Mapping as Historiographic Practice: The Ballet Landscape in Interwar Greece

Abstract

This article proposes mapping as a tool for dance historiography, and presents a case study of ballet in interwar Greece to show mapping’s distinct attributes. Mapping supports critical dance historiography in five interconnected ways: fostering anti-hegemonic dance histories that counter hierarchical and exclusionary classifications; diversifying dance history beyond West-centric and nation-centric frameworks; undoing linear narratives primarily based on kinetic information; admitting dance history’s performativity and constructed-ness; and amplifying relational, transindividual perspectives within dance histories. Ultimately, the article presents a dual focus: bringing attention to the characteristics of interwar Greek ballet as a genre-crossing, transnational, interdisciplinary modern form blurring distinctions between art and entertainment, and showing how mapping illuminates these distinct aspects.

Keywords:

• mapping dance history
• ballet in interwar Greece
• popular culture
• speculative historiography

Introduction

The interwar period in Greece was a turning point in the country’s ballet history, due to a significant increase in the number of choreographers and companies, and the establishment of the first centralized classical dance institution, the Royal Theatre Ballet, in 1939. While moving toward institutionalization, however, ballet was far from the legitimized, national-heritage-bearing form that it was in Western Europe, Russia, and some Eastern European countries. Instead, it appeared as titillating entertainment, subordinate to other dance styles, like modern dance, and closely aligned with operetta and epitheorisi, the Greek form of revue theater. Ballet developed through a web of small-scale initiatives by private troupes and touring productions.

Sources from the period include minimal information about ballet, reflecting the lack of prestige held by this art form. When I embarked on this research, I considered whether the non-institutionalized world of ballet in a small, young country at the European periphery had been written out of history, marginalized in favor of more dominant artistic practices. This is partly true: ballet in Greece has received less attention than modern and traditional dance styles, and dance has received less attention in Greek scholarship than other performing arts. Moreover, Greek performing arts are severely underrepresented in international literature.

Nevertheless, I remained convinced that the sources were not characterized by mere lack of information. I started collecting any information I could find: performance dates, theater venues, producers, a dancer’s name, descriptive adjectives. Connections emerged: a name reappeared, pointing to a practitioner’s circulations and multiple collaborations; a troupe with dense listings stopped being referred to, pointing to a halt in activity then a reprise elsewhere. I started mapping these connections and a landscape emerged: a vibrant image of a complex scene. This article describes the potential of mapping as a dance-historiographic methodology, one that invites an engagement with history not as disconnected past but rather as an active process that is made and remade each time it is told.

Research into relationships between dance history and maps has taken diverse forms. Scholars have examined cartographic ideology’s top-down, hegemonic representation of space in relation to Western choreography. Susan Leigh Foster compares choreography (in the early-1700s sense of dance notation) and chorography (a sub-field of geography) to argue that both fostered a disciplined kinesthetic defined by a purportedly-neutral space to which bodies had to adapt.¹ Contemporary choreographic practice has explored how mapping may enrich embodied/kinetic experience. Rachel Sweeney describes “sensory” and “body” mapping used to increase connections with dancers’ surroundings,² while Sarah Rubidge engages with cartographic concepts to explore the idea “that space is not simply something that surrounds us, or we occupy, but that those who inhabit it generate it, and it is affective, qualitative, as well as material.”³ Artistic research has employed mapping to address collective dance and performance histories and their gaps. For example, the Vienna-based collective Performatorium (Marlies Surtmann and Olivia Jaques) develops a long-term, slowly-evolving mapping of the local performance scene from information provided by the scene’s members in subjective ways: a bottom-up, living cartography. Ana Vujanović and Saša Asentić created the project A Tiger’s Leap into the Past (Evacuated Genealogy) in response to the lack of a contemporary dance history in Serbia by interviewing practitioners and following their leads towards others, forming a distributed, anti-hegemonic map of local dance history.⁴

My work is inspired by the field of critical cartography, which challenges the purported neutrality of maps, and underlines the sociohistorical frameworks of cartographic representations.⁵ From this perspective, rather than merely represent reality, maps construct it;⁶ they mediate and establish particular worldviews, especially Eurocentric ones.⁷ Critical cartography proposes counter-mapping as the diversification of situated perspectives from which maps are generated, resulting in plural visions of space. Rob Kitchin and Martin Dodge explain:

de-ontologized cartography is on the one hand about accepting counter mappings as having equal ontological status as scientific cartographic (that there are many valid cartographic ontologies) and, on the other, deconstructing, reading differently, and reconfiguring scientific cartography (to examine alternative and new forms of mapping).⁸

Responses to critical cartography propose a shift from the map as representational object to the process of engaging with it, challenging what Kitchin and Dodge call maps’ “ontological security,”⁹ meaning their purported existence as stable products independent from the active work of interpreting them.

Critical mapping puts into practice important historiographic tendencies in critical dance studies. Critical dance historiography acknowledges the constructed-ness of historical narratives, and views history as a selective, situated endeavor rather than an objective or exhaustive representation of the past. Dance histories therefore reinforce power imbalances in the present. These ideas can dialog with critical cartography’s focus on the constructed-ness and non-objective character of maps. Critical dance historiography is interested in decentering,¹⁰ expanding,¹¹ and pluralizing dance histories, multiplying the perspectives that narrate them, and widening the scope of dance history beyond Eurocentric values and examples. Non-canonical and non-canonizing dance histories are being told,¹² countering the invisibilization of some dance artists and practices. As horizontal, non-linear histories develop, scholars draw attention to pluralities, resonating with critical cartography’s creation of alternative, notably non-Eurocentric, maps that challenge the dominance of singular representations.¹³ A horizontally-constructed historiography invites researchers to focus on circulations and exchanges that question fixed categories, be it stylistically (e.g. so-called ‘high’ and ‘low’ dance styles¹⁴) or geographically (e.g. nation-bound dance histories¹⁵). Reflecting critical cartography’s insistence on maps as situated objects, critical dance studies counter modernist narratives that reduce dance to motion alone, and interrogate the material, financial, political, and social conditions through which purportedly autonomous works emerge.

Drawing from these parallels between critical cartography and critical dance historiography, my claim is that mapping fosters counter-histories that undo hierarchical and exclusionary classifications of dance practices and artists; diversifies the scope of dance history away from West-centric and nation-centric frameworks; undoes modernist tendencies towards linear narratives based on movement as the primary characteristic of dance; is performative, in that it draws attention to producing and reading history as generative, and as such not-neutral, acts; and fosters a relational, anti-individualist view of history addressing the conditions in which dance is made.

This article is divided into five inquiries, preceded by an explanation of the Greek interwar ballet context and of the mapping process. The first takes a cue from counter-mapping to ask: How can mapping trouble classifications of ‘high’ and ‘low’ dance forms and the imbalanced historiographic attention each receives? And how might mapping undo narratives that spotlight canonical figures while invisibilizing others? I then transfer these reflections to geographical space, asking: How can mapping deviate from the scale of the nation and support transnationality as a structural model? How can it shift away from binary dance histories opposing ‘center’ to ‘periphery’? The third part draws from critical cartography’s refusal of cartographic neutrality, asking: What other focal points can be proposed against the modernist trope reducing dance to motion? How can mapping counter linear, teleological dance histories? The fourth takes inspiration from processual cartographic approaches to ask: How can mapping draw attention to the act of doing dance history, both in writing/narrating/transmitting and in reading/receiving/interpreting? And how can it acknowledge the constructive(ly) speculative aspects of dance historiography? Finally, exploiting maps’ spatialized and relational nature, the fifth part asks: How does mapping promote histories of dance landscapes rather than purportedly exceptional individual figures? How does mapping relations foster our understanding of the conditions in which dances were produced?

