Natalie Zervou on Dance in the Age of Austerity
06/21/24 • 25 min
The relationship between dance and politics has long been a complex one. In moments of national and international crisis, artists are often at the center of resistance movements, and the embodied knowledges honed by dancers, choreographers, and performers can become key survival techniques for diverse communities.
In episode 161 of Imagine Otherwise, host Cathy Hannabach interviews dance studies scholar and Ideas on Fire author Natalie Zervou, author of the new book Performing the Greek Crisis: Navigating National Identity in the Age of Austerity.
The book is out now from the University of Michigan Press, and it offers a deep dive into how the Greek dance world and arts communities navigated the decade-long Greek financial crisis that began in 2009.
In the interview, Natalie situates dance in Greece’s complex economic and political standing in the European Union, explaining how choreographers, performers, funders, and audiences manage this standing through the performing arts.
They also discuss the vibrant regional dance festival circuit in Greece, where festival organizers and dancers use them as platforms for political critique, cultural expression, and international engagement.
Natalie also addresses recent Greek dance performances about the European refugee crisis, explaining how they engage the urgent and racialized politics of mobility and displacement in the context of neoliberal capitalism and racist state violence.
They close out the episode with Natalie’s vision for a new creative economy in which dance and artistic labor is valued and the embodied arts serve as a vital way to build more just futures.
Transcript and show notes: https://ideasonfire.net/161-natalie-zervou
The relationship between dance and politics has long been a complex one. In moments of national and international crisis, artists are often at the center of resistance movements, and the embodied knowledges honed by dancers, choreographers, and performers can become key survival techniques for diverse communities.
In episode 161 of Imagine Otherwise, host Cathy Hannabach interviews dance studies scholar and Ideas on Fire author Natalie Zervou, author of the new book Performing the Greek Crisis: Navigating National Identity in the Age of Austerity.
The book is out now from the University of Michigan Press, and it offers a deep dive into how the Greek dance world and arts communities navigated the decade-long Greek financial crisis that began in 2009.
In the interview, Natalie situates dance in Greece’s complex economic and political standing in the European Union, explaining how choreographers, performers, funders, and audiences manage this standing through the performing arts.
They also discuss the vibrant regional dance festival circuit in Greece, where festival organizers and dancers use them as platforms for political critique, cultural expression, and international engagement.
Natalie also addresses recent Greek dance performances about the European refugee crisis, explaining how they engage the urgent and racialized politics of mobility and displacement in the context of neoliberal capitalism and racist state violence.
They close out the episode with Natalie’s vision for a new creative economy in which dance and artistic labor is valued and the embodied arts serve as a vital way to build more just futures.
Transcript and show notes: https://ideasonfire.net/161-natalie-zervou
Previous Episode
Amber Rose González, Felicia Montes, and Nadia Zepeda on Mujeres de Maiz
In episode 160 of Imagine Otherwise, host Cathy Hannabach interviews Amber Rose González, Felicia Montes, and Nadia Zepeda—three legendary feminist artists, activists, and scholars from the genre-defying, transnational feminist of color collective Mujeres de Maiz.
Amber, Felicia, and Nadia are also editors of a new book called Mujeres de Maiz en Movimiento: Spiritual Artivism, Healing Justice, and Feminist Praxis, which was recently published by the University of Arizona Press.
In their conversation, Amber, Felicia, and Nadia share their journey with Mujeres de Maiz and the collective liberation the group is building.
They chat about how the book publishing process builds on their longstanding practices of making publishing more accessible and collaborative, embodying the political and ethical commitments found across their art and activism as well.
They also discuss how intergenerational knowledge transmission and other forms of community education dovetail with classroom teaching to create radical spaces of learning.
Finally, they close out the conversation with Amber, Felicia, and Nadia’s vision for a world in which many worlds are possible and how Mujeres de Maiz collectively brings those worlds into being.
Teaching guide with transcript and show notes: https://ideasonfire.net/160-gonzalez-montes-zepeda
Next Episode
Raven Maragh-Lloyd on Black Networked Resistance
How can communities creatively adapt and reshape online practices to forge resilient digital publics?
In episode 162 of Imagine Otherwise, host Cathy Hannabach interviews media studies scholar Raven Maragh-Lloyd about the historical contours of Black digital resistance.
The Ideas on Fire team was honored to work with Raven on her new book Black Networked Resistance: Strategic Rearticulations in the Digital Age, which is an insightful analysis of how Black technology users adapt and reshape resistance strategies and forge Black publics in the digital age. The book is out now from the University of California Press.
In their conversation, Raven and Cathy chat about how digital resistance is best understood as a creative process rather than just an outcome of digital practices and how Black communities create and sustain that process across time periods and platforms.
They dive into a bunch of different examples, from Instagram archiving around Juneteenth and Black women’s online networks of care to the politics of cancel culture and where the migration of Black Twitter in the wake of the platform’s demise.
The episode concludes with Raven’s vision for critical hopefulness in digital spaces, a critical hopefulness that reckons with the violences of the past and forges more just futures.
Transcript and show notes: https://ideasonfire.net/162-raven-maragh-lloyd
Imagine Otherwise by Ideas on Fire - Natalie Zervou on Dance in the Age of Austerity
Transcript
Welcome to Imagine Otherwise, the podcast about bridging art, activism, and academia to build more just futures. I'm Cathy Hannabach, and my guest today on the show is dance studies scholar and Ideas on Fire author Natalie Zervou, who we were excited to work with on her awesome new book Performing the Greek Crisis: Navigating National Identity in the Age of Austerity. The book is out now from the University of Michigan Press, and it offers a deep dive into how the Gre
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