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Natasha Hassiotis
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Intro Biography Bibliography Poetics Texts |
Intro
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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. For Sarma she will archive all the reviews, interviews and essays written for the journalistic media, supplemented with program texts. So finally her critical work, although spread over numerous different papers, can be read as one voice and one body of work. |
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).
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Bibliography
Interviews
From 1992 to 2002, Natasha Hassiotis has interviewed numerous artists for several magazines and her TV program 'Simple Steps'. Listed is a selection of interviews with dance professionals outside Greece.Articles
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Poetics
My Private Manifesto
On my code and practice of writing dance criticism
Part of becoming a (good) critic, first and foremost is to have a clear idea about the challenges and hardships of the profession, as this will settle any existential conflicts which may arise in the course of the years to come. Then, independence via relative detachment and distance from the artists' lives, may enable a rational management of power for both sides. Being a critic may be a very hard profession as writing, reviews or other texts, may vary from a fulfilling to a torturing process: words are 'escaping', meaning is evasive and, worse than that, the outcome of the 'battle' with words has to be communicated and shared with an audience, the readers.
Changing style, throwing away material, discarding any idea of controlling one's own writings have been all very useful to me. A critic can only write about parts of the work, with some objective (sic) description of props, lights, sets, costumes, names, titles and movement patterns, on the side. I often feel that I can only communicate glimpses of 'reality' through description and interpretation, (a sound and rational method), while the text follows its own course. The writer/critic may acknowledge this frustrating and exhilarating fact either while still in the process of writing, immediately afterwards, and often, a long time after it has been completed.
The most difficult part is for the artists - as audience/readers - to accept that the text does not 'belong' to them, even if it refers to them, as it follows similar - not identical - mechanisms as their choreography. For me, it is of vital importance to be impartial and develop a ('pop-up') mechanism of discerning - the true nature - of my personal likes and dislikes. I also firmly believe that a critic should have a 'flair' for subversion and provocation, filled with superior distaste for moralism and any notion of conformism in art. In my point of view, it is again of vital importance to be able to discern talent, potential, and a new current coming up.
Probably one of the most important issues, and a subject of debate, is how mercilessly should over-ambitious artistic mediocrity (aka 'o.-a.a.m.') be treated, once 'diagnosed' as such; the question combines issues on ethics, power and the myth encompassing the artist. (Preferable group of o.-a.a.m. those who take themselves and their art too seriously, to the point of eccentricity).
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