common(ing) dances (which I originally called IN-SIEME, common dances) is a participatory dance practice based on queering up folk dance steps and practices and combining them with practices of deep listening to the land, collective memories and desires and more-than-human bodies (which afterall lie at the core of the ontology of folk dances).

 

The practice aims to:

_mold physical scores for exploring the relation between rite and riot through bodies moving together in space and time

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_form locality and community specific contemporary dance rituals that activate embodied, critical, sensuous, anticapitalist relations to space and each other through movement
 

_create collective dances with the participants

_experiment as a community with the participants to create those dances by exploring possibilites of decolonial co-leadership, horisontal self-organisation, voicing communal needs and reestablishing territory-specific, emancipatory practices of resistance and rebirth of the collective 

Initially formed through my research on folk dances as a socially sustainable practice in and with the local community of Siatista in Northern Greece (Erasmus+ research project),  I further developed and defined it at my residency at Corte Ospitale/Teatro Herberia in Rubiera, Italy (2024) activating the local territory.

 

In the practice I as a co-participant propose music and steps from my body's cultural background, Greek folk dances, but the practice also responds to kinesiologies and dances at each territory it visits and encourages the participants to bring their own propositions for music and steps from their respective communities, cultural backgrounds, desires and personal life stories. Gradually the practice has become linked to live music production from the group through the use of voice and noise recorded on a loop station.

 

The steps become a vessel through which we experiement with, critically reflect on and create awareness of what makes us move, how we can possibilise collective movements, how dance is a protest and how we propel common living projects by the very process of staying with the trouble of these explorations through the body.

 

To accomplisg its aims common(ing) dances searches and specifies principles/scores for using the body in relation to rhythm and space, to transmitting a movement to all the participating bodies, to non-separation between human and more-than-human bodies in the dancing experience, deep listening to internal and external anatomies of our commons (body and space).

Through its practices common(ing) dances articulates strategies to mold uncoercive communities, where we train and approach our bodies as permeable and response-able to other bodies, our environments and more-than-human-bodies. It massages our collective tissues to possibilise moving together in space and time, developing our own contemporary dance rituals in a horizontal space that dares to re-imagine how we  meet each other in our everyday life and disrupt toxic, colonial, capitalist organisations of our commons and our territories.

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So far, common(ing) dances consists of 3 sub-practices:
1. matters that matter (an activation through experiential anatomy scores of body and space, opening up interrelations between in and out, body and space, dance and society),
2. chain of response-ability (a movement structure that moves repeatedly across the floor in a defined trajectory designed to transfer common steps in a common rhythm and acquaint us with the ability to carry the information through our own body and collectively through to the last body in the chain, so that we together take on the response-ability of leaving nobody out)
3. and finally common dances - communal bodies communicate (which is a relational score, where we as participants in groups develop our own contemporary folk dances as rituals for encountering today expressing matters and interrelations, that matter to each community at quest. Through embodied negotiations and staying with the trouble of arriving at common symbols-steps that mark our dance, the dance develops, is repeated gaining its density and symbolism in the community and is in the end transmitted to the other members of the community).

Having egaged with these sub-practices for a while, common(ing) dances culminates with pan-igiris, a collective celebration of the community of participants and the wider local community through a manifestation of the dances and awareness created during the process. Pan-igiris as a final celebration manifests common(ing) dancea as a hybrid  between an activist space, a workshop, a participatory performance and a fete that works towards solidifying and repeating the rituals of the community, hosting embodied negotiations of how we insist on staying with the trouble (Donna Haraway) of meeting each other moving in space and time together.