June 21, 2024 • 25 mins
The relationship between dance and politics has long been a complex one. In moments of national and international crisis, artists are often at the center of resistance movements, and the embodied knowledges honed by dancers, choreographers, and performers can become key survival techniques for diverse communities.
In episode 161 of Imagine Otherwise, host Cathy Hannabach interviews dance studies scholar and Ideas on Fire author Natalie Zervou, author of the new book Performing the Greek Crisis: Navigating National Identity in the Age of Austerity.
The book is out now from the University of Michigan Press, and it offers a deep dive into how the Greek dance world and arts communities navigated the decade-long Greek financial crisis that began in 2009.
In the interview, Natalie situates dance in Greece’s complex economic and political standing in the European Union, explaining how choreographers, performers, funders, and audiences manage this standing through the performing arts.
They also discuss the vibrant regional dance festival circuit in Greece, where festival organizers and dancers use them as platforms for political critique, cultural expression, and international engagement.
Natalie also addresses recent Greek dance performances about the European refugee crisis, explaining how they engage the urgent and racialized politics of mobility and displacement in the context of neoliberal capitalism and racist state violence.
They close out the episode with Natalie’s vision for a new creative economy in which dance and artistic labor is valued and the embodied arts serve as a vital way to build more just futures.
Transcript and show notes: https://ideasonfire.net/161-natalie-zervou
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Episode Transcript
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(00:05):
Welcome to Imagine Otherwise, thepodcast about bridging art, activism,
and academia to build more just futures.
I'm Cathy Hannabach, and my guest todayon the show is dance studies scholar
and Ideas on Fire author NatalieZervou, who we were excited to work
with on her awesome new book Performingthe Greek Crisis: Navigating National
Identity in the Age of Austerity.
(00:27):
The book is out now from the Universityof Michigan Press, and it offers a deep
dive into how the Greek dance world andarts communities navigated the decade-long
Greek financial crisis that began in 2009.
In our interview, Natalie situatesdance in Greece's complex economic and
political standing in the European Union,explaining how choreographers, performers,
(00:50):
funders, and audiences all manage thisstanding through the performing arts.
We also discuss the vibrant regional dancefestival circuit in Greece, where festival
organizers and dancers use them asplatforms for political critique, cultural
expression, and international engagement.
Natalie also addresses recent Greekdance performances about the European
(01:12):
refugee crisis, explaining how theyengage the urgent and racialized
politics of mobility and displacementin the context of neoliberal
capitalism and racist state violence.
Finally, we close out the episode withNatalie's vision for a new creative
economy in which dance and artistic laboris valued and the embodied arts serve as
(01:33):
a vital way to build more just futures.
Thank you so much for beingwith us today, Natalie.
Thank you so much for having me.
In this book, you show the waysthat Greece has a pretty complicated
role in European economic andpolitical hierarchies—what you call
a center/periphery relationship.
I'm curious how that center/peripheryrelationship shapes the Greek dance
(01:58):
communities that you're writing about.
I feel like to answer thatquestion, I need to provide a
little bit of context about whatled me to figure out this tension.
I grew up in Greece, and I went tostudy abroad, first in the UK and then a
little bit in Germany and then in the US.
I saw how people view Greeceinternationally and, by
(02:21):
extension, how they viewed me.
That was an eye-opening experiencebecause in some ways it's what planted
the seeds for this question of Greece'spositionality within the European Union.
So on the one hand, there are all thesenarratives about Greece that refer to
Ancient Greece and ideas and philosophiessuch as Greece being hailed as the quote
unquote "cradle of Western civilization"or the "birthplace of democracy."
(02:46):
And all of those ideas impactthe ways that the lineage of
Greece is viewed in Western andEurocentric notions of identity.
And then on the other hand, there ismodern Greece, and I still can't help
but think it's kind of ironic thatwe have to specify that the Greece of
today is quote unquote modern Greece.
I think that that in itself says a lot.
(03:08):
And then back to the question about howthis relates to the center/periphery
relationships, I feel that there's thisimagined ideal of Greece as the center
of ideological constructs of Europe.
And then there's the reality of thepresent day, especially after the
Greek financial crisis where Greeceis very much put in the periphery or
(03:29):
marginalized within the European Union.
So that's the first level ofthis center/periphery discussion.
And then in terms of how dancefits into this, dance has always
been very central in the processof identity construction in Greece.
Upon the establishment of Greece'sindependence, there were a few folk dances
that were chosen and incorporated intophysical education curricula across all
(03:52):
the liberated areas, across all the areasthat got liberated afterwards, because
the initial nation-state comprised whatis now just the southern part of Greece.
So with that, we see thatembodiment is really central to
the perception of Greek identity.
But then Greek identity is notoften tied to contemporary dance,
(04:14):
which is what I'm focusing on in thebook, because contemporary dance is
considered sort of an imported genre.