The case study, ballet in interwar Greece, and the methodology, critical mapping, share a reciprocal relationship. Sources led me to elaborate and refine the mapping process, while the mapping process generated new questions and perspectives on the sources. In this way, methodology arises from, instead of being imposed on, archival materials, and this relationship reflects the particular and situated character of its development.

Ballet in interwar Greece

Interwar years are commonly defined as 1918 to 1939, but in Greece these temporal boundaries are complexified by multiple conflicts. Prior to the start of WWI, the Balkan Wars (1912-1913) erupted as different Balkan nations—Greece, Bulgaria, Serbia, Montenegro—challenged the territorial boundaries of the Ottoman Empire (First Balkan War) and fought among themselves for the distribution of ex-Ottoman territories (Second Balkan War). Greece entered WWI in 1917 as an ally of the Entente, which enabled it to annex territories from the Ottoman Empire, which was allied with the defeated Central Powers. But Greece’s attempt to expand toward Anatolia was countered in a humiliating defeat that led to the destruction, in 1922, of the ethnically-Greek majority city of Smyrna/Izmir. Political turmoil continued in Greece after 1922, culminating in the establishment of a military dictatorship in 1936. Four years later, Italy invaded the country, drawing Greece into the Second World War. Throughout this period, Greek political life was heavily influenced by Western European interventions, exemplified by the fact that Greek royalty came from the Danish Glücksburg line.

These years were characterized by sociocultural tensions, as Greece negotiated a West-aligned, post-Ottoman national identity. Several of the political events described above were related to irredentist visions—the so-called Megali Idea, or Great Idea—of creating a homogeneously Greek nation-state that would ‘redeem’ ex-Byzantine regions. But as a result of the conflicts, the country had a multiethnic, multilingual, and multireligious population. The region of Macedonia and its port city of Thessaloniki, a multicultural hub with large Muslim and Jewish communities, was annexed in the Balkan Wars, and after the military debacle of 1922, refugees arrived in mainland Greece. Economic hardships led many Greeks to emigrate, notably to the United States, forming a Greek diaspora. Concurrently, the country was embroiled in partisan politics, with citizens divided between royalist conservatism and republican liberalism. Increasing urbanization and the rise of an urban working class posed challenges for an economically unstable country without significant industrial infrastructure.

Throughout these years, ballet started being institutionalized through the proliferation of dance schools offering structured training, the 1939 foundation of the Opera ballet, and laws regulating the exercise of dance as a profession.¹⁶ But ballet was still a non-centralized, distributed scene functioning in bottom-up ways. Ballet was staple entertainment during this turbulent time, and there is a wealth of archival sources—press material (mainly theater listings, more rarely reviews), programs, music scores, photographs, and libretti—albeit very little choreographic information. Little has been done with these sources, except for some research by Katia Savrami¹⁷ and Avra Xepapadakou.¹⁸ Authors referring to ballet in their studies of interdisciplinary theatrical forms include Emmanouil Seiragakis¹⁹ (operetta, epitheorisi); Xepapadakou²⁰ (operetta); and Konstantza Georgakaki²¹ (epitheorisi); my analysis connects their scholarship to ballet history/ies.

I focus on this period because ballet in interwar Greece has particular historiographic significance both domestically and internationally. Within the country, dance historical narratives overwhelmingly concentrate on modern dance, which forms the genealogical backbone of contemporary choreographic creation. Early twentieth-century modern dance positioned itself and was widely accepted as ‘high’ art, associated with practices of influential artists. Their work reinforced Greece’s focus on modernizing its national identity. In opposition, ballet blurred hierarchies between dance genres and was associated with mass entertainment. It overrode the aesthetics of singular artistic figures and dancers pursued commercial work, generating performances at high speeds. At times funded by the monarchy but appealing to a wide range of socioeconomic demographics, ballet was neither the embodiment of Greece as a modern nation nor a purely Western form, but a network of transnationally circulating practices localizing a globalized genre. As such, ballet formed a counterpoint, an unlikely alternative voice, that complexifies early twentieth-century Greek dance history and pluralizes its heritage. Greece’s ballet culture exposes how ballet did not always conform to hegemonic images of classical, stylistically homogeneous, nation-bound, and centrally institutionalized ‘high’ art. The local particularities of ballet in a Balkan-Mediterranean context thus ground possible shifts in ballet history more widely.

The tension between a dominant Western conception of ballet and Greek interwar ballet exists in the term itself: in sources of this period, “ballet” meant classical dance taught in dance schools as well as dance numbers in light musical theater, which did not follow classical dance aesthetics. It also referred to groups of dancers performing these numbers. Rather than as a misunderstanding of the term, I view these variations as proof of ballet’s existence as a set of interrelated practices not reducible to classical technique or a canonical repertoire. In this way, I propose a conceptual and discursive opening that might also widen our understanding of ballet in Western Europe: historically and currently, the term embraces a diverse range of performances and techniques.*

Mapping principles

Kitchin and Dodge see maps as “spatial practices enacted to solve relational problems.”²² Similarly, my research does not aim to produce a single, fixed map that would exhaustively present the ballet landscape in Greece, but rather to create multiple maps of relations: who danced with whom; who choreographed whom; which theaters a piece circulated among. Rather than topographically organizing information by placing it into fixed positions in space, my mapping is dynamic and malleable because it is structured by drawing connections. Nevertheless, mapping relations also engages a process of spatialization, which gives rise to a conception of the interconnected points as a landscape.

My mapping is based on a pool of tabulated information serving as inputs. From primary and secondary sources, I filter all dance-related information as well as contextualizing information and enter it into spreadsheets. Each entry lists the source and different columns show the year, venue, company, dance artist names, title and type of work, and descriptive and contextual information. Each map then starts with one node. This is not an organizational reference point (it is not a true North, nor is it placed in the map’s center) but a starting point, and all nodes offer viable starting points. From there, relevant connections are drawn towards other nodes. What is relevant is decided by the question the map answers: if a map is looking at the role of education in the formation of the Greek ballet landscape, only connections where it is known that one practitioner has taught another are included. The types of nodes depend on the question the map answers. While most of my maps’ nodes are artists, it is also possible to map works, theater spaces, companies. After nodes have been added, connections are drawn to all other relevant nodes. If useful, a search by node type (person, venue, company, or work), reveals relevant nodes not connected to others, fragmented parts of the landscape. The limits of the map are determined by the research question: a map responding to ‘What was the role of schools in the circulation of ballet practices in 1920s Greece?’ would stop if its spatio-temporal parameters were overcome or if connections did not articulate themselves via schools anymore.

Mapping allows researchers to see connections and patterns that may not appear when looking at a mass of information. As such, maps offer what literary theorist Franco Moretti called “distant reading” of vast amounts of material as opposed to close reading of selected works: “where distance is however not an obstacle, but a specific form of knowledge: fewer elements, hence a sharper sense of their overall interconnection.”²³ Mapping also has correlations with the study of dance in digital humanities.²⁴ It is based on the collection of large amounts of raw data from disparate sources; organizes data in entries, transforming it into meaningful information; selects parameters according to which it will be processed; processes large amounts of fragmentary information, and provides a visualization of the result. There are significant differences, especially regarding the granularity and amount of information it is possible to process, both of which increase with digital tools. Nevertheless, in this project I purposefully map by hand because manual mapping generates familiarity with the material as well as constructive feedback loops: looking for one type of information, I may stumble upon a connection that I never imagined, leading to insights the material itself has suggested. The step-by-step, non-automatized nature of mapping by hand makes it easier (although in no way guarantees) to avoid embedding ingrained biases in the results, as can be the case with digital techniques. Finally, I map manually because, following processual cartography, maps as finalized documents are not my main output. While the resulting maps may be informative, I do not see maps as media transmitting already-formed knowledge. Rather, I see the act of mapping as a process of generating knowledge.

