VITAE

Ephia 
 

Ephia studied dance with Min Tanaka, Kazuo Ohno, Anzu Furukawa, and Akira Kasai in Japan. Following her interest in ritual dance, she travelled to study under renowned teachers in Ghana, Java and Bali. She holds a BFA in dance from Columbia University, New York City. 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 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. 
Her production "Mirrorminded Curiousitease", which adapts Finnegans Wake and examines the relation between author James Joyce and his schizophrenic daughter Lucia, premiered in Germany in 2006, toured France the following year with the support of the Conseil Generale d' Aveyron, and was presented in 2008 at UNIDRAM 15, Festival for New Theater in Europe (Potsdam). 
Since 2002, she leads annual workshops in the desert of New Mexico, "INTEGRATING WITH/ DISINTEGRATING INTO THE LAND", and in the south of France, "LE CORPS: sens dedans dehors." Djalma Primordial Science workshops have been regularly hosted by Exploratorium Berlin and London's Theater Training Intiative, among others.
In 2007, she was an artist-in-residence with company SCOLOPENDRE at RAMDAM developing a unique approach developing a unique approach to visual theater, centered on the use of light and shadow. In 2009, she joins Collectif Ishtar and begins a new creation entitled "CONTRE-IMAGE" in residence at CCN Rillieux la Pape, Company Maguy Marin, MICADANSE and Atelier Carolyn Carlson in Paris.

Visit www.envelopeproject.com to see VIDEO.

"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

Jeff Gburek (co-founder)

Jeff Gburek is a guitarist /electronic music composer/sound artist currently living in Poznan, Poland. 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. Recordings on his own label Orphan Sound are available through Metamkine in France, La Mediatheque in Belgium and Erstwhile in the USA. He re-oriented 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...

...also at http://soundcloud.com/jeff-gburek and www.myspace.com/aenigmaplasme

DJALMA performs in COLLABORATION with...

Ana Kavalis

Visit http://www.anakavalis.de/