That's something that a lot of scholars Iinterviewed in the process of researching
this book also told me about becauseit seems like the endemic experience
of dancing Greece is about socializing,building relationships and kinship, and
(04:36):
contemporary dance or really any typeof concert dance, sort of puts a barrier
between audience and performers becausethere's someone on stage, and then
there's not as much live interaction.
So the reason why I'm mentioning thisis that it seems that dance is central
in the process of national identityconstruction but, then, contemporary
(04:56):
dance is kind of peripheral in thatrelationship, even within Greece.
Then if we map that out internationally,we start to see that contemporary concert
dance actually seems to be the mainembodied language that artists have to
converse with other people, other artistsin the European Union across borders.
(05:18):
So there it starts to become moreof a central idea for relating
across borders, even though it isperipheral within the Greek border.
So I hope that startsto answer your question.
It's very complicated.
I did my best to summarize it.
I mean, folks are just going to have toread the rest of the book to get to it.
Right.
There's that.
(05:38):
One of the things that I think is reallyinteresting in how you frame some of
these questions in the book is you talkabout multiple scales or multiple levels.
So for instance, you talk about howpercarity operates both at the level
of the nation with regards to nationalfinances, the Greek financial crisis
in particular, national identity,but also precarity operates at
(06:01):
the level of the human body, thedancing body, the community body.
What are some of the ways that youfound through doing research for
this book that Greek dancers andchoreographers and artists are addressing
those multiple scales of precarity?
So, precarity started as a primarilyfinancial condition brought
about by extensive budget cuts.
(06:23):
And of course, we know that the arts arealways the first sector to be impacted.
I feel like I need to providea little bit of context for how
the system is set up in Greece.
So, in order to produce either achoreographic work or a theater
performance, choreographers ordirectors need to apply to the
Ministry of Culture for a subsidy.
There is a board that decides whatthe amount is of each subsidy based
(06:46):
on the proposal and also who gets it,and not everyone gets it every time.
So that in itself sets up a precariouslandscape for artists to begin
with, let alone during the crisis.
In the book, I'm focusing primarilyon the period between 2009 and 2019
as the main time of the crisis.
But within that period, there's alsoa sub-period between 2011 and 2017
(07:11):
when the ministerial subsidies fordance and theater completely stopped.
So in that time, we see that initiallythe response of the artists is that
they slow down and not a lot ofworks are being created until they
figure out how to navigate this newlandscape because everything that
they took for granted up to that pointhas all of a sudden been taken away.
(07:34):
And then, in the beginning, we seea lot of small-scale productions,
such as solos or duets or ensemblesof up to four people, because they
could not support large casts.
But then moving forward throughoutthe years, especially after 2013,
where people had two years to adjustand see how to start navigating these
(07:54):
new conditions, what followed wasincreased political mobilization.
Artistic production was neverreally censored in Greece.
But I would hypothesize that the lackof subsidies and also the lack of any
government body or agenda that theartists had to gear their work toward to
receive financial support really openedup doors for artistic experimentation
(08:18):
afterwards because they no longer hadto cater to anything or please anybody
in order to receive the subsidies.
So they could really dowhatever they wanted.
And that's where their political agendasreally came forward, especially because
they were experiencing the crisis.
So after this period of slowingdown, they started coming together.
(08:41):
We saw a lot of communalinitiatives springing.
We saw the creation of a sort oftit-for-tat economy where it was
really about supporting one another.
Like one person would do the lightsone night and be an usher, and then
when that person had a performance theother time, they would switch roles.
Things like that.
It became very much this idea thatwe kind of also observed during
(09:05):
COVID of we're all in this together.
People realized that we allhave the same experience.
How can we support each other?
And that's kind of one of the mainways that they responded to precarity.
And then I also want to say that a lotof choreographers who I interviewed
and dancers told me that at the verybeginning of the crisis, they felt
(09:27):
sort of a need to remove themselves,oftentimes also from social situations.
And there was this sense of lookinginward or turning inward, which also
led to a lot of productions emphasizingmental health, emphasizing the sense
of alienation that was what a lot ofpeople navigated during the crisis,
(09:48):
and also emphasizing the strain thatthe crisis put on human relationships.
I know that this is not reallypart of the question, but I
also thought I would mention it.
This is something that I observedin both my own methodology and
my experience of having beentrained as a dancer growing up.
A lot of dancers mentioned using the toolsthat they gained in their dance training
(10:13):
to navigate this new precarious reality.
So an example being harnessing the toolsof improvisation that already lived in
their body to sort of improvise their waythrough this new fluctuating landscape.
And that's also something that I foundin the process of writing the book and
coming up with a theoretical frameworkbecause when I got back to Greece in
(10:34):
2013 to start doing this research,I mean, I grew up there, but it was
the place that I no longer fullyrecognized because so much has changed.
So I had a little bit ofa similar experience to
navigating an unknown landscape.
I had to also improvise myselfto come up with the solution and
figure out where the research andthe data is taking me to create the
(10:57):
frameworks that you see in the book.
It's a really interesting example of howthe research process often comes to mirror
or at least have a close relationship tothe thing that you're studying itself.
