DAGIPOLI DANCE Co is a mixed – inclusive contemporary dance group, created by Jiorgos Christakis in 2004. The core of the group consists of people with physical disabilities as well as non-disabled dancers – performers. It has become widely known for its long-standing activity in Greek and international artistic waters, together with a group of excellent and renowned contributors from dance, music and theatre, fellow travellers throughout the years in this bold effort. He has managed to gain recognition and respect and to establish himself through an equal relationship, as reflected in the creative path that has left and continues to leave its mark on the contemporary arts landscape. A path with many stops around the world from America, “The Kennedy Center”, Washington DC, to Russia (National theatre of Moscow), all over Greece, at the Herodeion, the Athens Concert Hall, and in Europe, at the renowned Teatro Piccolo in Milano, Italy, in England, Scotland (Edinburgh), Holland, Sweden, Germany, Germany and Spain, Poland and Romania, to distant China.
Speaking in numbers:
DAGIPOLI DANCE Co is a group with 20 years of experience and hundreds of performances, presentations, educational seminars, all over Greece and abroad, and many collaborations with important names in the field of Art and Culture. The music, and the texts open a special dialogue with movement and the body, and are completely identified with the new kinesiological vocabulary projected through the emergence of this harmonious and fruitful collaboration. Jiorgos Christakis (choreographer, wheelchair dancer), and founder of Dagipoli Dance Co., for his part, highlights through his choreographies, the harmonious collaboration of bodies with different functional traits, the fascination of human diversity and the collaboration of people with different morphologies in their bodies, thus honoring and highlighting the “different”. The group’s work, fundamentally, does not focus on the condition of disability, while disability exists in the work as a whole. Disability exists simply because it cannot disappear and the dancer and viewer cannot deny its existence. It exists subtly in the work as a whole but often disappears and reappears, subverting the roles and anthropometric scale of the dancers. The subversion is total to the point that it is difficult to tell who is or is not disabled. The group’s work, as a whole, is utterly subtly indiscriminate. It is a continual subversion of the normality of physical ability by disability and of disability by normality and physical ability, but in terms of the real terms of a real earthly space, where if gravity could technically be absent, the complete and total absence of both physical ability and physical disability would occur.
