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

I’ll start from the end. I decided to close my non-profit company Periigites because it was never funded. As you know, you can apply to the Ministry of Culture for funding for dance productions only through a non-profit company. After receiving negative responses to my funding applications consistently and also realising that even for the art projects I was doing I was making very little money (and on top of that often getting paid with much delay (up to a year and a half later), I decided to open my own atelier which was already a desire of mine mentioned in my last interview. This space I opened in Castella is not a dance studio, it focuses on research  with the aim to have many artists work and experiment together there.  Unfortunately I opened this space during the pandemic so I couldn’t do much back then. So I decided to change focus again and prepared for the exams for the Athens School of Fine Arts. After I got into the school I decided that I wanted to delve into sculpture mainly, although I also like painting. My desire was to explore the idea of sculpting the human body, a study on how you sculpt it and how it moves. I am now working on a project on positions and poses of the human body. In the visual arts, there is a different vocabulary for the human body, for example there is a point in the neck where we slaughter an animal, they call it the slaughter point. In every pose that the body takes, the relation to this point changes creating different axes. I investigate how different positions and axes can be therapeutic or not, what changes and why. This is a study that I started worked on, already in dance and now I explore it through sculpture. I am also experimenting with different materials of the body and the sculptural dimension that the body materials can have e.g. instead of clay, bones and the relationship between them or hair. As mentioned already in my previous interview, I work with dreams. This is a material I use and incorporate into the performances. As I grow older I feel the need to make the body more tangible to me, its materiality. Instead of embodying through movement or staying with the internal sense of movement, to touch the body with my eyes or otherwise. This helps me to decode the body. I feel  that this research is more interesting to artists than spectators, but it is fulfilling. I am now at a stage where my free time is my work; it gives me great pleasure. I’ve noticed that I like to isolate myself in what I do. It’s not that I am no longer interested in connecting with people, but I am living a more solitary, more ascetic life now. I channel all of my energy into art. I write a lot too. I’m diving into my work, not advertising it. Of course this kind of period I am going through has positive and negative sides to it.

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

I used to perform in Municipal theatres, teach in schools and was very active in the dance field. Through these crises I feel that dance and choreography are dying. Now relying on a younger generation of artists who just graduated and their blood is still boiling. At the School of Fine Arts, in the workshops on movement we are working with avatars and the imaging of movement in the digital world. I feel that there is less space for dance and choreography to continue to exist. There used to be martial or circular collective dances, now the body is locked behind a desk and a screen in a digital world. The digital has taken over the world, through different programs and applications you can create everything, movement, sound, etc. I feel that the body is gradually missing and that physicality is diminishing. It feels like big companies have come in and they are closing down the small ones. Digital education and  training has even appeared in dance. The concept of being in a studio or a dance school is disappearing. I don’t know if it makes sense to put so much technology into our life. I feel it invalidates those who want to live through the body.

Now some artists are struggling on their own as long as they can stand it, soon the avatars will come. Why can’t some people build something, a university? The School of Fine Arts has a restaurant, a library, a cinema hall, classrooms, and studios. That’s what I think dance needs, and not a theatre for dance only, but a university that encapsulates everything that the dance world needs. I do not believe that a theatre for dance alone can work. Christina Sougioultzi is running the Roes Theatre now, trying her best, but it is very difficult for artists and businesses to survive. We need a theatre of experimentation of education and expression, not a theatre business based on financial transactions. I believe that a theatre within a university campus runs on different conditions.

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

In Greece, I don’t know if we can support dance in the future because we are a country with a lot of very good dancers. Culture in Greece does not have the funds to support its own children. It has been many years already where almost all the dancers have a second degree. I remember being involved in SEXOXO (union of dance workers) in discussions saying that dance should be part of a university, so that dancers’ studies are recognized and they can continue to a master’s degree. In my time, we all went abroad to study because there was/is nothing here. We need to establish dance academically in Greece. I had suggested that dance should be part of some department in a university, maybe in the Fine Arts School, as the theatre students were incorporated in the Kapodistrian University. Dance lacks establishment. It’s not that we artists don’t feel like studying. I have studied sociology, dance, theatre and a master’s degree in choreography and performance. Still, I don’t know where to get my credits from in order to be eligible for a pension (which is almost impossible as a dancer). Some people have got to get into key positions and help sort out this issue of dance education.