In March 2015, Matthieu Banvillet, director of Le Quartz, Brest’s National Scene, invited me to curate a focus on Athens. It was the first time I received such an invitation. Puzzled at first, I thought of it as a great opportunity for me to decipher my multiple identities. I come from a Mediterranean country that struggles financially while being Europe’s eastern and southern border. I’m a woman that sometimes has to deal with sexist work environments. For the past ten years I have been living in a foreign country, France. Soon enough, I started conducting research on the dynamics of the artistic scene in Athens, the one I had left behind back in 2005. Today the country’s political situation has radically changed and so is my relation to it. As my research was progressing, what proved to be decisive in my choices was the type of relationship one builds with their community. When I left Greece, I was carrying an idealized image of a dancer being part of a dance company, but soon enough realized that this condition was becoming obsolete and had to adapt to a much more flexible, precarious and neoliberal work model. By and large, this model of individualization predominates in the current European contemporary dance scene and the dance that is being produced in Athens didn’t seem to be an exception. At least for the most part. In response to the financial crisis of 2008, a number of artists began to occupy abandoned spaces in downtown Athens in order to work collectively. —Lenio Kaklea
The book was published on the occasion of the Focus Athènes, DañsFabrik, Festival de Brest. Participated artists: Iris Karayan, Alexandra Bachzetsis, Mariela Nestora, Katerina Andreou and Lenio Kaklea.
