Iris-Eleftheria Nikolaou
Iris-Eleftheria Nikolaou
Position: Adjunct Lecturer
Email: irisnikolaou@uth.gr
Research Interests: Contemporary performative practices – choreography as an expanded practice – embodied listening – field recordings and sound composition – phenomenological approaches – feminist and post-human theory
Iris Nikolaou is a Greek transdisciplinary artist. Her practice lies at the intersection of dance, theatre and sound. Through her different roles as a performer, choreographer, movement director, teacher and sound artist, she researches movement as a mode of listening and listening as a way of moving. In her work she explores how embodied situated listening to Self, animate and inanimate Other contributes to an understanding of the interdependence between bodies, places, sounds, and e/motions generating a multilayered sensorial experience of witnessing “reality”.
Iris holds an MFA in Choreography with specialization in Performative Practices from Stockholm University of the Arts and a BA in Acting from the School of Drama, Faculty of Fine arts, Aristotle University of Thessaloniki. She has been trained in traditional Greek folk singing and ney (Turkish Flute) alongside with contemporary dance and improvisation in Europe and Unites States. Her work as a performer, choreographer and movement director has been supported by various institutions including the National Theater of Northern Greece, the National Opera of Greece, Athens Festival, municipal theatres in Greece, Harvard University, Duncan Dance Research Centre and the European Dancehouse Network. She has presented solo and group performances in the USA, Sweden, Spain, UK, Germany and Greece She has studied the Viewpoints method (a dance and acting technique of improvisation and composition) in New York and Europe with Mary Overlie, Anne Bogart and the Siti company. She has been teaching Viewpoints since 2011 in diverse contexts, to people of different ages and with different relationships to dance and theatre, including the School of Drama of the Faculty of Fine arts of Aristotle University of Thessaloniki, Onassis Foundation and public elementary school. She is the author of the chapter “Materials of movement and thought. The Viewpoints method in actor’s training”, in the anthology Movement and Dance in actor training, published by the National Theatre of Greece.
