Amazon Dance by Nico Angiuli and local artist Katerina El Raheb --and the outcome of his EMAP residency at Stegi-- is available for a limited time on the Onassis Foundation channel on YouTube.
The work premiered during the DA Festival on Sofia (BG), and although a dance film in its current form, it is prepared and planned as a full-physical performance. Amazon Dance is the outcome of Nico Angiuli's EMAP residency at Onassis Stegi.
Amazon Dance is a video performance, part of a research work that aims to study algorithms that are used in factories such as Amazon, in order to find the minimum time and most efficient way to arrange and deliver items in large warehouses, a process which is costly and time consuming. Although many of these tasks are performed by humans, their “routes” are perfectly predetermined based on algorithms and their movements are specific so as to achieve the goals of each shift: picking the maximum number of products. Director and visual artist Nico Angiuli brings to the stage the question of the big companies: Is a robot more cost-effective than human labor? And how does this translate to the performing body? Together with Katerina El Raheb, choreographer and informatics researcher, as well as a group of three more dancers, they worked on this “translation” researching how such an ALGORITHM could be embodied and represented in space. They wonder: Is executing a precise choreography, perhaps, awkwardly close to executing commands in the industrial space? Amazon Dance was realized in 2021 at ONASSIS STEGI, in the context of the European Media Artists in Residence Exchange (EMARE) program of the European Media Art Platform (EMAP), co-funded by the Creative Europe Programme of the European Union.
