What has changed, what are the developments in your work, since the last interview?

In 2020  Almalibre.co group was funded for the first time by the Ministry of Culture for its new production JOY, a solo. I remember saying in our first interview that I prefer to work on ensembles or duets and finally during the last 1,5 years I worked on creating an hour long solo, which was a huge challenge.

From 2020 until today I have been working with Thessaliko Regional Theatre as a movement director/choreographer. In 2020 we staged The statues are waiting, written by Andreas Flourakis and directed by Kyriaki Spanou, which was presented at various archaeological sites including the Herodion Theatre. In 2021, Thessaliko Regional Theatre produced The Good Person of Szechwan by Bertold Brecht, directed by Kyriaki Spanou, in which apart from the movement direction, I have the pleasure to participate as an actress. In the same year I collaborated as a dancer with the choreographer Jay Gonzalez, who is based at the Untergerwegs Theatre in Heidelberg, Germany in the creation Point of view.

After a decade of successive crises (economic, social, environmental, health) what changes and developments do you notice have happened in the contemporary dance scene in Greece and what do you think is missing?

I will start from the second part of the question. I believe that systematic financial support from the state is missing. So how can the dance scene evolve? The available grants from the Ministry of Culture are insufficient and unfortunately they are almost the only financial support one can get. For the evolution and development of the dance scene it is necessary that makers can produce and dancers can work. Without steady financial support there can be no steady progress. There are many good dancers who don’t work and many choreographers whose budget cannot support a production that exceeds their previous one, so inevitably almost everyone can reach only up to a point.

Before the pandemic there were already some changes and new trends that were starting to emerge, which we discussed at our previous meeting, but I think that the event of the pandemic didn’t allow them to evolve accordingly. I hope it will resume in the future. The pandemic reminded us that dance is one of the weakest links in culture.  In my opinion, things in Greece are stagnant in the present moment, because it is very difficult for people involved in the dance field to survive, which makes it even more difficult to continue to evolve or improve. The videos of solo improvisations in private spaces on the internet are more than live performances, the large number of dance studios that have opened this year in Athens and the Support art workers movement demonstrates to a large extent, what is happening in the field of dance (and culture). Of course there are always exceptions to the rule and I would like to believe that as things move towards normality the landscape will change for the better.

How could we imagine the landscape of dance in the next ten years?

I don’t know. It’s something I can’t guess or predict. Most certainly the progress of technology will influence the next dance trends, as well as the art of video-dance which has already created a movement. Nowadays things are moving so fast that ten years seems like a really long time span for me to imagine!