Ira Melkonyan
December 2024
How much can a person contain? Working in a laboratory, between glass tubes, vials and refrigerators, organising blood. While pandemics spread and wars are fought. Disaster approaches from a distance. Strange reflections, desires and visions leak into the regulated routines of a bloodless environment made of seemingly hermetic walls and vessels.
During her residency in HELLERAU the theater maker and scientist Ira Melkonyan works – together with the designer and visual dramaturge Jimmy Grima and the stage director and dramaturge Biljana Radinoska – on her new project research. With “Blood Thirsty”, she continues her research into the performativity of liquids, venturing into perhaps the most symbolic bodily fluid. Re-imagining blood and other biological substances, the performance explores a feminist mysticism of leaking bodies, political borders and a sense of connection.
As part of „Tanzformen: Empowering Bodies“ the artists Ira Melkonyan and Hana Umeda are in residency in HELLERAU. In a joint Open Studio on 05.12. they will give insight into their respective research.
Ira Melkonyan is an artist and biologist. Through her performances and installations, she explores non-human actants, transitions, fluidity, and liquid boundaries. Ira is from Odesa in Ukraine. Jimmy Grima is a multidisciplinary artist, researcher, and designer who works in the fields of graphic arts, performance, archival research, and film. The duo met in Malta, Jimmy’s birth island. They both graduated with an MA in Theatre from DAS Graduate School (formerly known as DasArts) and currently live between Amsterdam, the Netherlands and Nadur, Gozo. Another DAS Theatre peer, Biljana Radinoska, will join Ira and Jimmy for the current residency. Biljana is a theatre director and dramaturg from Macedonia, currently based in Arnhem, the Netherlands.
