Lady Lazarus – Maria Salouvardou – Greece

Lady Lazarus is a Poem by Sylvia Plath. In this artwork the poem is narrated by a female voice while a dancer performs around a sculpture-installation and music specifically created for the poem. Lady Lazarus,  who has already completed 3 suicide attempts, prepares herself for the next one.Her body suffers being alive. She suffers even more after losing her unborn baby.
The Performance reflects her relationship with her body. The sculpture is the skin of the dead Lady Lazarus, and she is forced back onto her living self after each unsuccessful suicide attempt. The experience of Living for her is like Dying.The dancer, by escaping her body, believes she has recovered from death only to be reborn, so that she can try to suicide again. She raises and falls.She asks the crowd to see her scars, her heart, her inside parts, her pain and suffering.The Rythm of the narration is given by the music and becomes darker and darker.
The Performance took place in Berlin,  by the dancer Maya Milet and supported in the frame of the project “Dance Encounters” by LUNA PARK / European Solidarity Corps.

The sculpture, made by Maria Salouvardou is one piece from her collection: Installations based on Poems. Her sculptures symbolize and seem to narrate the poem (given by a recording of Marias voice) and have their own music. This one is made of wire, fabrics and threads. 
The music is composed by Anthony P.

Camera by Alkistis Kafetzi

Maria Salouvardou was born 1970 in Athens . Started out with Business Economic Studies but very soon and concomitantly started to explore the Art scene. Moving from the Theatre workshop of Vasilis Diamantopoulos she concluded at the theatre school of Akis Davis. As a performing actress she participated in shows and performances. Various art seminars ensued such as Costume design and Scenography, Art History ,, History of Black and White Photography . She dressed actors and performers in various shows and performances. Lectured and teached at the Little University,  making clothes from recyclable materials. Subsequently,  she presented exhibitions of her collage work and performances with her clothes. The materials used ( with love and respect towards the environment) :are anything that would be discarded, like broken parts of instruments or apparatuses, of old toys, dolls, cloth pieces, paper, fabrics and threads. She restructures and composes. From 2014 she lives and works as an artist in Berlin. Her last performance was in Gallery 11 for the Landscape Metropolis exhibition with a costume made out of bin bags. She is working on installations based on poems and has already presented the installation “Returning to Myself” based on a poem by Paul Éluard at Illuseum Berlin in September 2020.  She works also as a Costume designer.                                            

Anthony P. (Anthony Palaskas) is a composer of contemporary electronic music. In 2008 he completed his Master (MA) in Computer Music at the National University of Ireland. He released his first four albums as a member of the band “Stereo Nova” and later, as “alfa P”, he released the album “TV Head”. In 1999 Anthony P. and Andriana Touliatou founded the band “Supermarket”. They released three albums until 2004.He has been composing music for contemporary dance since 2005. He has worked with “Lemurius” dance company (founded by Ioannis Mantafounis), ”Luna Park” dance company (founded by Kosmas Kosmopoulos), ”Griffon” dance company (founded by Ioanna Portolou) and many others. His work has been presented in dance festivals both in Greece and abroad. In 2013 he composed the music pieces, “Sonic Landscapes #1” and “Sonic Landscapes #2” with sounds from the magnetosphere and pulsars, respectively. In collaboration with the astrophysicist Fiori Anastasia Metallinou he gave a series of lectures on the topic “Astronomy and Music” at schools, museums and universities in Athens and Thessaloniki.