Where you're hearing about the use ofimprovisation by the folks that you're
interviewing, but then you're also havingto do it yourself in the writing process.
(11:20):
Yeah, absolutely.
Really cool.
So, one of the chapters also looksat regional dance festivals across
Greece, and these have differentgenres, they're held in different
locations, they have different audiences.
How are dance communities usingthose kinds of regional festivals to
navigate local issues in that specificregion but also tapping into these
(11:43):
broader international conversations?
I think this also relates to thecenter/periphery argument and discussion
earlier, but slightly differently.
So, for context again, most of theartistic production in contemporary
concert dance, which is the focusof the book, throughout the year is
primarily located in Athens, whichis Greece's capital, and not so
(12:06):
much in a few other urban centers.
But they're not by any means comparableactivity to what is happening in Athens.
And most of the rehearsals and theatersare located there, so that's where
most of the activity is occurring.
So the dance festivals that emergedduring the crisis started offering
opportunities for artists totour their works within Greece.
(12:29):
And here's where we start to getagain into a different level of the
center/periphery discussion becauseAthens is the center of production and
then the rest of Greece is the peripherywhere if we think of this idea of
contemporary being an imported genre,it's not very much a genre that audiences
in the periphery are familiar with.
(12:49):
So these festivals started as an effort tosort of de-center the dance scene and make
concert dance more available to audiencesin regional Greece and to introduce
them and educate them about this genre.
Now most of the festivals were alsointernational in scope, as you mentioned,
and this gave artists an additionalincentive because they had increased
(13:11):
opportunities to view internationallyacclaimed work because they also invited
a lot of international artists and alsoto present their work for international
audiences without leaving Greece, whichwas something that a lot of them did
not have the opportunity to do becauseof the crisis and the budget cuts.
So many of these regional festivalsreally began fostering international
(13:31):
dialogue between Greek artists andartists from all over the world.
Now one thing that I feel like I shouldalso mention in this response is that
the fact that many of these festivalscame about during the financial crisis.
This is interesting because in someways the crisis worked as a branding
or marketing mechanism to establishthese festivals as well and to attract
(13:55):
international audiences who heardabout the crisis and wanted to sort of
satisfy their curiosity about what theconditions are on the ground in Greece.
And they also perceived a lot ofthe festivals as grassroots activism
initiatives, the reason being that a lotof these festivals, and we're talking
about approximately six or seven festivalsthat started in within the first three
(14:18):
to four years of the crisis, some ofwhich have really become well established
nowadays and have continued to circulateand be organized on an annual basis.
But the reasons why they tied thesefestivals to activism is because they
were very much volunteer-based and verysmall initiatives when they started.
(14:40):
The festival organizers took on allof the labor of not just organizing
the festival, but they would alsobe stage manager, cleaners, ushers.
They really did everything, even to theextent of sometimes hosting international
artists and audiences in their housesbecause there wasn't an infrastructure
to support the festival otherwise.
(15:00):
I feel like in some ways thatcontributed to the myth and the
allure of these festivals, both asgrassroots activist initiatives and
also as a true experience of the Greekcrisis, which then became sort of a
gateway for tourism for these places.
You close out this book by looking atGreek performances that address what's
(15:22):
often called the European refugeecrisis, or an increase in displaced
peoples moving across borders dueto things like war, state violence,
economic crises, such as the Greekfinancial crisis, and many, many others.
I'm curious how those performancesaddress racialized refugee politics
and mobility in this context.
Yeah, thank you for that question.
(15:45):
Again, I feel like I have to start with alittle bit of context for our listeners.
The Greek financial crisis, as I said, Isituate in the book between 2009 and 2019,
and what came to be known as the Europeanrefugee crisis is noted as reaching
the level of a crisis around 2015.
(16:05):
However, legal anthropologistHeath Cabot has argued that in
Greece there was a crisis of asylumdating back all the way to 2004.
So this was not something new thatGreece had to deal with, but there
was in fact inadequate infrastructureto support and process asylum claims
of displaced populations for almost adecade already leading up to the crisis.
(16:28):
So the crisis and the budget cuts justreally intensified all of that process and
made it even harder for people to processtheir claims and move on from Greece
to other parts of the European Union.
And again, in case anyone is unfamiliar,Greece is one of the main ports to the
European Union because of its geographiclocation at the southeastern part of
(16:50):
Europe, where it's mainly accessibleby sea through the continent of
Africa, Turkey, and the Middle East.
And also a lot of people could crossover the border at the north by Evros.
Since the onset of the Greek financialcrisis, there has been a steady rise
of ethnocentric rhetoric in Greekpolitics, which really reached a peak
(17:12):
in 2012 with the election of a fascistparty in the parliament in 2012.
Thankfully, there has been atrial, the party has been deemed
a criminal organization, and a lotof the members have been convicted.
But at the time, this increase inethnocentric rhetoric, xenophobia,
and increase in racially motivatedviolence led a lot of choreographers to
(17:35):
really reflect on the shifting climate.
