Eliza Trefas
Creative Crossroads Cycle Two 2025–2026
Eliza Trefas works in contemporary dance and visual arts. She is interested in bridging visible and invisible forms of life through the body. In her practice she attempts to fix ills through poetic perspectives, and open states of embodied poetry. Her works were presented in contexts such as Salonul de Proiecte, Suprainfinit Gallery, eXplore Festival Bucharest, Bang Torres Vedras, Multiplicidades Festival Santa Cruz, RAKETE Tanzquartier Vienna, DO Festival Gdansk, National Dance Centre Bucharest, etc.
Grace
Workshop
Eliza Trefas invites to her research workshop Grace at Agora, Cité Internationale de la Danse:
Within my residency at Agora, I will work with the somewhat complicated subject of grace. Grace seeks an encounter between its meaning in dance and a broader sense of grace as found, for example, in mysticism. In spiritual contexts, it refers to a mysterious state, received rather than produced; a blessing that comes upon you.
I'm interested in how working with grace could influence, inform, transform or support the way we are in our bodies, the way we move, perform and generally create. Throughout the days, I will guide minimal body practices, we will dance, try to find ways of moving with grace as well as notice it in others, simulate a Grace Contest, and discuss theoretical or empirical references on this matter.
Grace will be explored in its wide spectrum: from wilfully spiritual (forms of attention) to playfully formal (can we dance in graceful ways?), from grace as spirit that guides the dancer, to grace as beauty, charismatic trickery in the body.
The research has a soft spot for philosophy, intuition and a longing for expressivity, for a body with a possibility for spirit. It's open to anyone interested in working with forms like dance, performance, meditation, metaphor, dreams. While no professional dance experience or training is required, you're encouraged to bring a sustained presence and attention, as well as to be sensitive to, and careful with, your own process and that of others.
Ultimately we will see what it could mean for each of us to be and dance under grace. That, of course, if any of it will come upon us.
20–21 April 2026,
Agora, Cité Internationale de la Danse
Showings in Prag
In spring 2025 Eliza Trefas is in residence at the meet Factory in Prag. She engages with eating disorders through art, aiming to form an exit practice and address the issue by shifting physical and mental hunger towards aesthetic, poetic, art hunger. She is interested in exploring various historical, cultural, literary, philosophical, and personal perspectives on the relationship between oneself and the body. She wishes to examine how the aims of both eating and starving have changed over time.
From Roman feasts with their vomitoriums to gluttony as a cardinal sin in the Middle Ages, from monks' ascetic endeavors to "holy anorexic" nuns, from spiritual fastings to intermittent fasting, from sainthood to patienthood, from periods of helpless famine to voluntary hunger strikes, from the former skeletal body ideals promoted by media to the more recent "body positivity" movements, and from athletes and models to figures like Princess Diana, Trefas is curious about what eating disorders might reflect today, their various causes, and how they can be understood and addressed through different artistic practices, through a subjective, gut-felt pursuit.
There will be showings of the work in progress on 14 and 25 June 2025.