Reflection & report from the sea -
sailing-creative expedition The Urge of Being aboard LAFRI sailing boat
Greece 2024-25-26
The Urge of Being sailing-creative expedition is a project by Marcozzi Contemporary Theater & LAFRI on Art and Beyond, born from the friendship and collaboration between Daniela Marcozzi and Captain and artist Nikolas Piperas.
We asked questions to the sea and here we go with some impressions of this process of EX-POSURE (etymologically, put-out of oneself)
Our research questions are:
what happens when we bring the artistic processes out of the fours walls of the studio or the theater?
How does the artistic-performative energy dialogue with the forces of the living world? Namely how our artistic processes are in direct and real dialogue with an environment that it's not controlled 100% by human beings?
In the theater we can set most of the conditions in which we want to play: temperature, light, volume, sound, audience, etc. In the open sea we can't, we have to negotiate our energy and creativity with the forces of the living world.
What do we learn from this process?
The sea becomes our master, the communal life on board allows us to exchange our impressions and feelings with our companions, and the breathtaking landscape and beaches and moments that we witness makes the rest of the magic!
In this page, expedition after expedition, we collect some of our impressions and short clips. At the moment we identify some recurrent artistic practice and moments, for example:
The encounter with the temple > natural / or anthropic temple where to condense and offer our artistic processes;
Interrogate the archetype
Body of waves > movements practices while sailing, into the water and on land;
Genius loci > a specific location that we embody through movement, or voice or meditation, breath and hiking;
Re-sizing urge > to bring our own urge in dialogue with the forces and landscape of the sea;
Performance-habitat > where do we perform? for whom for the fish? for the rocks?
Ritual
click for video clip
Expedition '24
Cyclades Archipelagos
from the studio to the sea
For the first expedition, in 2024, we began our journey with a indoor workshop where we developed the main artistic tools and vocabulary of the expeditions. The intuitions in studio where then brought in direct dialogue with the sea, with LAFRI, with the wind and currents.
Expedition '26 Chios>Lesvos
our dirt my dirt
cleaning ritual
The act of cleaning is inherently ambiguous
at times, it is an act of displacement;
at others, an act of purification.
It can be a political act, a somatic act, an act of care or purification. And yet, sometimes, it feels utterly futile: the world is saturated with waste, the oceans contain entire islands of garbage.
What difference can it possibly make to remove one piece of plastic from a beach?
Evoking Camus and his absurd action ...
And yet, in that moment, something changes. That particular piece of waste is no longer there. A fish will not eat it. It may be recycled, perhaps even returned to the cycle of production and consumption from which it originated.
The action remains controversial, conflicted, apparently moralistic.
It confronts us with a question:
what meaning does our action have?
And perhaps another question follows:
Does it make any sense to ask this question?
click for video-clip
click for video-clip
Expedition '25
Lesvos
body of wind body of waves
Places are where matter meets the energy that brings them to life. The genius loci is the way life inhabits a place: the way matter encounters energy, and the way energy animates matter.
We listen to this encounter, and in doing so, we immediately become part of it. But we are part of it even when we do not listen.
Or are we?
Why, then, when we listen, when we attune ourselves to this exchange, do we sense something different? Is it a kind of harmonious attunement with our surroundings?
To listen actively means to become aware of our own energetic position within an environment. This position is a perpetual negotiation between action and reception: a dialogue between the active and the passive, where the passive is understood not as inactivity, but as receiving.
When we become aware of this energetic position—when we sense it through the body and the inner life, using our personal and artistic tools,, we can begin to articulate it. We can compose from it, creating an artistic response to the felt experience of our position within the environment.
Expedition '25
Lesvos
sense of urge
condense.
grow.
compose.
petrify.
work the urge of your persona
let's do it in the water.
Re-collocate ourselves within the ecosystem.
What a beautiful feeling, to be able to whisper to a stone
click for video-clip
click for video-clip
Expedition '24
Cyclades Archipelagos
Temple of Apollo - interrogating the archetype of light, exposure, creativity
An archetype may emerge from the physical presence of a temple or a human-made structure that evokes a deity, a mythological presence, a cultural tradition, or a collective memory.
And it may also take the form of a natural element that we choose to recognise as a “temple”: a place where we can gather our prayers, our presence, our intentions, and our artistic processes.
To sense an archetype within or through a place means, for us, to reposition ourselves ecologically: to develop the ability to listen to a place, to its intelligence, its currents of energy, and to sense the effect it has on us.
Once this process has begun, we look for a channel of expression and communication, and perhaps for an archetypal guide that can support and illuminate our artistic journey throughout the expedition.
Expedition '26 Chios>Lesvos
a shout of burn
a shout of grief
During the expeditions, we dedicate some days to exploring the land. We visit settlements, castles, small villages, and fishing ports. These journeys are also shaped by the weather and the conditions at sea.
On one of these excursions, we visited a site on the island of Chios where numerous and devastating wildfires in recent years had scorched the landscape, leaving it barren, surreal, and exposed to the wind.
The sounds were sparse: the dull knocking of dry trees and branches against one another. The wind still carried the smell of dryness and blackened ash. The geometries and forms left by the fire dominated the hills and valleys.
As we moved closer to the charred branches, we could hear their shout. We shouted grief.
click for video-clip
click for video-clip
Expedition '25
Lesvos
Performhabitat
A performance for water, swimming people, fish, birds, and voices above and beneath the surface.
A declaration of love in the land of Sappho.
Expedition '26
Chios>Lesvos
genius loci narratives
Once we have established our artistic vocabulary during the first days of the workshop, we use it to relate to the places we encounter, both at sea and on land.
These encounters become opportunities for embodiment: moments in which our bodies and our inner lives absorb information and intuitions, receiving answers even to questions we have not consciously asked.
By entering into an artistic relationship with our surroundings, we discover parts of ourselves that resonate with those environments. In doing so, we can begin to move beyond the boundaries of what we already know about ourselves.
A thread begins to emerge and runs throughout the entire expedition, both individually and collectively, connecting the places we encounter with the discoveries we make along the way. Dramaturgy, narrative, composition, casualty.
click for video-clip
Expedition '25
Lesvos
sense of form
"di-vento LAFRI"
click for video-clip
Form is a sense.
Recurring forms, functional forms, dysfunctional forms, forms carrying energy. The body inhabits form, moving from one form to another at every instant. Sometimes form appears still and visible; at other times, it reveals itself through movement, vibration, and change.
Yet no form is ever truly still. Within every form there is a continuous movement: an undulation, a condensation, a shifting of energy.
LAFRI is the boat where these transformations occur. In the encounter between wind and current, water and human intention, the sailboat is set into motion by forces that cannot be separated from one another.
The body enters form, and form enters the movement of LAFRI. It dissolves into the dynamics of the boat, into the sea, into the shifting relations between forces. Then, somewhere within this continuous exchange, another form begins to emerge in the body.
Form is never an arrival. It's in the current