sarma

Natasha Hassiotis

item

Natasha Hassiotis started her life as a professional dance critic in 1992 and still contributes to several newspapers and magazines. She was the first in Greece to approach the country's own dance history in a critical way, and used a whole range of media to convey her ideas: Anti, Athens News, Avghi, Ballet/Tanz, Choros, Dancemagazine, Danza & Danza, ELLE, En Choro, Epilogos, Hmerissia, Peritehno, Seven, Theatis, Taxydromos, To Vima, Votre Beauté.

Biography

Natasha Hassiotis (Greece, xxxx) is a dance critic and scholar living and working in Athens. At the age of fourteen she started dancing (ballet, contemporary, Bharata Natyam, flamenco) and attended since then also classes in dance therapy and seminars in ballroom dance, Afro-Carribean dance, contact improvisation etc. She studied law in Athens and obtained an MA in Dance Studies (1991) at the University of Surrey, where she is currently working on her PhD on Dance and Language. She taught Dance History at the Greek Department of the Laban Centre for Movement & Dance (Athens), the Isadora & Raymond Duncan Research Centre (Athens), in several major schools in Athens, and is currently teaching at the State School of Dance. Her theoretical interests as a scholar, on which she has lectured, include education and new technologies, dance and politics, gender issues, psychoanalysis, and folk culture.

In 1992 she started to work as a free-lance dance critic and has ever since been contributing to various newspapers and magazines, such as Anti, Athens News, Avghi, Ballet/Tanz, Choros, Dancemagazine, Danza & Danza, ELLE, En Choro, Epilogos, Hmerissia, Peritehno, Seven, Theatis, Taxydromos, To Vima, Votre Beauté etc. She is the correspondent in Greece of Ballet/Tanz. She has written numerous program texts for Athens Concert Hall, Kalamata International Dance Festival, Athens Festival. For the Greek National Television she made a documentary on 'Contemporary Dance in Greece in the 20th Century' (2001) and presented her own tv-program on dance ('Simple Steps' on Channel Seven X). From 1999 to 2001 she run two radio shows, on dance ('Do you dance?' at Pharos) and politics ('Power Games' at En Lefko Radio).

• Poetics by Natasha Hassiotis: My Private Manifesto. On my code and practice of writing dance criticism