Eleni Ploumi
Eleni Ploumi (1988 - Thessaloniki, GR) is a performer and choreographer working from Tilburg. She studied Theatre Dance Performance at the Contemporary/Urban Department of the Fontys Dance Academy, where she graduated as Bachelor of Choreography (2016). Before attending the academy, she was a hip-hop and house dancer, she is constantly exploring the fusion between urban dance and contemporary dance.
Already during her studies at the Fontys Dance Academy, Eleni Ploumi and DansBrabant were in conversation. That collaboration became concrete with mentoring at Makershuis Tilburg and, from 2020,PLAN Talent Development Brabant. Eleni concludes her trajectory with MisslightenmentTo be a woman (working title). For this last part, she was intensively coached by Pauline Roelants / United Cowboys.
Tackling what is unjust, not shying away from what is complicated and telling it like it is. Even during her choreography training, Eleni's activist temperament stands out, as does the extent to which she takes contemporary artistry both critically and seriously. Eleni likes to get to the bottom of things, to tease out obviousness and question preconceptions. She is convinced of the power of the arts to break taboos, bring suppressed emotions to the surface and inspire people to awareness and change. With her belief in the eloquence of the body and her extreme body control, she was at home as a performer both in the exuberant, theatrical work of T.r.a.s.h./Kristel van Issum, and in the duration&impro installations of United Cowboys, as well as in the sober, stylised concepts of Katja Heitmann.
In her own work, she brings together and plays with the paradox of the unbridled and subtle body. Animalistic, dangerous and with a control that winds around the finger, Eleni explored the pain and beauty of what remains and what disappears in Wax Me Apart (2019). In Stirring Pan (2018), she worked with breathing concentrated to the extreme to rekindle her inner fire while Poutanes (2017) was a hilarious yet painful indictment of the sell-out of the female body. In the coming years, Eleni will work on researching the meaning of entertainment in dance. She does this through forms of presentation both inside and outside the theatre.
With her plans for the coming years, Eleni explores in performance form what the history of entertainment and the human need for it mean for her own work. And in installation form, she explores how the body needs space and how space needs the body to be experienced. That may sound fairly innocent, knowing Eleni, she undoubtedly adds an engaged and political layer to this with her heroic militancy. The different layers that Eleni alludes to and keeps looking for makes working with her exciting and never non-committal.
