Elias Klark (b.1999, Nicosia) is a performance and movement artist originally from Cyprus. He graduated from SNDO- School for New Dance Development and ECD- Expanded Contemporary Dance in Amsterdam. His works have been presented in festivals across Europe including Netherlands, Italy, Greece and Cyprus. Elia’s artworks reflect themes of borders, divided landscapes, memories, and militarised states. Oscillating between a self- existent agency and the paradox of its failure, his research traverses the absurd geopolitical reality of his homeland and his experience of compulsory service in the Cypriot National Guard. His performances are sensed through transformation and liminal spaces, notions associated with the transcendence of imaginary buffer zones that help us visualise different types of revolution. 


The landscape plays a crucial role in Klark’s work, and it is approached in a conceptual way, where dramaturgy, technology and body meet to disclose a hybrid practice, stressing the beauty that can be found in slowness and transmitting the sense of blurriness that embodiment brings. Light and sound design are part of his fields of performative exploration—areas he already uses to direct, compose and transcribe his concepts, expanding his knowledge and profession of dance making into other disciplines.
Project: MesaoríaThe New Buffer Zone 

I join the residency program – Moving The New – two days after graduating from the Academy of Theatre and Dance in Amsterdam, where from 2019 to 2026 I have been based, pursuing two bachelor degrees in dance and choreography. To that end, with my return to Cyprus, and therefore in the first phase of the residency, I crave studio time with no expected outcomes in order to drain the institutional pressure out of my body and gradually release myself from an era of fast-paced productions. Initially, I desire to move from instant needs for experimentation to the optimization of ideas in an arbitrary setting; to unravel my interdisciplinary approach to performance making, research new forms of developing dance, and map out the existing systems in which my artistry is conducted.
Conceptually, I will carry on with my persistent research on the abandonment of the Cypriot buffer zone – more specifically, how the density found on those empty lands inspires a site-specific practice that engages with performance art in more expanded terms where choreography appears, amongst the body, and in the exchange of different media: lights, audio, and video sources.
Within these three months, I am curious to find the means of directing the performance research of my own works - Mesaoría (2026) and The New Buffer Zone (2024) - toward creating the condition where the body can exist and articulate through minimalism. At the same time, avoiding linearity in its reading, providing a spherical view of their dramaturgy and establishing presence through transformation in a plain landscape. I hold no plan for the development of a single work, but rather the combination of progressing material along the way and seeing where that leads.