Dancing to connect - Continued in New York

The first “Dancing to Connect” program in Greece was co-organised by the Onassis Stegi, the American Embassy in Athens and the municipality of Athens in collaboration with the Battery Dance Company which has developed the program nd presented it all over the world. The extremely successful Athenian edition of the program, culminating in a performance at the Main Stage of the Onassis Stegi, was the starting point for the collaboration of five individual Greek dancers who on that occasion worked together for the first time.

"Chapter Two" is all about them getting together once more and continuing the process of 'connecting' through dance, a process that is at the core of the Program itself. Putting themselves in the shoes of the Program's participants, they started experimenting with movement and various kinetic tasks, improvising and trying out different relationships, in order to discover what connects them.

The five dancers, all coming from different dancing backgrounds, shared and experienced each other’s personal style. Through this collective work process, the piece "It's Up To You" came into being and we are happy and honored to present its world premiere in the premises of the Downtown Dance Festival in New York.

The piece is all about random meetings in space, initiating contact and building looping sequences that fall apart, only to be re-created. Watching from the outside, we see in full view the gradual development of relationships, which are formulated by the choices of the performers. By manipulating space and time, emphasis is given to individual instances that are put under the magnifying lens, shedding light onto the details. Physicality, timing, the importance of the moment, accumulation, variation and repetition, are the main elements of this piece. "It's Up To You" reflects the work process, the open character of the piece itself and its flexibility to incorporate new elements in the future.