Counter-mapping dance

Mapping undoes ‘high’ and ‘low’ dance hierarchies

When the ballet of the Royal Theatre was founded in 1939, Kostis Bastias, the theater’s director, invited Czech dance artist Saša Machov to be its leader. Looking though programs of works that Machov choreographed for, I come across a dancer called Kovalefsky with no first name except the initial ‘M.’ An apparently insignificant figure, Kovalefsky enters the tables that form the basis for mapping, and stays there. Months later, looking through sources involving light musical theater choreographer/dancer Koula Giuseppe, Kovalefsky appears again: once performing at the Variety Theater of Corfu in Giuseppe’s choreography for the 1938 operetta The Two Orphans²⁵ and once co-performing with her in All Out,²⁶ a 1930 epitheorisi in Piraeus. On their own, these occurrences of a name do not mean much; mapped together, they indicate that dancers circulated among genres (theater, oper(ett)a, epitheorisi), between ‘high’ and ‘low’(er), capital city and regional, State-owned and private institutional contexts.

There are countless similar examples of the ways mapping bypasses genres and categories. Dancer Iro Zoukova performed in academic classical dance by Adam Morianov as well as spectacular epitheorisi performances at least one of which, 1940s Athens,* was labelled for adult audiences only. In the same work appeared Luisa Poselli, known for her work in ‘Attik’s Mandra.’ Kleon Triantafyllou, known as Attik, a composer of light songs, ran the Mandra as a cabaret-like entertainment venue. Despite gaining recognition as an avant-garde artist and curator,²⁷ his venue is part of Greek collective memory as a popular, entertaining spectacle stage. If Poselli shifts the path we are mapping towards pop spectacle, one of the choreographers of 1940 Athens, Angelos Grimanis, zigzags back to academic classical dance, as he collaborated with the Royal Theatre and graduates of classical ballet schools.

Making these circulations visible, mapping posits that ‘high’ art forms have been enriched by popular ones through an intertwining network of relations concealed by a fallacious sense of divided legacies. When people like Grimanis traveled from academic dance to light musical theater and back, they imbued commercial entertainment dance with classical technique while layering that technique with other performative and stylistic traits. The term ‘ballet’ correspondingly refused to categorize their practice as either classical or light entertainment dance. Rather than conceiving of ballet as a singular (‘high’) technique and repertoire, it referred to an interconnected field of ‘high’ and ‘low’ practices. Filling a gap between popular and classical dance, the example of Greece is a reminder of the ‘low’ art contexts where ballet existed and thrived in Western Europe too. In France, for instance, ballet was centrally institutionalized and linked to dominant socioeconomic tastes, but cross-pollination with popular dance can also be found.²⁸

Mapping reveals that ballet in interwar Greece was permeated by diverse influences such as cabaret dance and fashionable dances featured in epitheorisi, making it difficult to define it as an independent genre, let alone as ‘high’ art. While support from the palace was given to selected artists, especially in earlier periods, ballet was not aristocratic entertainment in Greece: interwar spectacles including ballet shifted towards working-class themes and characters appealing to broader audiences.²⁹ In the Greek context, ballet was not bourgeois entertainment either, partly because the binary of ‘high’ art/bourgeois culture vs. ‘low’ art/working-class culture is not fully applicable. Greece was never a highly industrialized country; family-scale businesses and a widespread informal economy meant that the capital-holding/working-class division was not entirely applicable. Moreover, the liberal Greek bourgeoisie was more closely associated with modern dance than ballet.

Developing in a context of rapidly growing urban spectatorship seeking cultural products that were both West-connotated and oriented towards entertainment, ballet admitted its massive appeal and commercial value. At the same time, its cross-pollinations with popular culture did not concern all popular culture: rebetiko, a marginalized music and dance culture developed mainly by working-class refugees from Asia Minor, does not seem to enter the ballet world. Ballet in Greece thus complexifies how ‘high’ and ‘low’ designations develop in a not-fully-capitalist/industrialized context, cutting across rather than along class lines. Undoing the retroactively constructed image of ballet as an elite form, mapping encourages scholars to track the complex, often top-down processes through which ballet in Greece became legitimized over the course of the century.³⁰

Mapping undoes hierarchies between dance agents

Artists like Machov who held institutional positions, or who had significant financial means and/or commercial success, are more widely documented and more present in historiographic narratives. This is reflected in mapping: more documented nodes have more connectivity around them. Nevertheless, tracing connections for each and every node in a map reveals less documented but equally active figures. For instance, choreographer-director Alexander Ardatov, who is minimally recognized in dance history despite having been as active as Machov, emerges through mapping as a major figure who worked with performers Henny Zeyn, Sonia Sperantza, Irma Czech, Sasa Lambi, Zaza Brillanti, and Lili Kontoni, among many others.³¹

Mapping treats all nodes equally, acknowledging dancers who are often invisible in hegemonic dance histories. This mainly concerns dancers grouped together and hence anonymized, like the ‘Yusova Girls’ (in works by choreographer Eleni Yusova) or the ‘Kenedy’ ballet troupe (in works by operetta star Elsa Enkel). But if all nodes on a map are ontologically equivalent, each dancer corresponds to one node, and the map suddenly looks densely populated by anonymous figures, and well-known names become harder to spot. The dialogical character of method and primary material becomes visible here. The sources’ references to large numbers of anonymized dancers call for a method to address them; mapping proposes a solution by taking them into account despite their anonymization and thus highlights agents who are alluded to but not adequately documented.

Countering the invisibilization of the landscape’s silent majority, mapping also helps counter structural exclusions. It is often repeated that most ballet dancers in Greece were women, stigmatized because of their profession;³² and the results of this sexism continue to manifest in the absence of their voices and perspectives in dance history. Mapping them, making them visible as a numerical majority, debunks their exclusion from historical value. Paying attention to the neglected female dancers of Greek ballets encourages researchers to notice how gender intersects with their status as non-individually-valued workers, as well as with their national/cultural background. Most anonymized dancers were female, working-class Westeners: the labor of the invisibilized and stigmatized working ballet class staged a Western corporeality, rather than an orientalizable one.

Acknowledging anonymous or non-spotlighted artists challenges the hegemonic figure of the singular, exceptional artist whose vision generates historically-significant work. Mapping presents this figure as a fiction that silences the manifold contributions of non-canonical agents. It makes evident the interactions of dominant and marginalized artists and amplifies the co-dependency between them. For example Enkel, active in Greece since the 1910s, was one of the rare figures to receive support from the court, but she could not have been the choreographer she is remembered to be without groups of unnamed dancers performing her work. Histories that account for those unacknowledged people who contributed to canonical work remain urgently needed internationally.³³

Shifting choreographic territories

Mapping disconnects dance history from the national scale

Machov trained under Jelizaveta Nikolská (who traversed geographies and genres as a classical dancer who performed at the Folies Bergère*) and collaborated with the Dadaist Prague Free Theatre. Enkel, who was German, transmitted Viennese operetta choreographies and aesthetics to the Greek theater world. German-born actress and dancer Pepi Zamba was another influential presence emulated by Greek artists; numerous ballet artists came from Russia and Eastern Europe post-1917. The majority of anonymous performing artists in Greece were also foreigners. English, Italian, French, and Austrian/German ballet troupes are regularly mentioned, especially earlier in the century. These dancers brought their training, practices, and aesthetics to Greece and inevitably left traces. The landscape was also layered with foreign influences carried in the bodies of Greek artists. Grimanis, for instance, was connected to Zoukova, Poselli, and Flery, as well as Ballets Russes choreographer Bronislava Nijinska and Ausdruckstanz figurehead Mary Wigman, whose schools he attended. Even if focusing on Greece, studying its dance along nation-bound parameters produces a distorted image which should be replaced by mapping transnational circulation and exchange.