They tried to respond to it bycreating works that were aiming
to raise awareness, raise audienceawareness about these issues.
So they brought in a lot of migrantsand refugees and other people who were
making their way through Greece toother parts of the European Union and
(17:56):
involve them in the creative process.
And here's where it starts to getcomplicated because many of the
participants actually reflect on theseinitiatives as really therapeutic
experiences that gave them a sense ofbelonging and a sense of community.
And that is definitely truebecause they did foster a lot of
connections between the locals andthe people who had recently arrived.
(18:20):
But I think it also presents aninteresting oxymoron because there's,
on the one hand, the sort of freedomof experience and freedom of movement
that they can experience withinthe setting of the performance.
But then the reality is that thesepeople are stuck in Greece because
they are experiencing what, again,Heath Cabot refers to as legal limbo.
(18:44):
So they can't actually leave until theirclaims, their asylum claims, are processed
so they can move on to another country.
And here's the binary sort of dancebeing about movement and expression
but then this feeling of being stuck.
A lot of these works were documentedon film and actually toured as dance
films in international festivals,which creates a very jarring antithesis
(19:08):
to the immobility of the displacedpopulations and the reality of their
experience in Greece in that moment.
Then another thing that I wasconsidering is that they way that
they were guided to explore thisidea of freedom and to improvise was
a lot of times driven through veryWestern or Euro-American practices and
(19:32):
frameworks, such as improvisationalscores or the practice of contact
improvisation, which has American roots.
So all of that raises questions for meabout how much of their experience was
truly reflected in terms of bringingthe cultural richness on the stage and
(19:52):
how much of that was a highly curatedversion of the refugee experience.
This brings me to my last point,which is that a lot of times,
yes, the performances were aboutraising awareness on these issues.
So a lot of times they had to engagewith the hardship and the resilience that
(20:13):
refugees went through and encountered.
But also I feel like after a certainpoint, these narratives became limiting
for the displaced populations becausethey fixed them in a stereotype.
I remember there was also—I don'tremember the exact year, but the
United Nations High Commissionerfor Refugees had this campaign with
(20:35):
a slogan and this is a quote of theslogan: refugees are not the crisis.
It's the narratives we tell about them.
End quote.
So that's something that Itook away, which does not only
apply to the case of Greece.
I observed that throughout other partsof Europe as well, after a certain
point, engaging with refugees inperformances also became sort of a trend.
(20:59):
It started crossing the borders orraising the question of is it really
engagement for the sake of education oris it veering into being exploitation?
So this brings me to my favorite questionthat I get to ask folks, which really gets
at the heart of why you write books likethis, why you do this kind of research.
And that's that world thatyou're working toward.
(21:21):
So I'll ask you the giant question thatcloses out every episode of this show.
What is that world thatyou're working toward?
What kind of world do you want?
Wow.
Yeah, what a question.
I think broadly, a world wherethe value of art is recognized
(21:43):
and where creative labor is notundervalued or is not perceived as
always being tangled with precarity.
I've also been reflecting a loton how there are, there seem to be
increasingly many crises that we haveto deal with in our lives these days.
There's, like, global healthcrisis, human rights, migrant
(22:06):
crisis, financial, environmental.
And I'm sure they're unfortunately goingto keep occurring as we move forward.
The one thing that became clear to mewhile I was doing this research is that
oftentimes when we are considering thesecrisis, the default is to view them
through a lens of human rights sort ofstatistics or numbers or other measurable
(22:26):
factors that quantify that experience.
And I found that this approach can bevery dehumanizing because it doesn't take
into account the toll that crisis have onpeople's lived experience ,on their mental
health, and especially on their body,since I'm coming from a dance background.
I've said this in the book as well, butI view crisis as sort of a moment of
(22:46):
rupture when everything that you took forgranted up to that point is in flux and
your only stable referent is your body.
So inevitably, I think, as I saidbefore, with what interview is
reported, crieses instigate thisinward turn and focus on oneself.
So to return to your question, ideally,I would envision a world where the
(23:10):
body, embodied knowledge, and livedexperience are taken into consideration
in the process of political decisionmaking and where people are not
treated as statistics, but theiractual lived experience and embodied
impact of any decision that is made isrecognized and thoroughly considered.
Well, thank you so much for beingwith us today and sharing all these
(23:31):
ways that you imagine otherwise.
Thank you so much as well.
Thanks for joining me for thisepisode of Imagine Otherwise.
A big thanks to Natalie aswell for sharing her work.
Our team really loved working withNatalie on her new book, Performing
the Greek Crisis (23:49):
Navigating National Identity in the Age of Austerity.
The book is out now from theUniversity of Michigan Press.
You can discover more about the bookand grab your copy in the episode show
notes on our website, which also havea detailed transcript, related books
and interviews, and a teaching guide.
If you'd like some interdisciplinaryediting or indexing support for your own
(24:11):
book, we would love to hear from you.
Our team of developmental editors,copyeditors, indexers, book marketers,
and publishing consultants specialize ininterdisciplinary books like Natalie's and
can help you go from draft to published.
