Debut Concert – Olga Szymula, electronic composition: Body Epiphanies

With this concert composer Olga Szymula makes her debut from the soloist class at RAMA.

The concert is part of SPOR Festival 2025.

Olga Szymula (b. 1986) is a Polish composer, performer, and director who lives and works in Aarhus, Denmark. Olga specializes in interdisciplinary, experimental works that blend video, sound, and performance. Projects include MON (2021), re- (2023) for K!lart ensemble, and Lapses (2017). Olga also composes scores for film (Baba Vanga, The Siren’s Scream) and dance (Gravity, PRIMUS). Recently, Olga has delved into somatics and choreography, shaping Body Epiphanies, which will premiere at SPORfestival 2025. With this performance, Olga concludes her post graduate studies I electronic composition at DIEM, The Royal Academy of Music, Aarhus/Aalborg.

Body Epiphanies is a somatic composition by Szymula, expanding on The Ears of the Skin, supported by the Danish Composer Society. The piece explores somatics – the body’s internal perception – through sound, physical expression, text, and choreographed movement. Performed by Szymula herself, Afro-Brazilian artist Sandro Masai, and Danish senior dancer Laila Wodtke Nissen, the work unfolds as a choreographed corporeal documentary, drawing from the performers’personal memories. Rooted in lived experience, Body Epiphanies explores seven core emotional drives – seeking, play, care, rage, fear, panic/grief, and lust–drawing on neuroscientist Dr. Jaak Panksepp’s research on emotional command systems. His work reveals that these emotions are not abstract concepts but deeply embedded neural processes that shape survival, connection, and human relationships.