In 2019, Susan Manning noticed “a decided shift over the last decade from histories premised on the nation state to histories promising a transnational and global approach… Whereas the nation-state model plots choreographic families, the transnational model traces networks of exchange.”³⁴ Mapping makes these networks visible, and is particularly effective at acknowledging transnationality as a structure for describing dance modernity. When dance mapping overlaps with a geographic map, it becomes clear that the movement of dance is also the movement of people carrying dance in their bodies:^† influence is not an abstractable fact but a real-world phenomenon resulting from conditions and possibilities of people crossing borders. Even when not overlapping with geographic representations, mapping emphasizes transformation and counter-influence rather than passive absorption, whereby an established practice like Ausdruckstanz would have an impact on a peripheralized scene.

Manning continues: “Yet I am not advocating a rejection of the nation-state model. Rather, I am calling for histories of modern dance that integrate the nuance and detail of nation-state approaches with the sweep and generality of transnational approaches.”³⁵ This insistence on not rejecting a nation-based model is important because dance has a track record of engaging with nationalism, from staging idealized national identities to embracing nationalist-fascist ideologies.³⁶ In interwar Greece, a need to solidify national identity both for new domestic populations and for external observers strengthened a tendency towards essentializing dance as Greek, despite transnational inputs.³⁷ A national scale is also relevant to analyzing public policies, state institutions, funding mechanisms, and their absence. Consistent with Manning’s suggestion, mapping examines the nation from a transnational perspective, reorganizing space without perpetuating the delimitations of national borders.

Shifting away from the national scale undoes historiographic exclusions due to historiography’s own nation-centeredness: it is possible that Greek ballet’s lack of historiographic attention was due to its practitioners often being foreigners. Indeed, modern dance, practiced by Greeks and strongly engaging with national identity, was far better preserved as choreographic heritage. Beyond a possible origin-based marginalization, mapping the contributions of non-Greek artists to the ballet scene encourages investigation of reasons for their underrepresentation, notably the effects of ballet’s devaluation as an entertainment format. When these artists arrived in Greece, their ballet practice was transplanted into a context where ballet was not a historically validated genre but a commodified one, undervalued socially and artistically. Mapping foreign contributions to this context underscores these artists’ possible roles in the gradual legitimation of ballet in the country.

Mapping troubles ‘center’ and ‘periphery’

One of the first things Enkel did in Greece was to teach a dance from Franz Léhar’s operetta Eva (1911) to the theater company of actress Marika Kotopouli, who used it in an epitheorisi. On this and several other occasions, Enkel functioned as a mediator of Viennese operetta choreographic aesthetics. Connections around her node abound: both groups of anonymous dancers, like the ‘Kenedy’ ballet, and known figures, like dancer and actress Xeni Damaskou, performed with or for her. If one looks at Mary Wigman on the same map, direct connections are very limited (mainly to Grimanis).* This may look like a moot point: Enkel was in Greece, Wigman was not, obviously they had different roles in the Greek landscape. It may also look biased. Wigman appears decentered only because of a selective mapping focus, while a more global overview would reinstate her as a dominant reference point. My proposal is not to diminish the reverberations of Wigman’s impact. Other maps, responding to other questions, would accurately represent Wigman as a pivotal node. As critical cartography states, no map is neutral. Tracing decentered maps is an exercise in becoming radically aware of the situatedness and context-sensitivity of who and what constitutes a dominant figure or practice. Insisting on mapping in a way that decenters Wigman proposes a view of dance modernity from the perspective of the Greek landscape.

Moreover, by widening the scale of the mapping, Wigman would become a less-peripheral presence but so would several others, excluded from Eurocentric narratives. Enkel collaborated with artists from Serbia, Russia, and the United Kingdom, and toured to Turkey and Egypt. Theatrical forms circulated through touring or relocations (at least) between Athens, other Greek cities, Istanbul, Smyrna/Izmir, Odessa, Alexandria, and Cairo. Rather than reinforcing a Western-European center/Greek periphery binary, a wider mapping shows how Greek ballet existed in Mediterranean, post-Ottoman, as well as Western European frameworks. This is reflected in the works’ content: while ballet-involving spectacle was mostly based on Western formats such as operetta, it regularly integrated Eastern Mediterranean and Ottoman elements,³⁸ processing Greece’s negotiation of a post-Ottoman identity adhering to Western expectations. If maps are spatialized responses to specific questions, different questions lead to different spatial frameworks and scales that can be valid simultaneously.³⁹ Shifting and multiplying centers can lead to interconnections among under-represented dance histories, bypassing Western Europe as a hub. Rather than negating the effects of peripheralization, this approach acknowledges that peripheralization occurs alongside alternative networks that bypass dominant centers.

Mapping multidimensional dance histories

Mapping expands historiographic attention beyond kinetic information

Writing about dance in light musical theater in interwar Athens, Manolis Seiragakis refers to Yusova as an important figure who contributed to the rise of Greek (rather than foreigners working in Greece) choreographers.⁴⁰ There is too little information about the compositional, kinetic, or performative characteristics of Yusova’s choreography to trace her influence. Yet mapping her connections in the dance landscape, it becomes clear that she extensively choreographed for works staged by Ardatov, collaborated with Enkel, directed the Yusova girls, and choreographed for works involving several artists deeply embedded in the Greek landscape, including Kontoni, Brillanti, and Czech.⁴¹ Seiragakis’ claim about Yusova’s influence therefore plays out not because we find traces of the practices she transmitted to later generations, but because we can see her dense web of collaborations. This web was not exclusively choreographic. Yusova was an actress, dancer, and choreographer; Ardatov was a performer, choreographer, director, and producer; Enkel was a singer, actress, dancer, choreographer, and producer; Brillanti was a singer, actress, and dancer. Mapping their connections makes ballet’s embeddedness in an interdisciplinary framework visible, hinting that if we don’t have kinetic information on Yusova, it might be because movement was not the main medium of her field.

Decentering kinetic information, mapping deviates from the idea that movement is the vital information dance historians seek. The equation of dance with motion, and the attendant celebration of pure motion as a desirable choreographic trait, is characteristic of Western modernist dance historiography and criticism. Multiple authors counter this essentialization by identifying choreographic practices not characterized by moving bodies⁴² or by illustrating how this essentialism disregards the social, political, and cultural inscription of dance.⁴³ Another consequence of motion-bound dance historiography is that entire dance cultures about which no kinetic information exists are condemned to historiographic absence. The absence of sources about movement is an epistemological problem of access to a specific type of information, but the deep anchoring of the kinetic focus in the Western academic context almost turns it into an ontological one: a dance culture we cannot know kinetically becomes a dance culture that cannot exist in the canonical framework. Mapping counters this leap from epistemology to ontology, refusing the idea that if we have no movement indications the dance is lost. Instead, mapping proposes that other types of information are valid. From a mapping perspective, a cast list is as valuable as a photograph and a press announcement with a date and title as valuable as a descriptive review or even notation. By widening the types of sources considered informative, mapping reveals stories of dance cultures excluded by motion-specific criteria. Concurrently, mapping acknowledges the interdisciplinarity of works that have trouble fitting into modernist classifications of medium specificity. This holds for Greek ballet as well as Greek dance history in general. Greek dance is marked by the influence of ancient theatre and its blend, notably in the figure of the chorus, of music, rhythm, word, and movement. Greek dance is not fully analyzable through modernist, movement-oriented methodologies. Such reflections also hold for highly interdisciplinary parts of Western ballet history, from court ballet to the Ballets Russes and Ballets Suédois. The need to acknowledge interdisciplinarity is even more acute regarding entertainment forms. Catherine Hindson asks:

What did dance mean to spectators (…), when understandings of entertainment incorporated actresses that danced, dancers that acted, actresses that sang, singers that danced and dancers that sung – often all in the same performance? Was dance simply read as an inseparable part of a whole performance event, in the same way that choreographed movement and dance have become accepted and key elements of much post-modern performance?⁴⁴

Hindson refers to late-nineteenth-century skirt dance, but the same questions can be asked about ballet in Greece a few decades later. Mapping offers a way out of the rigid categories that prevent interdisciplinary study.

