Ephia is a physical theater artist, dancer and the creator of a movement philosophy called “Unsound Body”, which concentrates on situations of physical instability, fragility, connection with nature and the deconstruction of the logic of performance. The first phase of her career can be described as having strong ties to butoh

Butoh

is the collective name for a diverse range of activities, techniques and motivations for dance, performance, or movement inspired by the movement. It typically involves playful and grotesque imagery, taboo topics, extreme or absurd environments, and is traditionally performed in white body makeup...

. She studied dance with Min Tanaka, Kazuo Ohno

Kazuo Ohno

was a Japanese dancer who became a guru and inspirational figure in the dance form known as Butoh. It was written of him that his very presence was an "artistic fact."...

, Akira Kasai and Anzu Furukawa. She joined Furukawa’s company in Berlin in 1999 and gained recognition for the “dance of being crushed by elephants” (created by butoh founder Tatsumi Hijikata

Tatsumi Hijikata

was a Japanese choreographer, and the founder of a genre of dance performance art called Butoh. By the late 1960s, he had begun to develop this dance form, which is highly choreographed with stylized gestures drawn from his childhood memories of his northern Japan home...

) in Furukawa’s final production, “Goya: La Quinta del Sordo”. She collaborates with composer Jeff Gburek

Jeff Gburek

Jeff Gburek, born 1963, is a guitarist/electronic music composer and sound sculptor working throughout Western Europe and the USA. He employs extended and prepared guitar techniques, signal processing, open source applications and field recordings to create richly textural music linked to musique...

 in the project Djalma Primordial Science. In the seven years of performance and teaching with Djalma Primordial Science, Ephia’s physical practice has broken away from butoh and her dance-theater has also incorporated increasingly the use of voice on a metalinguistic level, showing some affinities with the work of Roy Hart and Ami Yoshida

Ami Yoshida

Ami Yoshida is a Japanese musician.Yoshida does not play instruments, instead making her music with her own voice. Rather than conventional singing she makes a variety of vocalisations of such a nature that it is often hard to tell that the sounds are being produced by a voice at all. These sounds...

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