to me how Jeff Gburek can wring this timbral richness out of his acoustic-electric guitar, even with small motors and quirky dexterity taken into account. He has an extremely fine-tuned feel for what works, as he walks "the fragility of line"... Gburek’s music is barbed wire through the mist of fall, or thunderclaps through suffocating humidity; it evolves like magic out of the benign gesture of a magician, that guitar laid out in front of him on the table... thin, winding, bending sounds rising through the timbres, moving like seaweed, coming across like shrouded messages from inside matter, from mineral worlds of weak and strong forces, inching their way out into the open through Gburek’s guitar that lies there like an alien to be dissected in a secret hangar on a secret 1940s’ air base in a western U.S. desert...
---Ingvar Nordin, Sonoloco Magazine

Jeff Gburek feature article in Bagatellen

Other reviews at Gaz-eta and at Aural Innovations

NEW MEMBERS...

Ana Karen Suarez was born Havana, Cuba. In 1993 she begin her studies of modern dance with the Narciso Medina Cia. In 2000, she completed her degree in Drama at Theater School “Margarita Xirgú” in Montevideo, Uruguay. In 2001 she had the opportunity to study with the theater director Antunes Filho for 4 months in Sao Paulo, Brazil, and at the same time she made her first contact with butoh dance and physical theater. She began her work with Djalma Primordial Science in the summer of 2005; she appears with them in performance for the first time in the production of (MYOPIA)2. http://anakarensuarez.theaterblogs.de/