Athena Mazarakis is a South African choreographer, performer, somatic arts educator, arts manager and embodied mindfulness practitioner. She joins The Centre for the Less Good Idea as the Momenteur of the SO Academy.

Athena brings the resourcefulness and creativity implicit in her creative practice as a choreographer and movement artist over the past 25 years to her work within arts administration, arts activism, project design and programme innovation.

As an arts educator Athena has worked across a range of formal and informal learning spaces. She held a lecturing position at Wits University (1999 – 2007) and played a leading role in the establishment of The Forgotten Angle Theatre Collaborative’s Ebhudlweni Arts Centre, in rural Mpumalanga, where she served as the Development Manager from 2016 to 2019.

A common thread that runs through Athena’s choreographic works is the exploration of the relationship between the body and live digital arts interfaces, whilst investigating the connection between memory and the body. The concept of ‘the body as archive’ has been the key focus of her artistic and scholarly research and continues to underpin her choreographic methodology and teaching practice. It also informs her embodied approach to mindfulness practices, which she has consolidated in her embodied mindfulness work through her company, EMBODIMENT NOW.

Athena has always valued inter-disciplinarity in her own artistic practice and is deeply interested in how The Centre is able to support and extend artistic investigation, learning, exploration and innovation through its collaborative and cross-disciplinary projects.

In her role as the Momenteur, Athena hopes to lean on her deep understanding of creative processes to hold and enable the learning and work processes within the SO Academy.

Photographer | Zivanai Matangi