You can get in touch onour website at ideasonfire.
net.
This episode of ImagineOtherwise was produced and
(24:33):
edited by me, Cathy Hannabach.
If this episode inspired you,make sure to subscribe to the
show at ideasonfire.net/podcast.
In addition to new episodes, subscribersalso get access to exclusive writing
and publishing resources, book newsfrom the Ideas on Fire author community,
and invitations to interdisciplinaryevents to help you imagine otherwise.
(24:56):
Finally, you can find Ideas on Fireon social media at @ideasonfirephd,
where we share all kinds of resourcesto help interdisciplinary scholars
write and publish awesome texts,enliven public conversations, and
ultimately build more just worlds.
Welcome to Imagine Otherwise, thepodcast about bridging art, activism,
and academia to build more just futures.
I'm Cathy Hannabach, and my guest todayon the show is dance studies scholar
and Ideas on Fire author NatalieZervou, who we were excited to work
with on her awesome new book Performingthe Greek Crisis: Navigating National
Identity in the Age of Austerity.
(00:27):
The book is out now from the Universityof Michigan Press, and it offers a deep
dive into how the Greek dance world andarts communities navigated the decade-long
Greek financial crisis that began in 2009.
In our interview, Natalie situatesdance in Greece's complex economic and
political standing in the European Union,explaining how choreographers, performers,
(00:50):
funders, and audiences all manage thisstanding through the performing arts.
We also discuss the vibrant regional dancefestival circuit in Greece, where festival
organizers and dancers use them asplatforms for political critique, cultural
expression, and international engagement.
Natalie also addresses recent Greekdance performances about the European
(01:12):
refugee crisis, explaining how theyengage the urgent and racialized
politics of mobility and displacementin the context of neoliberal
capitalism and racist state violence.
Finally, we close out the episode withNatalie's vision for a new creative
economy in which dance and artistic laboris valued and the embodied arts serve as
(01:33):
a vital way to build more just futures.
Thank you so much for beingwith us today, Natalie.
Thank you so much for having me.
In this book, you show the waysthat Greece has a pretty complicated
role in European economic andpolitical hierarchies—what you call
a center/periphery relationship.
I'm curious how that center/peripheryrelationship shapes the Greek dance
(01:58):
communities that you're writing about.
I feel like to answer thatquestion, I need to provide a
little bit of context about whatled me to figure out this tension.
I grew up in Greece, and I went tostudy abroad, first in the UK and then a
little bit in Germany and then in the US.
I saw how people view Greeceinternationally and, by
(02:21):
extension, how they viewed me.
That was an eye-opening experiencebecause in some ways it's what planted
the seeds for this question of Greece'spositionality within the European Union.
So on the one hand, there are all thesenarratives about Greece that refer to
Ancient Greece and ideas and philosophiessuch as Greece being hailed as the quote
unquote "cradle of Western civilization"or the "birthplace of democracy."
(02:46):
And all of those ideas impactthe ways that the lineage of
Greece is viewed in Western andEurocentric notions of identity.
And then on the other hand, there ismodern Greece, and I still can't help
but think it's kind of ironic thatwe have to specify that the Greece of
today is quote unquote modern Greece.
I think that that in itself says a lot.
(03:08):
And then back to the question about howthis relates to the center/periphery
relationships, I feel that there's thisimagined ideal of Greece as the center
of ideological constructs of Europe.
And then there's the reality of thepresent day, especially after the
Greek financial crisis where Greeceis very much put in the periphery or
(03:29):
marginalized within the European Union.
So that's the first level ofthis center/periphery discussion.
And then in terms of how dancefits into this, dance has always
been very central in the processof identity construction in Greece.
Upon the establishment of Greece'sindependence, there were a few folk dances
that were chosen and incorporated intophysical education curricula across all
(03:52):
the liberated areas, across all the areasthat got liberated afterwards, because
the initial nation-state comprised whatis now just the southern part of Greece.
So with that, we see thatembodiment is really central to
the perception of Greek identity.
But then Greek identity is notoften tied to contemporary dance,
(04:14):
which is what I'm focusing on in thebook, because contemporary dance is
considered sort of an imported genre.
That's something that a lot of scholars Iinterviewed in the process of researching
this book also told me about becauseit seems like the endemic experience
of dancing Greece is about socializing,building relationships and kinship, and
(04:36):
contemporary dance or really any typeof concert dance, sort of puts a barrier
between audience and performers becausethere's someone on stage, and then
there's not as much live interaction.
So the reason why I'm mentioning thisis that it seems that dance is central
in the process of national identityconstruction but, then, contemporary
(04:56):
dance is kind of peripheral in thatrelationship, even within Greece.
Then if we map that out internationally,we start to see that contemporary concert
dance actually seems to be the mainembodied language that artists have to
converse with other people, other artistsin the European Union across borders.
(05:18):
So there it starts to become moreof a central idea for relating
across borders, even though it isperipheral within the Greek border.
So I hope that startsto answer your question.
It's very complicated.