Mapping grounds a history of synchronous diversity

In 1939, Machov choreographed for a staging of Jacinto Benavente’s Los Intereses Creados for the Royal Theatre.⁴⁵ He was credited as choreographer of ballets, along with Loukia Sakellariou, credited as choreographer of minuet dances, and they also co-performed in the piece. Sakellariou was a modern dance artist who refused interest in ballet, a form “foreign to Greek tradition and truth.”⁴⁶ But mapping connections around this work makes clear that drawing rigid boundaries between modern dance and ballet, in Greece as elsewhere, is impossible.

Ballet coexisted with modern dance also within the bodies of dancers. Grimanis was related to expressionist modern dance through his Wigman training, as much as classical dance through his Nijinska training; the Athenian school of Mme. Raymond taught classical dance on pointe as well as Dalcrozian eurythmics; dancer/choreographer Vassos Kanellos referenced both classical and Isadora Duncan-inspired dance. Interweavings multiplied both through fashionable dances filtering into ballet for light musical theater and through traditional dance material filtering into modern dance. Mapping traces the pathways through which these layered corporealities were formed, making visible what theater and dance scholar Christina Thurner names “the simultaneity of the nonsimultaneous:”⁴⁷ the coexistence of forms that continue to be periodized in the name of innovation, while they were actually concurrent parts of complex dance scenes.

This coexistence of ballet and modern dance is another challenge to the linear narratives that presume ballet was succeeded by modern dance. It is indeed urgent to acknowledge their intersections as part of Greek dance heritage, still largely dominated by modern dance as the primary precursor to contemporary practice. But the argument can be taken a step further: in Greece, ballet was not a heritage-bearing tradition undergoing modernization in contact with modern dance, but was itself a modern genre. Despite some selective support from a West-imported royalty, ballet was not a courtly form but rather was introduced directly into theaters. As a theatrical form, ballet quickly became a commercially-oriented one. Despite some earlier appearances in opera, its breakthrough in Athens and mainland Greece occurred when, in the late nineteenth century, French operetta and vaudeville overwhelmed the musical theater landscape.⁴⁸ From its first steps as a regularly occurring performative phenomenon, ballet in Greece was commodifiable, urban, modern entertainment culture. This is one more reason why the term ballet referred to practices beyond classical dance. Ballet was not a classical form, but a modern form interweaving elements of Western classical dance with other movement vocabularies.*

Mapping contributes to a shift from dance modernity to plural narratives of dance modernities, as it illustrates different practices occurring simultaneously within the Greek scene, as well as within individual bodies, and different perceptions of these practices in Greek and Western European dance history. Different but interconnected modernities have different but interconnected temporalities. Greek dance history does not follow the Western European timeline, where ballet is a historical form undergoing modernization, but generates its own temporality, with ballet as a modern form coexisting with others. Mapping the simultaneities of Greece’s historical landscape grounds the country’s contemporaneity in a plural past rather than a Western European linear narrative.

Mapping as doing

Mapping is performative

The first time I was invited to share this research, I decided to do the mapping in real time rather than only speak about the conclusions. Starting from one name, I used tape to trace connections between artists, verbally explaining who they were and how they were linked. Soon, a landscape appeared on the table in front of me (as shown in Figure 1). I did not need to argue for or describe its existence; it emerged out of simple actions translating information into spatialized relations. Those present made comments and asked questions and this led us to move certain nodes around, add more lines of tape, and make new connections. The group I was speaking to was Slovak, students and faculty at the Bratislava Academy of Performing Arts. They recognized some of the figures in the map, like Machov and Nikolská, both active in Czechoslovakia. They mentioned new names in response; the map could continue towards their contexts, unfolding transnational dance histories in the space between us. We looked at nodes like Wigman, Nijinska, and Duncan that we all knew because of a dominant dance history we were taught. We looked at them as small parts of a South-Eastern European dance landscape. We joked about the lack of descriptive information in our respective archives, while considering the wealth of information in front of us.

Figure 1. Part of a mapping by the author, made during a talk at Bratislava Academy of Performing Arts in March 2022. Photo by Maja Hriešik, used with permission by Maja Hriešik.

Ontogenetic cartography invites us to “think critically about the practices of cartography and not simply the end product (the so-called map)”; maps “are profitably theorized, not as mirrors of nature (as objective and essential truths) or as socially constructed representations, but as emergent.”⁴⁹ Enacting the mapping, doing the historical narrative draws attention to the performativity, in J.L. Austin’s sense, of history. Enunciating a dance-historical narrative impacts the real-world dance context. Acknowledging this performativity through active mapping also makes manifest how situated positionalities influence the histories we tell. Moreover, concentrating on the action of mapping as much as the insights that it generates allows the map to be seen as a dynamic research tool that can be expanded and re-interpreted, rather than as a fixed document. In this way, the performative dimension of mapping incites an awareness of the performative dimension of reading or otherwise engaging with the map.

At the same time, mapping amplifies the unfinished nature of history, rather than creating an illusion of a complete and immutable narrative. The performative dimension of mapping radically opens the possibilities of how history can be shared, inviting alternative formats. In the future, my mapping will take the form of a slowly-evolving installation, as I put nodes and relations from several maps together in three-dimensional space. Enacting mapping shifts from creating documents describing historical landscapes to reactivating landscapes where contemporary bodies can navigate histories.

Mapping guides active speculation around archival gaps

Sasa Lambi was a performer about whom very limited information exists. Widening the mapping criteria by including all known relations activates connections between Lambi and Ardatov, who directed Soap-bubbles,⁵⁰ a 1929 yper-epitheorisi (hyper-revue) where she performed; Yusova choreographed for this work too. Another connection links her to Brillanti, also performing in Soap-bubbles. Another links her, through co-performing in the operetta The Black Rose (estimated 1923)⁵¹, to Damaskou. Another links her to choreographer Ioannis Iatrou, as she performed his work in Luck’s Dance⁵² (1923). Still another tentatively links her to Enkel, as Lambi played in at least two operettas from the Enkel company repertory. Lambi may be slipping through the gaps of the archive but mapping her connections fills these gaps by deducing the kinds of practices she engaged through an understanding of her collaborators’ work. Press listings of Yusova’s and Iatrou’s choreographies, programs of Ardatov’s productions, photographs of Brillanti performing, some descriptive information from Damaskou’s press reviews, and accounts of Enkel’s aesthetics together fill the gaps of sources about Lambi.

