POWER SHAME. Yannis Karalis
In POWER SHAME research project, I explored the emotion of shame and the consequences of internalized shame to the individual as well as to their connection to the environment. During the research process the character of a werewolf was created, a being born out of an intense traumatic shameful event. This persona adopts aggression, both as a coping mechanism against shame and also as a weapon to clear a path towards salvation from the omnipresent shameful emotion.
What does shame do a person? Movement and voice have dug into topics such as bullying, transformation, aggression, pretense, disconnection and vulnerability in order to embody the elusive sensation of shame, since it is nowadays considered a taboo-emotion, which in turn camouflages shame’s influence on political thinking and consumer behavior.
The different themes and performance material started circling around a story, actually a film narrative, with the aggressive shameful werewolf at its center. A growing interest was born and is still actively in process, as I am in the middle of my DIS-TANZEN-SOLO research project, to portray dance amidst other strong contexts such as film. How does dance react to a thriller film narrative and how do we react as viewers to a dancing protagonist? How can a more abstract movement-portrayal of the topics I have encountered during my research about shame be directed in a suspenseful logical story about an aggressive werewolf dancing towards either salvation or destruction?
