I am a performer, director and choreographer, writer and translator, mover, mother.

I am currently working on a solo piece, an imagined autobiography through song(s) and dance. This piece is growing out of a group research residency (at ausland, Berlin) which focused on the embodiment of ideology through music and movement. In development is also a collaborative experiment I call choreography of the body-in-care. Profoundly inspired by my reading of ‘Oedipus at Colonus’, it is an exploration of movements and soundscapes by and for bodies with (dis)abilities. I am also pursuing further education in rehabilitative care for women post-partum and beyond. 

My 2023 stage project, A Song that Can’t Be Sung, in collaboration with Hilà Lahav, deals with entanglements of trauma, empathy, and listening. The piece is inspired by the stories of Cassandra and Iphigenia as evoked in Aeschylus’ poetry. My book, Dancing with Philoctetes, is based on a lifelong engagement with dance, pain, and ‘tragedy’ broadly construed. It blends memoir, scholarship, and dramaturgy, and contains my translation-adaptation of Sophocles’ Philoctetes (Premiere: March 2020, English Theare Leipzig).

A classical philologist by training, I have worked as an actor and dramaturg in Israel, Chicago, and Leipzig. My essays have appeared on 3 Quarks Daily. I have a PhD in Classics from the University of Chicago with a dissertation on the Poetics of Listening in Sophocles. In 2019-2021 I held a Minerva Stiftung post-doctoral fellowship at the Institute for Theater Studies at the University of Leipzig, where I taught a seminar on empathy and music, and conducted research on the ‘Greek plays’ of Israeli playwright Hanoch Levin.

Drawing on my background in dance, I seek to cultivate among collaborators a dramaturgic-choreographic awareness that encompasses the body and the voice.

Contact me: abigail.akavia [at] gmail.com