PRIMORDIAL

Constantine Koukias is an internationally acclaimed composer, opera director, and producer based in Amsterdam since 2013. Originally from Tasmania, where he co-founded with Werner Ihlenfeld IHOS Music Theatre and Opera, he has built a distinguished career spanning over three decades, with projects presented across Europe, Australia, North America, and Asia.

Koukias’s work is distinguished by its innovative fusion of large-scale music theatre, opera, film, and installation art, often exploring themes of migration, identity, and human rights. His productions are recognized for their striking spatial and temporal designs and their integration of diverse musical traditions, including Byzantine, Latin, and Eastern influences.

Major international commissions include ICON for the 20th anniversary of the Sydney Opera House and The Barbarians, inspired by Constantine Cavafy, which was commissioned by the Museum of Old and New Art (MONA). Koukias’s avant-garde approach to opera has resulted in groundbreaking productions such as Days and Nights with Christ, To Traverse Water, MIKROVION, The Divine Kiss, Tesla – Lightning in His Hand, and Prayer Bells, which premiered in Chicago. Other notable works include Kimisis – Falling Asleep, which has toured the Netherlands and Australia, and Before The Flame Goes Out, performed at the Stedelijk Museum Amsterdam and other major European museums.

Recent projects include the film noir opera Deep Black Sleep for MONA FOMA, the film opera Shaped by Trees (in collaboration with Biasino William Pezzimenti), and the international documentary-performance series PRIMORDIAL, exploring Ediacara fossil sites worldwide.

Koukias has received numerous prestigious awards, including the International Valentino Bucchi Vocal Prize in Rome for Incantation II for soprano and digital delay, the Sir Winston Churchill Fellowship for his contributions to music and opera, and The American Prize for his direction of Backward from Winter. He also won ABC Radio’s Gallipoli Centenary Composer Competition with Three Episodes from the Diary of Signaller Peter Ellis. His opera The Barbarians was nominated for a Helpmann Award for Best New Opera. His work has also been recognized in the field of design with the Interior Design Excellence Awards (IDEA) and the Australian Interior Design Awards for the production of The Barbarians.

Beyond his artistic achievements, Koukias is recognized as a passionate collaborator and advocate for social justice initiatives.

Pianist Gabriella Smart is a leading advocate of new music. Touring extensively in Australia and internationally for over 30 years, she has premiered over 80 new works for solo piano in Europe and China. Her expertise and leadership as an Australian representative artist has been recognised with numerous awards and grants including a Helpmann Award, a Churchill Fellowship, an Arts SA Fellowship, a Prelude Composer Residency, and, in 2019, an APRA AMCOS Award for Excellence by an Individual. As an improviser, she has collaborated with numerous acclaimed artists including Lisa Gerrard, Brian Ritchie, Cat Hope, and Paul Grabowsky.

Robin van Erven Dorens is an independent filmmaker from Amsterdam. He makes documentaries, films on commission and music videos.

His documentary Ik ben een zwarte beeldhouwer (“I am a black sculptor”) is a poetic quest for the imagination and inspiration of the Amsterdam artist Nelson Carrilho, who expresses his African origins with his bronze sculptures. In this time of polarisation, Carrilho feels the pain of the colonial past and transforms this pain into monumental statues.

The documentary In Groove We Trust is a cinematic expression of the musical spirit of Joseph Bowie: the foreman, singer and trombone player of Defunkt, the eccentric, highly influential New York based hard-core jazz-funk band from the 80s. Starting off as a regular music documentary, with a lot of live music, this film appears to be a search for the definition of ‘groove’. The story line takes many surprising twists and therewith passes along many aspects of Bowie’s inspiration, his character and his musical ambitions. While themes like heroin addiction, racism, personal responsibility, buddhism and commercialism in music come along in often humorous scenes, Bowie is shown as a man of great contrasts.

Robin also made documentaries about the visual artist Hilarius Hofstede and Former USSR leader Michaël Gorbachov, among many other projects. Currently he makes video’s for musicians and for the Nederlandse Bach Vereniging (Dutch Bach Society).

Charles Shafaieh is an arts critic and journalist whose writing on theatre, visual art, literature, architecture, film, and music has appeared in The New Yorker, The Financial Times, Artforum, The Irish Times, The Times Literary Supplement, and Mastermind, among other international publications. An editor at large for The Brooklyn Rail, he regularly contributes to Harvard Design Magazine and Opera News. For the Brooklyn Public Library, he co-curates LitFilm, an annual film festival which focuses on documentaries about writers. He is based in Paris.