This lecture will examine the site-specific choreographies and pedagogical practices of two central figures in the history of modern Greek dance: Koula Pratsika (1899-1984), the founder of the original Greek National Dance School, and Rallou Manou (1915-1988), Pratsika’s student and the founder of the Hellenic Choreodrama. Through a close reading of photographs, reviews, and other written and visual material from events like Pratsika and Manou’s co-choreographed 1939 “Water Festival” at the Marathon Dam, this talk will shed light on the intersecting (and sometimes contradictory) discourses of Hellenism, nationalism, and feminism that inform Pratsika and Manou's visions of modern Greek dance in the mid-twentieth century. These women's particular mode of Greek dance deploys mythic narratives and classical aesthetics, makes dynamic use of archaeological space and material objects, and enables both individual and collective processes of identity formation.
Amanda Kubic
Dr. Amanda Kubic is the current Marilena Laskaridis Visiting Research Fellow in Modern Greek Studies at the University of Amsterdam. She holds a PhD in Comparative Literature from the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor. She also holds MA degrees in Ancient Greek and Classics from the University of Michigan and Washington University in St. Louis. In the Fall of 2027, she will join the Seeger Center for Hellenic Studies at Princeton University as a Postdoctoral Research Fellow. Her research has been published in journals such as Modernism/modernity and in the edited volumes Women Creating Classics (2025) and Classical Reception: New Challenges in a Changing World (2024). Her monograph in progress examines poetic texts, dances, and audio-visual installations by twentieth and twenty-first-century Greek and North American artists to argue for their performance of anti-monumental, crip-queer, and otherwise non-normative forms of embodiment through the animation of Greek antiquity.
新闻报道
