Inspired by Ray Bradbury’s “Martian Chronicles”, Études is a stop motion dance video about a person trying to find her own routine in an unknown and hostile environment, using the techniques of repetition, engraving, adaptation and transformation. Visually influenced by the GIF culture, Études borrow their name from the homonymous musical compositions that were designed to provide practice material for perfecting a particular skill. Respectively, the brief sequences of the dancer’s movements can be seen as preparation exercises or parts of made-up (war) rituals that keep her warm in anticipation of potential attack.

Evi Stamou and Pietro Radin have collaborated in Evi Stamou’s films since 2013 and they work as a duo of film and video-art curators since 2018. Études is the first video they co-directed. 

Music

The music of Études was created for the film by the Greek composer Giorgos Hatzimichelakis. The music followed the visual rhythm of the film, and only a few changes were made in film’s final cut, after the music track was applied. For a few seconds, in the beginning as well as in the end of the film, a small extract from Études by Carl Czerny - played and recorded by a music student - can be heard: it is a playful way to keep the spirit of the title. In between, original music that combines contemporary and classic elements, with the flute as the lead instrument, is accompanying the image.

Making

“Études” was created in the frame of a residency organized by LatoMeio Project in the arcadian mountains of Peloponnese in Greece.  Inspired by the surrounding landscape (most of the residency took place in an abandoned quarry) we created four short choreographies, four small exercises to give the opportunity to the dancer, the directors and the post production team to try out new techniques. In keeping with the residency’s theme, which had an underlying sci-fi tinge, the art direction and styling of the main character are indebted to 80s science fiction movies and their sandy dystopias.

The camera moved freely around the dancer taking high quality photos in order to create a stop motion video. Our aim was to isolate the elements of the choreography (the movements and the gestures), so we used still photography instead of video. Working with the photographic medium we were able to apply a very high shutter speed (so as to avoid motion blur) and to obtain a very high resolution (in order to isolate smallest portions of the frame without losing quality).  We shot roughly 4,000 photos: in the first and the fourth etude you can see the sequences of photos exactly as they were taken (at least in the first iteration of the choreography), whereas in the second and third etude separate gestures and dance figures were isolated from the original choreography, then repeated and recombined in many different sequences, so that each dance movement would take on a different meaning in every new context. 

Artemis Manakou was born in Athens (1993) and she grew up in Neapolis, Laconia, Greece. She studied acting and direction at "Elefthero Schima" of Stelios Pavlides (Αthens). 

During the same period, she attended Devised Theater seminars with Amalia Bennett. In 2013 she started attending Physical Theater classes in  PLEFSIS, completing her three-year course in 2015. Along with her involvement with theatrical art, she regularly attended seminars in contemporary dance, contact improvisation, Somatics, Release & Limon technique, and acrobatic dance. In 2019 she moved to the Netherlands and continued her studies in choreographic synthesis by attending independent classes at the vocational school of Amsterdam "The Henny Jurriens Foundation". 

She is a regular collaborator of Dare Dance Digitalize with Antonis Bertos. Also, since 2017 she is in collaboration with the LatoMeio Project by Eleni  Danesi. Until today, she deals with physical theater both as a performer and as a teacher, with dance and cinema in Greece and Europe.

Pietro Radin (b.1984) is a filmmaker, film editor, curator and professor of film editing at the Hellenic Cinema and Television School Stavrakos and the ANT1 media lab. He has worked in more than a hundred short, feature and documentary films, music videos, commercials, video art pieces and interdisciplinary works, many of which have been screened and awarded in Greece and abroad (IDFA - International Documentary Filmfestival Amsterdam, Cinemed International Mediterranean Film Festival of Montpellier, Sole Luna Doc film festival, Thessaloniki Documentary Festival, International Environmental Film Festival Paris etc.).