Yannis and filmmaker/dramaturge, Talal Al-Muhanna dissected humor by studying particular sources that either produce humorous situations or funny reactions for the viewer. Yannis feels that by understanding where and how humor can be found and accessed, we can all experience it more easily, which could allow for vitality and lightheartedness to be breathed into performance again rather than the solemn and sacrosanct regard that is sometimes expected. Through various methods, they studied and measured audience response to various props, sound scores, juxtaposition, lighting, movement speed and verbal expression. His collaborators included filmmaker and dramaturge, Talal Al-Muhanna and dancers Kara Davis and John Mercke.
Yannis Adoniou, born in Athens, Greece is an award-winning dancer, choreographer, filmmaker and the artistic director of KUNST-STOFF Dance Company based in San Francisco. Since its founding in 1998, Mr. Adoniou has premiered over 20 new works in the Bay Area, toured internationally, and collaborated with nationally known visual and media artists and composers.
Mr. Adoniou also studied dance on scholarships at The State School of Dance in Athens and John Neumeier's Hamburg Ballet School in Germany. He has danced with the Osnabruck National Dance Theater, the Bonn State Ballett, Unterwegs Theater in Heidelberg, Germany and Sara Shelton Mann's Contraband among others.
Mr. Adoniou was a member of Alonzo King's LINES Contemporary Ballet for seven years and he currently serves as a teacher and choreographer at the San Francisco Dance Center, LINES Ballet School and LINES Ballet School Pre-professional Program.
Mr. Adoniou was nominated twice for the Bay Area's Isadora Duncan Awards, winning an "Izzy" in 1998 for outstanding achievement in performance. His choreography has been hailed as "some of the most original dance or drama" by the San Francisco Chronicle, "multy-focused, ever-shifting work in which the viewer imposes his own perspective" by Dance View West and the San Francisco Examiner has praised KUNST-STOFF as being a "remarkably harmonized company" with "some of the finest ballet-trained daredevils to be found in any metropolis."
Mr. Adoniou has received commissions from and presented his work at the Bonn Ballett, Summerfest/Dance, the Bay Area Dance Series, the San Francisco Lesbian and Gay Dance Festival, the Burning Man Festival in Nevada, the Herbst Dance festival in Heidelberg, Germany, Dance Forum Monaco, the Dimitria International Dance Festival in Thessaloniki, Greece and Ballet Frankfurt. This summer the company will perform Mr. Adoniou’s work in Berlin, Germany at Dock11 and in Athens, Greece at the Athens International Dance Festival.
As a filmmaker, Mr. Adoniou has received acclaim from the San Francisco Footage Film Festival and financial support from the Film Arts Foundation. The films BIRTH, POTHEAD and imageWord.not_a_pipe=, in collaboration with dance filmmaker/cinematographer, Evann Siebens, have been presented at film festivals around the world and have been shown on arts television networks in Canada and Europe.
Talal Al-Muhanna received his professional training in dance, drama and musical theater at the Elmhurst Ballet School in England – being awarded the Solo Seal of the Royal Academy of Dance at the conclusion of his studies. As a young performer he appeared at the Royal Festival Hall, the Duke of York Theater in London’s West End, on the BBC program Blue Peter and in a Command Performance for H.R.H. the Princess of Wales. An additional year of training in the United States at North Carolina School of the Arts was immediately followed by an extensive career in classical and contemporary ballet as a performer with companies in the United States and Asia: North Carolina Dance Theater, Cleveland Ballet, Ballet Chicago, Universal Ballet/Seoul and Feld Ballets/New York. In 1996, he moved to Germany where he then performed in productions for Germany’s National Theater Mannheim, Ballett Frankfurt, Ballett Freiburg Pretty Ugly, Unterwegstheater and for Mouvoir - a Cologne-based multimedia dance group. He also choreographed and conducted dramaturgy at some of these same companies and appeared as an actor in short films, musicals and drama productions including West Side Story (National Theater), The Merchant of Venice (Das TAT) and Faust (Ruhr Triennale). In New York, his improvisational work was presented at both the O.K. Harris gallery and Joyce Soho as part of the Downtown Arts Festival in 1999 and at the alternative Brooklyn venues Galapagos Art & Performance Space and The Cave thereafter. His collective stage experience has included professional engagements at most of the major international performance venues in North America, Europe and Asia including for the opening of TATE Modern.
Since 1999, Talal has been regularly engaged as a dramaturge, curator and producer for various companies, theater productions, films, special events, symposia and festivals in Europe and the United States. In this capacity, he has developed multi-media programs showcasing dance, theater, music, film and video for the Frankfurt Stock Exchange and Frankfurt Culture Committee; UnterwegsTheater, TANZinternational and Forum Neue Art (Heidelberg); the Korzo Theater (Den Haag); Side Step Festival (Helsinki); PACT Zollverein (Essen); Goethe Institute (Brussels); The Kitchen (New York) and for Ballett Frankfurt and Das TAT under the direction of William Forsythe. He is currently co-curating a screendance event in Ireland in cooperation with Dance Ireland, Daghdha Dance Company and the Dublin City Council Arts Office. The series will present workshops with artists such as Rosemary Butcher and Iina Naoto (Dance & Media Japan), discussion forums with Irish media artists and choreographers plus screenings of international dance videos and installations. As an extension of his curatorial work, Talal has utilized video to document and/or interview artists such as Dutch theater director Jan Ritsema, New York performance artist John Kelly and filmmaker Mike Figgis.
Talal has coordinated and developed academic/educational projects such as the 2003 international symposium Dance and the Brain (in cooperation with The Dana Foundation in New York); imPACT 04:Strategy and Scope of Theatrical Practices - the 2004 retrospective of William Forsythe’s work for PACT Zollverein and, most recently, the Daghdha Mentoring Programme in Choreography & Dance - a major public-private initiative to support emerging artists in Ireland that is run in cooperation with Ireland’s Employment and Training Authority.
Holding a BA in Film & Moving Image Production from Leeds Metropolitan University, Talal has also produced, directed and edited digital video projects for public presentation at Das TAT (Frankfurt), tanzhaus NRW (Duesseldorf), PACT Zollverein (Essen), Side Step Festival (Helsinki) and the New Media Series@ Dance Mission Theater (San Francisco). His work has been exhibited at international dance film festivals such as ADF’s Dancing for the Camera (N. Carolina), Danscamdanse (Ghent), BOZAR (Brussels) and Coreografo Elettronico (Naples). Recently he co-produced/directed a promotional video for Dance Umbrella in London – featuring performance excerpts and interviews with Mark Morris, Michael Clark, Charles Linehan and Trisha Brown Dance Company amongst others. He also holds a Certificate in Fundraising from New York University and is producing a documentary sponsored by Dance Films Association (NY).
