Dancing the Past into the Present: The Traditional Dance as Theatrical Performance

Ioanna Karathanou1 & Maria Papaioannidou2

1Department of Physical Education and Sports Sciences, Democritus University of Thrace, Komotini, Hellas

2Department of Physical Education and Sports Science, Aristotle University of Thessaloniki, Hellas

Abstract

The transfer and presentment of the traditional dance of a country on stage, is an aesthetical and at the same time a political action, that brings a special meaning when dance is presented to a foreign audience. This happens because stage presentation of the traditional dance can be considered as a picture of the country that enacts on stage its civilizational ideals and principles. The aim of this assignment is the research of topics that are associated with the stage presentation of the Greek dance by the Greek dancing groups and its encounter as an artistic kind. The research is based on the analysis of 80 traditional dancing “performances” that took place from April 2003 to April 2004 with the participation of 320 dancing groups from all around Greece. Additionally, we retrospected on the global and Greek bibliography related to the certain topic. For the analysis of the data given quantitative and qualitative analysis were used. By the analysis was resulted that the “performances” of the dancing groups the recent years present the same aesthetics and artistic attitude and they don’t correspond to the theatrical demands and the artistic criteria. From their performances several specialties are absent such as director, choreographer, costumer and the whole responsibility is upon the dancing teachers. This probably happens due to the economic condition of the dancing groups and their inadequate corpsmen with the suitable scientific, managerial and tech- nical staff and the educational inadequacy of dancing teachers.

Keywords: traditional dance, folk dance, dancing group, performance