I did my best to summarize it.
I mean, folks are just going to have toread the rest of the book to get to it.
Right.
There's that.
(05:38):
One of the things that I think is reallyinteresting in how you frame some of
these questions in the book is you talkabout multiple scales or multiple levels.
So for instance, you talk about howpercarity operates both at the level
of the nation with regards to nationalfinances, the Greek financial crisis
in particular, national identity,but also precarity operates at
(06:01):
the level of the human body, thedancing body, the community body.
What are some of the ways that youfound through doing research for
this book that Greek dancers andchoreographers and artists are addressing
those multiple scales of precarity?
So, precarity started as a primarilyfinancial condition brought
about by extensive budget cuts.
(06:23):
And of course, we know that the arts arealways the first sector to be impacted.
I feel like I need to providea little bit of context for how
the system is set up in Greece.
So, in order to produce either achoreographic work or a theater
performance, choreographers ordirectors need to apply to the
Ministry of Culture for a subsidy.
There is a board that decides whatthe amount is of each subsidy based
(06:46):
on the proposal and also who gets it,and not everyone gets it every time.
So that in itself sets up a precariouslandscape for artists to begin
with, let alone during the crisis.
In the book, I'm focusing primarilyon the period between 2009 and 2019
as the main time of the crisis.
But within that period, there's alsoa sub-period between 2011 and 2017
(07:11):
when the ministerial subsidies fordance and theater completely stopped.
So in that time, we see that initiallythe response of the artists is that
they slow down and not a lot ofworks are being created until they
figure out how to navigate this newlandscape because everything that
they took for granted up to that pointhas all of a sudden been taken away.
(07:34):
And then, in the beginning, we seea lot of small-scale productions,
such as solos or duets or ensemblesof up to four people, because they
could not support large casts.
But then moving forward throughoutthe years, especially after 2013,
where people had two years to adjustand see how to start navigating these
(07:54):
new conditions, what followed wasincreased political mobilization.
Artistic production was neverreally censored in Greece.
But I would hypothesize that the lackof subsidies and also the lack of any
government body or agenda that theartists had to gear their work toward to
receive financial support really openedup doors for artistic experimentation
(08:18):
afterwards because they no longer hadto cater to anything or please anybody
in order to receive the subsidies.
So they could really dowhatever they wanted.
And that's where their political agendasreally came forward, especially because
they were experiencing the crisis.
So after this period of slowingdown, they started coming together.
(08:41):
We saw a lot of communalinitiatives springing.
We saw the creation of a sort oftit-for-tat economy where it was
really about supporting one another.
Like one person would do the lightsone night and be an usher, and then
when that person had a performance theother time, they would switch roles.
Things like that.
It became very much this idea thatwe kind of also observed during
(09:05):
COVID of we're all in this together.
People realized that we allhave the same experience.
How can we support each other?
And that's kind of one of the mainways that they responded to precarity.
And then I also want to say that a lotof choreographers who I interviewed
and dancers told me that at the verybeginning of the crisis, they felt
(09:27):
sort of a need to remove themselves,oftentimes also from social situations.
And there was this sense of lookinginward or turning inward, which also
led to a lot of productions emphasizingmental health, emphasizing the sense
of alienation that was what a lot ofpeople navigated during the crisis,
(09:48):
and also emphasizing the strain thatthe crisis put on human relationships.
I know that this is not reallypart of the question, but I
also thought I would mention it.
This is something that I observedin both my own methodology and
my experience of having beentrained as a dancer growing up.
A lot of dancers mentioned using the toolsthat they gained in their dance training
(10:13):
to navigate this new precarious reality.
So an example being harnessing the toolsof improvisation that already lived in
their body to sort of improvise their waythrough this new fluctuating landscape.
And that's also something that I foundin the process of writing the book and
coming up with a theoretical frameworkbecause when I got back to Greece in
(10:34):
2013 to start doing this research,I mean, I grew up there, but it was
the place that I no longer fullyrecognized because so much has changed.
So I had a little bit ofa similar experience to
navigating an unknown landscape.
I had to also improvise myselfto come up with the solution and
figure out where the research andthe data is taking me to create the
(10:57):
frameworks that you see in the book.
It's a really interesting example of howthe research process often comes to mirror
or at least have a close relationship tothe thing that you're studying itself.
Where you're hearing about the use ofimprovisation by the folks that you're
interviewing, but then you're also havingto do it yourself in the writing process.
(11:20):
Yeah, absolutely.
Really cool.
So, one of the chapters also looksat regional dance festivals across
Greece, and these have differentgenres, they're held in different
locations, they have different audiences.
How are dance communities usingthose kinds of regional festivals to
navigate local issues in that specificregion but also tapping into these
(11:43):
broader international conversations?
I think this also relates to thecenter/periphery argument and discussion
earlier, but slightly differently.
So, for context again, most of theartistic production in contemporary
concert dance, which is the focusof the book, throughout the year is
primarily located in Athens, whichis Greece's capital, and not so
(12:06):
much in a few other urban centers.
