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Performing the Greek Crisis: Navigating National Identity in the Age of Austerity
Performing the Greek Crisis explores the impact of the Greek financial crisis (2009–19) on the performing arts sector in Greece, and especially on contemporary concert dance. When Greece became the first European Union member to be threatened with default, the resulting budget cuts pushed dance to develop in unprecedented directions. The book examines the repercussions that the crisis had on artists' daily lives and experiences, weaving the personal with the political to humanize a phenomenon that, to date, had been examined chiefly through economic and statistical lenses. Informed by the author's experience of growing up in Greece and including interviews and rich descriptions of performances, the book offers a glimpse into a pivotal moment in Greek history.
In Greece, dance (and, by extension, the body) has historically held a central role in the process of national identity construction. When the crisis broke out, artists had to navigate through a precariously fluctuating landscape, with their bodies as their only stable referent. By centering the analysis of the Greek crisis on the dancing bodies, Performing the Greek Crisis is able to examine the various ways that artists reconceptualized their history and reframed ideas of national belonging, race, citizenship, and immigration.
Figure 1. Map of territorial expansion of Greece, 1832–1947. Map data is adapted from Flemming (2010). Country boundaries shapefile data is from Natural Earth Dataset. Territory lines were drawn by Lauren Gerlowski. Projection is a Miller Cylindrical World Projection.
Figure 5. Ministry of Culture funding disparities between dance and theater productions. The data is based on the approved budget. All amounts are exact except for the approximate amounts shown for theater companies in 2007–2008 (marked with an asterisk), as exact data was unavailable for that year. Graph created by the author.
Figure 10. Greek choreographers’ graduate study in the EU and the United States, 1960s–2010s. The data was drawn from the artists’ biographies found either in anthologies documenting their work (Grigoriou Mirayas 2004; Fessa-Emmanouil 2004) or on their personal websites. The graph encompasses only choreographers who returned to produce works in Greece after studying abroad. Chart created by the author.
Figure 11. The introduction of the PIIGS cheerleaders in PIIGS—A European Cheerleading Team (2015), curated by Daniel Kok. Video screenshot from Kok (2015, 13:32).
Figure 12. Country profile sections in PIIGS A European Cheerleading Team (2015), curated by Daniel Kok. From top left clockwise: Ireland, Sheena McGrandles; Portugal, Jorge Conçalves; Spain, Diego Agulló; Italy, Luigi Coppola. Sreenshots from a YouTube video of the performance (Kok 2015 3:40; 14:23; 54:20; 23:59).
Figure 13. Elpida Orfanidou in the profile section for Greece in PIIGS—A European Cheerleading Team (2015). Screenshot taken from a video of the Greek section (Orfanidou 2015a; 6:15).
Figure 17. Public performance in a central square of Kalamata during the 24th Kalamata Dance Festival in 2018. The work is 99 corners of a possible self by Athanasia Kanellopoulou. Photograph taken by the author.
Figure 18. Map of regional dance festivals in Greece. Country boundaries shapefile data is from Natural Earth Dataset. Projection is a Miller Cylindrical World Projection. Map designed by Lauren Gerlowski.
Figure 19. Promotional videos for the 2019 Dance Days Chania festival. Screenshots from separate videos on the festival’s Vimeo page: Image on the left is from (Dance Days Chania 2019b, 0:10) and image on the right is from (Dance Days Chania 2019a, 0:48).
Figure 20. Promotional video for the 2017 one small step festival. Community-building and recreational activities are emphasized. Video screenshots from one small step (2017, 01:14; 01:13; 01:11; 01:16).