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

Since 2016, the most major event in my life has been becoming a mother. Workwise, I made my two biggest and most complex productions in 2018: Trapped (Fast Forward Festival 2018, produced by the Onassis Cultural Center and co-produced by the National Theater) and Dribbles and Triplets (part of the educational program of the OCC). The first was a multimedia work on how Athenians received Isadora Duncan during her visits to Greece in 1903 and 1915 and the second was a youth dance work set in school basketball courts, which proved extremely challenging on very many fronts. That was an interesting year.. after which… well… I stopped “making” work. This by no means signifies the end of my involvement with dance, but certainly indicates a conscious turn in terms of what I am interested in doing as a dancer, choreographer and teacher. Making work just didn’t seem to fulfil its promise of fulfilment. Something is missing for me, in the way the work, its ideas and its processes, enter into a dialogue (or don’t) with the audience, the wider public and ultimately society. What remains after the end of a performance? How do works enter into the collective history of a dance community? How are they embodied into the dance scene? How does a piece of work lead to a more general questioning of what we do and why we do it? There seems to be a barrier there, which is the symptom of a problem that  isn’t rooted in the specific work. In other words I don’t believe this is a personal failing. I will speak more about this in question 2.

So today I found myself editing a ‘reader’ or ‘anthology’ of foreign texts that I have translated, to be published as an introduction to dance theory covering a range of subjects and different perspectives. Steriani Tsintziloni is the scientific consultant for the book, so we are in close collaboration, exchanging ideas, comments, correcting, discussing terminology and all sorts of issues that arise from the publication of such a book. This process has brought me into the depths of academic thought, language and modes of expression. Today also finds me collaborating with four wonderful women: performance maker, researcher and University lecturer Dr.Kate Adams, choreographer, researcher and teacher Zoi Dimitrioiu, theorist, researcher and dance curator Dr. Steriani Tzintsiloni and anthropologist and visual artist Dr. Elpida Rikou, in ACAMEDIA DANCE PROJECT, which has been subsidised by the ministry of culture in the category of dance research. We all seem to be in a perpetual transition phase and have come together to research a question that was articulated for a one-day conference organised by Steriani and Elpida about artistic research in the field of dance in Greece in January 2021 (https://artistic-research.gr/artist-talks-dance/). One of the questions articulated and addressed during the symposium goes as following “If not through the Academy, then how?”.  A very specific but at the same time open question, caught my attention and led to a proposal from myself to these women to host a research on this question, in the context of the non-profit company Vaso Giannakopoulou and I founded in 2014, Shared Productions.

Finally, today finds me developing my work in the field of dance and disability that I have talked about in the previous stage to page interviews. This year the OCC commissioned three young disabled artists to make short new works in the contexts of the European program Europe Beyond Access. I took part in designing the commission program and then I was a mentor to the artists before and during their rehearsal periods. This process led to a very interesting first showing of the works, in which all three works demonstrated potential and promise for the future.

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?

In question 1. I raised the issue of how we can ensure that performances don’t reach an end when the lights go out (so to speak); how can they take on an afterlife through the dancers who danced them, the audience who watched them, the writing that succeeds them, the way the work is discussed, processed, distilled by the dance community, even if unconsciously. I believe this is a problem quite specific to Greece, although certainly not unique to this country. I think that the reasons for this are linked to the lack of an academic level of study, which usually provides the structure which orchestrates this afterlife of works: breaking down, like an enzyme, or enabling, like a catalyst, mixing and dissolving like a chemical solvent, the ideas, concepts, methodologies, techniques, images, sensations and relations that a work leaves behind. And of course the effects of academic thought reach well beyond academia itself, seeping into every aspect of dance practices. This is what I have missed dearly and this is what I am seeking through the new practices I am trying to establish, as an individual artist but also through collaborations that I am forever trying to instigate and facilitate. So I believe that what is missing is those structures, or those institutions, or those modes of practice that will create new modes of creation, more collaborative, more interdisciplinary, more extrovert and relevant to society.

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

I would like to see the Greek dance scene as a hub of experimentation in new forms of collaboration, research and production. The model of production that was handed down to my generation by the Papaioannou and Rigos generation (where you had dance companies centred around a creative genius, who submitted a funding proposal every year, got the funding, made the work and back to the beginning of the cycle) has certainly been challenged in many ways during these last ten years of crises. I would like to see a close knit community of practitioners and theorists working closely together, in direct contact with audiences, students, the public and society in general. I would like to see an awakening regarding dance publications, with exciting books and articles being written in Greek or translated, and the building of a network of actions and events instigated by the growing bibliographical sources and facilitating a vibrant and practice based exchange. We need to keep the struggle for a University Dance Department up, but at the same time we must make the most of the lack of a dance university. If it isn’t in our hands to establish it, then we must do what we can to fill that space while at the same time locating and avoiding the traps of academia…