But they're not by any means comparableactivity to what is happening in Athens.
And most of the rehearsals and theatersare located there, so that's where
most of the activity is occurring.
So the dance festivals that emergedduring the crisis started offering
opportunities for artists totour their works within Greece.
(12:29):
And here's where we start to getagain into a different level of the
center/periphery discussion becauseAthens is the center of production and
then the rest of Greece is the peripherywhere if we think of this idea of
contemporary being an imported genre,it's not very much a genre that audiences
in the periphery are familiar with.
(12:49):
So these festivals started as an effort tosort of de-center the dance scene and make
concert dance more available to audiencesin regional Greece and to introduce
them and educate them about this genre.
Now most of the festivals were alsointernational in scope, as you mentioned,
and this gave artists an additionalincentive because they had increased
(13:11):
opportunities to view internationallyacclaimed work because they also invited
a lot of international artists and alsoto present their work for international
audiences without leaving Greece, whichwas something that a lot of them did
not have the opportunity to do becauseof the crisis and the budget cuts.
So many of these regional festivalsreally began fostering international
(13:31):
dialogue between Greek artists andartists from all over the world.
Now one thing that I feel like I shouldalso mention in this response is that
the fact that many of these festivalscame about during the financial crisis.
This is interesting because in someways the crisis worked as a branding
or marketing mechanism to establishthese festivals as well and to attract
(13:55):
international audiences who heardabout the crisis and wanted to sort of
satisfy their curiosity about what theconditions are on the ground in Greece.
And they also perceived a lot ofthe festivals as grassroots activism
initiatives, the reason being that a lotof these festivals, and we're talking
about approximately six or seven festivalsthat started in within the first three
(14:18):
to four years of the crisis, some ofwhich have really become well established
nowadays and have continued to circulateand be organized on an annual basis.
But the reasons why they tied thesefestivals to activism is because they
were very much volunteer-based and verysmall initiatives when they started.
(14:40):
The festival organizers took on allof the labor of not just organizing
the festival, but they would alsobe stage manager, cleaners, ushers.
They really did everything, even to theextent of sometimes hosting international
artists and audiences in their housesbecause there wasn't an infrastructure
to support the festival otherwise.
(15:00):
I feel like in some ways thatcontributed to the myth and the
allure of these festivals, both asgrassroots activist initiatives and
also as a true experience of the Greekcrisis, which then became sort of a
gateway for tourism for these places.
You close out this book by looking atGreek performances that address what's
(15:22):
often called the European refugeecrisis, or an increase in displaced
peoples moving across borders dueto things like war, state violence,
economic crises, such as the Greekfinancial crisis, and many, many others.
I'm curious how those performancesaddress racialized refugee politics
and mobility in this context.
Yeah, thank you for that question.
(15:45):
Again, I feel like I have to start with alittle bit of context for our listeners.
The Greek financial crisis, as I said, Isituate in the book between 2009 and 2019,
and what came to be known as the Europeanrefugee crisis is noted as reaching
the level of a crisis around 2015.
(16:05):
However, legal anthropologistHeath Cabot has argued that in
Greece there was a crisis of asylumdating back all the way to 2004.
So this was not something new thatGreece had to deal with, but there
was in fact inadequate infrastructureto support and process asylum claims
of displaced populations for almost adecade already leading up to the crisis.
(16:28):
So the crisis and the budget cuts justreally intensified all of that process and
made it even harder for people to processtheir claims and move on from Greece
to other parts of the European Union.
And again, in case anyone is unfamiliar,Greece is one of the main ports to the
European Union because of its geographiclocation at the southeastern part of
(16:50):
Europe, where it's mainly accessibleby sea through the continent of
Africa, Turkey, and the Middle East.
And also a lot of people could crossover the border at the north by Evros.
Since the onset of the Greek financialcrisis, there has been a steady rise
of ethnocentric rhetoric in Greekpolitics, which really reached a peak
(17:12):
in 2012 with the election of a fascistparty in the parliament in 2012.
Thankfully, there has been atrial, the party has been deemed
a criminal organization, and a lotof the members have been convicted.
But at the time, this increase inethnocentric rhetoric, xenophobia,
and increase in racially motivatedviolence led a lot of choreographers to
(17:35):
really reflect on the shifting climate.
They tried to respond to it bycreating works that were aiming
to raise awareness, raise audienceawareness about these issues.
So they brought in a lot of migrantsand refugees and other people who were
making their way through Greece toother parts of the European Union and
(17:56):
involve them in the creative process.
And here's where it starts to getcomplicated because many of the
participants actually reflect on theseinitiatives as really therapeutic
experiences that gave them a sense ofbelonging and a sense of community.
And that is definitely truebecause they did foster a lot of
connections between the locals andthe people who had recently arrived.
(18:20):
But I think it also presents aninteresting oxymoron because there's,
on the one hand, the sort of freedomof experience and freedom of movement
that they can experience withinthe setting of the performance.
