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Emmanouela Sakellari
GRC

EMMANOUELA SAKELLARI

REMEMBERING A LINE DANCE

24/9

21.00

Roes Theater

DURATION: 15'

In Remembering a Line Dance, four girls attempt to recall the steps from dances of recent years, as they have been recorded in video clips, in TikTok, in their memories from concerts and parties, or even from their personal attempt to create a line dance. Social dances of religious nature in America; Macarena; Cha-Cha Slide; Harlem Shake; Gangnam Style; the dances of urban ballrooms — all offer kinetic and conceptual raw material which, enriched with elements from French philosopher and sociologist Maurice Halbwachs’s theory on collective memory, has shaped the work of Sakellari.

As individual memories are intertwined with collective ones and the experiences of the dominant Western pop culture, they give rise to the condition of a peculiar social construct and the movements that symbolically represent it. An unfolding of a line of movements, relationships and moments of co-existence, filtered through memory, becomes a language of dance. This language, in turn, evolves, recalls, recounts, and commits to memory, transferring us from the individual to the collective and back again. The bodily-kinetic patterns thus emerging are transformed into social bonds, parts of a ritual "belonging," albeit a temporary one.

BIOGRAPHY

Emmanuela Sakellari is a graduate of the Maro Marmarinou Professional Dance School. As choreographer, she has participated with the video dance work To Get There and with APART INTO A PART in the Athens Video Dance Project at Trianon Movie Theater and at the Theater of the Athens School of Fine Arts. As part of the seminar program “Inner Movers,” she has co-created and danced in the production of three video dance works and three site-specific performances in public spaces (Port of Salamina, Monastiraki Metro Station, City of Athens Eleftherias Park). In 2021, she co-operated as assistant choreographer with Patricia Apergi’s Aerites Dance Company in the work U(R)TOPIAS at Olympia Municipal Music Theatre Maria Callas. She is participating in the program of U(R)TOPIAS Academy of Choreography in the context of 2023 ELEUSIS European Capital of Culture.

CREDITS

CONCEPT, CHOREOGRAPHY: Emmanuela Sakellari
PERFORMERS: Eleftheria Agapaki, Antonia Exertzi, Iris Liakakou, Rea Tsantouri
MUSIC: Angelos kyriou
LIGHTING DESIGN: Nikos Vlasopoulos
PHOTOGRAPHY: Stephie Grape