Dance scholar Susanne Foellmer refers to using archival material as a creative, constitutive act rather than employing pre-existing, fixed documents:

going into the archive is a performative act, also with regard to the ways in which the materials are produced in the very moment when they are found and used. Because documents do not just lie around as such, ‘waiting’ to be dealt with. They become documentary when they are consulted, placed in relation to other documents.⁵³

Mapping similarly acts upon available materials and repurposes their function. A program preserved to document a known choreographer becomes a means to access the aesthetics of the choreographer’s un-documented dancers. Mapping attains this access through a combination of information, deduction, imagination, and constructive speculation. It is a historiographic act comparable to what Saidiya Hartman calls “critical fabulation,” an act of “imagin[ing] what cannot be verified (…) a history of an unrecoverable past; it is a narrative of what might have been or could have been; it is a history written with and against the archive.”⁵⁴ Critical fabulation challenges the black-and-whiteness of historical ‘truth’ and reminds us that including and excluding, forgetting and remembering, preserving and letting go are actions affecting different historical figures differently.

While all history-writing, to a certain extent, involves speculation and active construction from incomplete materials, cases like Greek interwar ballet, where information is missing, illustrate why speculation might be necessary. Mapping responds to that need without concealing the constructive character of the historiographic endeavor. Operating in the grey zone of partial absence, speculation mediated by mapping makes archival gaps manifest and uses information-dense networks to address what or who is absent. In this sense, mapping is situated between two epistemic cultures: it acknowledges what Western academic dance history perceives as lack (archival material as the only adequate way of understanding past dances) but also supports speculative, less legitimized forms of epistemic access to the past.

Mapping relational landscapes

Mapping doesn’t solely focus on individuals

If I go through my sources on Morianov, I see that he had a school teaching classical dance as well as rhythmic gymnastics (in context this should be understood as eurythmics). From at least 1933 onwards, his school staged yearly performances including classical repertory (Swan Lake and Coppelia excerpts in 1933, a Death of the Swan in 1939) as well as balleticized traditional and/or popular dances (Caucasian dance and tarantella in 1939, Spanish dance and Csàrdàs in 1935, tap dancing recurred from 1937 to 1939).* But if I shift my treatment of the same sources to mapping connections, a different image appears. Linking Morianov’s school with other parts of the landscape through the employment of his graduates, I see that the primarily classical training he offered was directly recycled into epitheorisi choreography. Several of his most prominent students, appearing foremost in his school’s performance programs, are Zoukova and Haris Kalokairinos, who worked in epitheorisi. I therefore see that while Morianov’s classical choreography appropriated and transformed other dance styles, choreography in musical spectacle appropriated and transformed the classical dance he transmitted to his students. If I map the school’s own collaborations, I see that lyrical and dramatic theater penetrated its work: composer Dionysios Lavragas, actor Dimitrios/Mitsos Myrat, and musician Frank Choisy were members of Morianov’s school’s examination committees, even though they were not dancers. Combining these two mappings, I see that students pursued careers in light musical theater even if the artists invited into the school had access to dramatic and/or lyrical theater realms.

The same data gives me different information when focusing on a singular unit or within a mapping process: mapping creates a history of interconnected dance scenes rather than separated people active in the same spacetime. This methodology underlines the fact that, as Moretti has argued, unit-focused histories miss significant parts of the picture: “a field this large cannot be understood by stitching together separate bits of knowledge about individual cases, because it isn’t a sum of individual cases: it’s a collective system, that should be grasped as such, as a whole.”⁵⁵ This does not mean that a history of dance scenes prioritizes the collective instead of the individual artist. Rather, mapping circulates between perspectives: seeing the individual as part of a scene and the scene as emerging from individual actions. Ana Vujanović refers to this bidirectional relationship through the concept of transindividuality, which she describes as an invitation to a focus on individuals insofar as they arise from their interactions with others and with common frameworks.⁵⁶ Morianov’s practice may well be particular to him, but its particularity is constructed through his interactions with a complex landscape. This approach has transhistorical implications: recognizing the historical existence and subsistence of transindividually-construed dance scenes provides anchoring for contemporary practitioners in a more-than-individual history. Mapping proposes a networked and distributed sense of collective heritage. Vujanović speaks of a “rhizomatically-structured history”⁵⁷ that invites current actors to consider themselves as parts of scenes, insofar as they are genealogically related to an already-networked history.

Mapping draws attention to conditions making dance possible

Throughout this text, I have traced how mapping pays less attention to the node itself, meaning the individual artist, work, or company, and more attention to relations between nodes. These relations leave no tangible trace. How much contact did Brillanti and Lambi have? In other words, was co-performing in an epitheorisi a collaboration? How did Enkel transfer aesthetics to the young Damaskou? In other words, what were the conditions of transmitting these practices? How did Kovalefsky balance his work between the Royal Theatre and private productions? In other words, how did an artist’s different statuses or roles intersect with one another? Sometimes the sources do not answer such questions. Other times, fragments of answers are found in often-disregarded information like ads and ticket prices in programs, indicating income sources for companies.

Mapping encourages researchers to speculate about the means, conditions, and negotiations that brought dance landscapes into existence. Sometimes, mapping furthermore tracks information that answers such questions. For example, we know that Enkel’s company was one of the rare entities that received funding from the palace. Mapping Enkel’s influence indicates that she provided a possible launchpad for the careers of Damaskou and Yusova, revealing how funding trickled through dance scenes without the full control of the palace.

Mapping insists on relations as ontologically-valid entities,⁵⁸ and this is not an abstract ontological claim. Mapping reminds us that artistic landscapes depend on transindividual relations, and relations themselves depend on conditions that are structuring and mediating. Financial, labor, and legal histories of dance are becoming more prevalent, as seen in Steriani Tsintziloni’s⁵⁹ study of Cold War soft power funds and the circulation of aesthetic paradigms; Olivia Sabee’s⁶⁰ study of the Paris Opéra’s petits rats from a working-class perspective; and Anthea Kraut⁶¹ and Hélène Marquié’s⁶² work on copyright laws and their relationship with white supremacy and patriarchy, respectively. By drawing attention to relations, mapping makes visible the interweavings of choreographic histories and the often-invisibilized frameworks that made them possible.

Conclusions

A wealth of sources providing very little information: mapping inverts this situation by recalibrating what material is historiographically relevant. Rather than condemning interwar Greek ballet to a lost dance culture, mapping presents it as a vibrant and complex landscape. Some tentative conclusions about this landscape can be formulated, countering predominant ideas about ballet. Greek interwar ballet was not a ‘high’ art, but part of entertainment spectacles where classical and popular dance blended and where acclaimed and working-class artists interacted. These often-uncredited entertainers contributed to the overlapping circulation and exchange of creative practices. The absence of a national tradition of ballet in Greece was a catalyst for a different conception of ballet as a transnational inscription of multiple, not always West-centered influences. Ballet was part of interdisciplinary projects rather than an autonomous dance form. Its practitioners were dancers but also singers, actors/actresses, producers, and directors. Ballet in interwar Greece was a modern form interacting with, rather than succeeded by, modern dance. As such, ballet formed an alternative current in early twentieth-century Greek dance, diversifying the country’s choreographic heritage beyond the vastly more represented forms of modern and traditional dance. At the same time, ballet in interwar Greece complexifies Western ballet history, showing variations in the genre of ballet when it develops outside of centralized, institutionalized contexts.

Using ballet in interwar Greece as an example, I have sketched out five interconnected ways in which mapping provides a critical tool for dance historiography. Through its horizontality in terms of ‘high’ and ‘low’ cultures, and of canonical and undocumented figures, mapping undoes hierarchies that continue to exclude certain artists and narratives. By generating a dynamic conception of space, mapping calls into question the nationally-determined scales and binary models in which dance history is too often spatialized. Mapping replaces dichotomies of center/periphery through multifocal networks of exchange. Through a widening of possible sources, it encourages histories of dance that are not solely focused on the kinetic, and counters singular, teleological narratives through its articulation of multiple, parallel, and intermingling histories. Mapping is active, processual, and highlights the performative aspects of history’ production and reception. This destabilizes hagiographic accounts of canonical history, revealing how historical knowledge is always in the process of construction, and accentuating the multiple formats through which that knowledge can be shared. Mapping emphasizes a relational approach that promotes a history of dance landscapes and illuminates how individual artists navigate material, financial, and legal conditions that both generate and hinder their work.