But then the reality is that thesepeople are stuck in Greece because
they are experiencing what, again,Heath Cabot refers to as legal limbo.
(18:44):
So they can't actually leave until theirclaims, their asylum claims, are processed
so they can move on to another country.
And here's the binary sort of dancebeing about movement and expression
but then this feeling of being stuck.
A lot of these works were documentedon film and actually toured as dance
films in international festivals,which creates a very jarring antithesis
(19:08):
to the immobility of the displacedpopulations and the reality of their
experience in Greece in that moment.
Then another thing that I wasconsidering is that they way that
they were guided to explore thisidea of freedom and to improvise was
a lot of times driven through veryWestern or Euro-American practices and
(19:32):
frameworks, such as improvisationalscores or the practice of contact
improvisation, which has American roots.
So all of that raises questions for meabout how much of their experience was
truly reflected in terms of bringingthe cultural richness on the stage and
(19:52):
how much of that was a highly curatedversion of the refugee experience.
This brings me to my last point,which is that a lot of times,
yes, the performances were aboutraising awareness on these issues.
So a lot of times they had to engagewith the hardship and the resilience that
(20:13):
refugees went through and encountered.
But also I feel like after a certainpoint, these narratives became limiting
for the displaced populations becausethey fixed them in a stereotype.
I remember there was also—I don'tremember the exact year, but the
United Nations High Commissionerfor Refugees had this campaign with
(20:35):
a slogan and this is a quote of theslogan: refugees are not the crisis.
It's the narratives we tell about them.
End quote.
So that's something that Itook away, which does not only
apply to the case of Greece.
I observed that throughout other partsof Europe as well, after a certain
point, engaging with refugees inperformances also became sort of a trend.
(20:59):
It started crossing the borders orraising the question of is it really
engagement for the sake of education oris it veering into being exploitation?
So this brings me to my favorite questionthat I get to ask folks, which really gets
at the heart of why you write books likethis, why you do this kind of research.
And that's that world thatyou're working toward.
(21:21):
So I'll ask you the giant question thatcloses out every episode of this show.
What is that world thatyou're working toward?
What kind of world do you want?
Wow.
Yeah, what a question.
I think broadly, a world wherethe value of art is recognized
(21:43):
and where creative labor is notundervalued or is not perceived as
always being tangled with precarity.
I've also been reflecting a loton how there are, there seem to be
increasingly many crises that we haveto deal with in our lives these days.
There's, like, global healthcrisis, human rights, migrant
(22:06):
crisis, financial, environmental.
And I'm sure they're unfortunately goingto keep occurring as we move forward.
The one thing that became clear to mewhile I was doing this research is that
oftentimes when we are considering thesecrisis, the default is to view them
through a lens of human rights sort ofstatistics or numbers or other measurable
(22:26):
factors that quantify that experience.
And I found that this approach can bevery dehumanizing because it doesn't take
into account the toll that crisis have onpeople's lived experience ,on their mental
health, and especially on their body,since I'm coming from a dance background.
I've said this in the book as well, butI view crisis as sort of a moment of
(22:46):
rupture when everything that you took forgranted up to that point is in flux and
your only stable referent is your body.
So inevitably, I think, as I saidbefore, with what interview is
reported, crieses instigate thisinward turn and focus on oneself.
So to return to your question, ideally,I would envision a world where the
(23:10):
body, embodied knowledge, and livedexperience are taken into consideration
in the process of political decisionmaking and where people are not
treated as statistics, but theiractual lived experience and embodied
impact of any decision that is made isrecognized and thoroughly considered.
Well, thank you so much for beingwith us today and sharing all these
(23:31):
ways that you imagine otherwise.
Thank you so much as well.
Thanks for joining me for thisepisode of Imagine Otherwise.
A big thanks to Natalie aswell for sharing her work.
Our team really loved working withNatalie on her new book, Performing
the Greek Crisis (23:49):
Navigating National Identity in the Age of Austerity.
The book is out now from theUniversity of Michigan Press.
You can discover more about the bookand grab your copy in the episode show
notes on our website, which also havea detailed transcript, related books
and interviews, and a teaching guide.
If you'd like some interdisciplinaryediting or indexing support for your own
(24:11):
book, we would love to hear from you.
Our team of developmental editors,copyeditors, indexers, book marketers,
and publishing consultants specialize ininterdisciplinary books like Natalie's and
can help you go from draft to published.
You can get in touch onour website at ideasonfire.
net.
This episode of ImagineOtherwise was produced and
(24:33):
edited by me, Cathy Hannabach.
If this episode inspired you,make sure to subscribe to the
show at ideasonfire.net/podcast.
In addition to new episodes, subscribersalso get access to exclusive writing
and publishing resources, book newsfrom the Ideas on Fire author community,
and invitations to interdisciplinaryevents to help you imagine otherwise.
(24:56):
Finally, you can find Ideas on Fireon social media at @ideasonfirephd,
where we share all kinds of resourcesto help interdisciplinary scholars
write and publish awesome texts,enliven public conversations, and
ultimately build more just worlds.
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