Eleni Ploumi
2020 – present
© DansBrabant, Renate Beense
Eleni Ploumi and DansBrabant were already talking to each other during her training at the Fontys Dance Academy. This collaboration became concrete with guidance at Makershuis Tilburg and, from 2020,PLAN Talentontwikkeling Brabant. Eleni concludes her trajectory with To be a woman (working title). For this last part she is intensively coached by Pauline Roelants / United Cowboys.
Eleni Ploumi (1988 – Thessaloniki, Greece) is a performer and choreographer working from Tilburg, the Netherlands. She studied Theatre Dance Performance at the Contemporary/Urban Department of the Fontys Dance Academy, where she graduated as Bachelor of Choreography (2016). Having been a hip hop and house dancer before starting at the academy, her constant focus is on examining urban and contemporary dance fusion.
Crack down on injustice, confront complexity and don’t evade the issue. Eleni made no secret of her activist temperament when she was studying to be a choreographer; there is also no denying her critically questioning attitude to contemporary artistic expression, while at the same time giving it her serious attention. Eleni likes to do things thoroughly, to clinically dissect what we take for granted and to question prejudices. She is convinced of the power of the arts to cut through taboos, to bring to the surface suppressed emotions and to inspire people into awareness and change. With her belief in the power of expression of the human body and her supreme physical control, she earned her place as a performer in the exuberant theatrical work of T.r.a.s.h./Kristel van Issum, as well as in the impro-installations of United Cowboys and the sober stylised concepts of Katja Heitmann.
In her own work she brings into focus the paradox of the unbridled yet restrained human body, and she plays with this idea. Animal, dangerous and with persuasive control, Eleni examines the pain and beauty of what stays and what disappears in Wax Me Apart (2019). In Stirring Pan (2018), she works with extreme breathing concentration to re-kindle her inner fire, while Poutanes (2017) is a hilarious yet at the same time painful plea against selling out the female body. In the coming years, Eleni will be working on studies into the meaning of entertainment in dance. She will be using presentation forms on and off the theatre stage.
Eleni’s plans for the coming years will focus on studies in performance form that reveal the significance of the history of entertainment and the human need to be entertained in her own work. She will use installations to examine the human body’s need for space and how space requires a body if it is to be experienced. This may sound a little ingenuous, but knowing Eleni, with her intrepid fighting spirit, she is bound to add an engaged and political layer to her work. The different layers that Eleni suggests and continues to pursue make working with her exciting and never non-committal.
For our projects together with Eleni check below at her Dutch DB page or visit her website.