Title: From the Waters of Marathon to the Marbles of Athens: Following the Steps of Koula Pratsika and Rallou Manou’s Modern Greek Choreographies
Speaker: Dr. Amanda Kubic, Marilena Laskaridis Visiting Research Fellow, University of Amsterdam
Date: 22 May 2026
Time: 15:30-16:30
Location: UvA, P.C. Hoofthuis, room 5.02, Spuistraat 134, Amsterdam
Language: English
Abstract
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 “Water Festival” at the Marathon Dam, the archaic-inspired dances of Pratsika’s school at the Herodeion in Athens, and the Hellenic Choreodrama’s outdoor performances of Greek tragedy, this talk will shed light on the personal, political, and aesthetic ideologies that have informed the development of this strand of modern Greek dance since the 1930s. This particular mode of Greek dance is characterized by its layered deployment of mythic narratives and its dynamic use of archaeological spaces and material objects, and enables both individual and collective processes of identity formation and memory-making.
Bio
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. Her current project, Classical (Dis)embodiments: Interanimating Greek Antiquity in Modern Greek and North American Women’s Poetry and Performance, maps out an original multimedia network of poetic texts, dances, and audio-visual installations by twentieth and twenty-first-century women artists to argue for their performance of anti-monumental, crip-queer, and otherwise non-normative forms of embodiment. Her work has appeared in the journal Modernism/modernity and in edited volumes such as Classical Reception: New Challenges in a Changing World (2024) and Women Creating Classics: A Retrospective (2025).