What I have described here is an interweaving of mapping as a historiographic methodology and a particular context, ballet in interwar Greece. Mapping is not a universal(ist), abstract(ible) tool but a practice emerging from intimately relating with historical materials. As a spatialized, situated, time-inscribed, and evolving practice, mapping is a performative and constructive way of doing history, (re)making the past and therefore (re)making the present.

Acknowledgements

I would like to thank Maja Hriešik for inviting the first sharing of this research; the ‘Peripheralized dance modernities’ working group for our discussions of dance landscapes; Konstantina Stamatoyannaki for supporting the archival research; and Maria Prantl for offering solidarity and childcare.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Additional information

Funding

This research was funded in whole or in part by the Austrian Science Fund (FWF) [T1336-G]. For the purpose of open access, the author has applied a CC BY public copyright license to any Author Accepted Manuscript version arising from this submission.

Notes on contributors

Anna Leon

ANNA LEON is theory curator at Tanzquartier Wien and a postdoctoral fellow at the Academy of Fine Arts Vienna. Her first book, Expanded Choreographies—Choreographic Histories: Trans-Historical Perspectives Beyond Dance and Human Bodies in Motion was published in 2022. She co-curates the ongoing projects Radio (non-)conference with Netta Weiser and Choreography+ with Johanna Hilari. She has taught at the Universities of Vienna, Salzburg, and Bern, as well as SEAD (Salzburg Experimental Academy of Dance) and the Institut Français. She occasionally collaborates as a dramaturg or historiographic adviser with choreographers including Julia Schwarzbach, Florentina Holzinger, and Berit Einemo Frøysland.

Notes

1 Susan Leigh Foster, “Chorography and Choreography,” in Denkfiguren: Performatives zwischen Bewegen, Schreiben und Erfinden, eds. Nicole Haitzinger and Karin Fenböck (Munich: epodium, 2010), 69–75.

2 Rachel Sweeney, “Tracking Entities: Choreography as a Cartographic Process,” Choreographic Practices 2 (2012): 73, 76.

3 Sarah Rubidge, “Nomadic Diagrams: Choreographic Topologies,” Choreographic Practices 1 (2010): 45.

4 Ana Vujanović, “Tiger’s Leap: A Method of Reloading the History of Local Scenes,” Vita Performactiva, 2008, https://www.anaVujanovic.net/2012/03/tigers-leap-a-method-of-reloading-the-history-of-local-scenes/.

5 Jeremy W. Crampton and John Krygier, “An Introduction to Critical Cartography,” ACME: An International E-Journal for Critical Geographies 4, no. 1 (2006): 12.

6 Crampton and Krygier, “An Introduction to Critical Cartography,” 15.

7 Rob Kitchin and Martin Dodge, “Rethinking Maps,” Progress in Human Geography 31, no. 3 (2007): 333–4.

8 Kitchin and Dodge, “Rethinking Maps,” 334.

9 Kitchin and Dodge, “Rethinking Maps,” 335.

10 E.g. Pour une histoire décentrée de la danse. Towards a Decentered History of Dance [Colloquium program], Ecole normale supérieure de Lyon, Conservatoire national supérieur de musique et de danse de Lyon, Maison de la danse – Usines Fagor, Biennale de la danse de Lyon, CN D, Lyon, 2022, https://www.cnd.fr/en/file/file/1846/attachment/CN%20D%20Colloque%20Pour%20histoire%20d%C3%A9centr%C3%A9e%20de%20la%20danse.pdf.

11 Ramsay Burt and Michael Huxley, Dance, Modernism, and Modernity (Oxfordshire: Routledge, 2020), 4.

12 Eike Wittrock, “Julius Hans Spiegel: Das andere Erbe der Moderne” [Julius Hans Spiegel: The other heritage of modernity], in Global Groove: Art, Dance, Performance & Protest, ed. Museum Folkwang (Munich: Hirmer, 2021), 308–15; Sandra Chatterjee, Franz-Anton Cramer, and Nicole Haitzinger, “Remembering Nyota Inyoka: Queering Narratives of Dance, Archive, and Biography,” Dance Research Journal 54, no. 2 (2022): 11–33.

13 Christina Thurner, “Time Layers, Time Leaps, Time Loss: Methodologies of Dance Historiography,” in The Oxford Handbook of Dance and Reenactment, ed. Mark Franko (New York: Oxford University Press, 2017), 525–32.

14 Sarah Gutsche-Miller, Parisian Music-Hall Ballet, 1871-1913 (Rochester: University of Rochester Press, 2015).

15 Arianna Beatrice Fabbricatore (ed.), La Danse théâtrale en Europe. Identités, Altérités, Frontières [Theatrical Dance in Europe. Identities, Alterities, Borders], (Paris: Hermann, 2019).

16 Emmanouil Seiragakis, “O Horos stin Operetta. I Anadisi ton Ellinon Horografon sti Dekaetia tou 1930” [Dance in Operetta. The Emergence of Greek Choreographers in the 1930s], Ariadni 13 (2007): 115–26.

17 Katia Savrami, Tracing the Landscape of Dance in Greece (Newcastle upon Thyne: Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 2019), 31–4.

18 Avra Xepapadakou, “Ta Prota Vimata. O Endehnos Horos sti Neoelliniki Skini” [The First Steps. Theatrical Dance on the Modern Greek Stage], Science of Dance 9 (2016): 70–86.

19 Emmanouil Seiragakis, To Elafro Mousiko Theatro sti Mesopolemiki Athina [Light Musical Theatre in Inter-war Athens], vol. B (Athens: Kastaniotis, 2009); “O Horos stin Operetta”.

20 Avra Xepapadakou, “Operetta in Greece,” in The Cambridge Companion to Operetta, eds. Anastasia Belina and Derek B. Scott (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2019), 167–86.

21 Konstantza Georgakaki, I Efimeri Goitia tis Epitheorisis [The Ephemeral Beauty of Revue Theatre] (Athens: Polaris, 2013).

22 Kitchin and Dodge, “Rethinking Maps,” 335, emphases added.

23 Franco Moretti, Graphs, Maps, Trees: Abstract Models for a Literary History (London: Verso, 2005), 1. Cf. Claire Bishop, “Against Digital Art History,” Humanities Futures. Franklin Humanities Institute, 2015, https://humanitiesfutures.org/papers/digital-art-history/.

24 Harmony Bench and Kate Elswit, “Dance History and Digital Humanities Meet at the Archives: An Interim Project Report on Dunham‘s Data,” Dance Research 38, no. 2 (2020): 289–95.

25 Ai dyo orfanai [The Two Orphans] [program], Giuseppe-Stylianopoulou, Variety theater, Corfu, Summer 1938, http://eliaserver.elia.org.gr:8080/lselia/rec.aspx?id=322440.

26 Exo Ola [All Out] [program], Iatridi-Hrisohoou-Sylva, Municipal theater, Pireus, 1930-1931, http://eliaserver.elia.org.gr:8080/lselia/rec.aspx?id=323108.

27 Kelley Tialiou, “Conceptual Art in Ruins? Maria Eichhorn Commemorates Urban Ruination in Athens,” Journal of Modern Greek Studies 38 (2020): 279.

28 Bertrand Porot, “Acrobatie, danse et pantomime à l’Opéra-Comique” [Acrobatics, dance and pantomime at the Opéra-Comique], in: Fabbricatore, La Danse théâtrale en Europe, 153-71; Gutsche-Miller, Parisian Music-Hall Ballet.

29 Xepapadakou, “Operetta in Greece,” 176.

30 Seiragakis, “O Horos stin Operetta”; Savrami, Tracing the Landscape of Dance in Greece, 47–61.

31 I Pariziana [The Parisian Woman] [program], Ardatov Greek Epitheorisi, Ideal, Athens, Summer 1929, http://eliaserver.elia.org.gr:8080/lselia/rec.aspx?id=328882; Sapounofouskes [Soap-bubbles] [program], Laoutari-Kofinioti-Ardatov Greek Epitheorisi, Ideal, Athens, Summer 1929, http://eliaserver.elia.org.gr:8080/lselia/rec.aspx?id=330078.

32 Seiragakis, To Elafro Mousiko Theatro, 504.

33 For an example, see Michael Huxley and Ramsay Burt, “Modern movements: women’s contributions to the success of Rudolf Laban’s ideas and practice in England 1930–1941,” Theatre, Dance and Performance Training 11, no. 3 (2020): 327–42.

34 Susan Manning, “Dance History,” in The Bloomsbury Companion to Dance Studies, ed. Sherril Dodds (London: Bloomsbury, 2019), 303.

35 Manning, “Dance History,” 303.

36 Susan Manning, Ecstasy and the Demon. The Dances of Mary Wigman (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2006); Laure Guilbert, Danser avec le IIIe Reich. Les Danseurs modernes sous le nazisme [Dancing with the Third Reich. Modern Dancers under Nazism] (Brussels: Complexe, 2000); Mark Franko, The Fascist Turn in the Dance of Serge Lifar. Interwar French Ballet and the German Occupation (New York: Oxford University Press, 2020).

37 Steriani Tsintziloni, “Koula Pratsika and her Dance School. Embracing Gender, Class and the Nation in the Formative Years of Contemporary Dance Education in Greece,” Research in Dance Education 16, no. 3 (2015): 276–90; Anna Leon, “‘To take dance back and make it ours’. Europe and the nation in early modern dance in Greece,” in Post-Utopia and Europe in the Performing Arts, eds. Alexandra Kolb and Nicole Haitzinger (Munich: epodium, 2022), 59–71; Anna Leon, “Choreographing Proximity and Difference. Vassos Kanellos’ Performance of Greekness as an Embodied Negotiation with Western Dance Modernity,” Dance Research Journal 55, no. 1 (2023), 22–45.

38 Xepapadakou, “Operetta in Greece,” 179–80; Manolis Seiragakis and Ioannis Tselikas, “Greek Operetta between East and West: the Case of Chalima,” in Beyond the East-West Divide. Balkan Music and its Poles of Attraction, eds. Ivana Medić and Katarina Tomasević (Belgrade: Serbian Academy of Arts and Sciences, 2015), 94–102.

39 Harsha Ram, “The Scale of Global Modernisms: Imperial, National, Regional, Local,” PMLA 135, no. 5 (2016): 1372–85.

40 Seiragakis, To Elafro Mousiko Theatro, 506.

41 I Pariziana; Sapounofouskes.

42 Anna Leon, Expanded Choreographies – Choreographic Histories. Trans-historical Perspectives Beyond Dance and Human Bodies in Motion (Bielefeld: Transcript, 2022).

43 Susan Manning, “Modernist Dogma and Post-Modern Rhetoric: A Response to Sally Banes’ Terpsichore in Sneakers,” TDR – The Drama Review 32, no. 4 (1988): 32–9; Ramsay Burt, “Undoing Postmodern Dance History,” SARMA, 2004, http://sarma.be/docs/767.

44 Catherine Hindson, “Interruptions by Inevitable Petticoats: Skirt Dancing and the Historiographical Problem of Late Nineteenth-Century Dance,” Nineteenth Century Theatre & Film 35, no. 2 (2008): 53.

45 Ta dimiourgithenta simferonda [The Bonds of Interest] [program], Royal Theater, Athens, 1939, www.nt-archive.gr/viewFiles1.aspx?playID=472&programID=578.

46 Quoted in Nina Alcalay, Kratiki Sholi Horou. Parelthon, Paron ke Melon [State School of Dance. Past, Present and Future] (Athens: DIAN, 2002), 26.

47 Thurner, “Time Layers, Time Leaps, Time Loss,” 526.

48 Xepapadakou, “Ta Prota Vimata,” 74–5.

49 Kitchin and Dodge, “Rethinking Maps,” 337, 340.

50 Sapounofouskes.

51 Press clippings collection. Folder 1.1, Xeni Damaskou archive, The Hellenic Literary and Historical Archive of the National Bank of Greece Cultural Foundation (ELIA/MIET).

52 O horos tis tihis [Luck’s Dance] [program], Papaioannou Greek Operetta, Papaioannou, Athens, Summer 1923, http://62.103.29.196:8080/eliasim/rec.aspx?id=332186.

53 Susanne Foellmer and Jitka Pavlišová, “Tracing Dance: Expanding Archives, Contemporary Witnesses, and Other Modes of Re-Producing Embodied Knowledge,” Theatralia 25, no. 2 (2022): 123. (Foellmer is commenting on work by Janine Schultze).

54 Saidiya Hartman, “Venus in Two Acts,” Small Axe 12, no. 2 (2008): 12.

55 Moretti, Graphs, Maps, Trees, 4.

56 Ana Vujanović, “Performance Practice: Between Self-Production and Transindividuality,” in Performance und Praxis: Praxeologische Erkundungen in Tanz, Theater, Sport und Alltag, eds. Gabriele Klein and Hanna Katharina Göbel (Bielefeld: Transcript, 2017), 304–5.

57 Vujanović, “Tiger’s Leap”.

58 Brian Massumi, Parables for the Virtual: Movement, Affect, Sensation (Durham: Duke University Press, 2002), 230–1.

59 Steriani Tsintziloni, Ypo ti skia tu Parthenona. Horos sto Festival Athinon stin periodo tu Psyhrou Polemou (1955-1966) [Under the Parthenon’s Shadow. Dance in the Athens Festival in the Cold War Period (1955-1966)] (Athens: Kapa, 2022).

60 Olivia Sabee, “The Rat de l’Opéra and the Social Imaginary of Labour: Dance in July Monarchy Popular Culture,” French Studies I.XXVI, no. 4 (2022): 554–75.

61 Anthea Kraut, “Race-ing Choreographic Copyright,” in Worlding Dance, ed. Susan Leigh Foster (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2009), 76–97.

62 Hélène Marquié, “Enquête en cours sur Madame Stichel (1856-ap. 1933): Quelques pistes de réflexion” [In-progress investigation on Madame Stichel (1856-ca. 1933). Some paths for reflection], Recherches en Danse 3 (2015): 1–21.

*For example, ballet de cour was significantly different from what today is associated with ballet.

*This performance brought together as co-choreographers Angelos Grimanis and Giannis Flery; they both developed careers circulating between drama and light/musical theater. It premiered a few months before Greece entered the Second World War and some of its act titles (e.g. ‘If such a war happens…’) reflect related anxieties. I Athina tou ‘40 [1940s Athens] [program], Kyriakou-Kokkini-Filippidi, Athinaion, Athens, Summer 1940, http://eliaserver.elia.org.gr:8080/lselia/rec.aspx?id=323842.

*Nikolská studied classical dance in Odessa and performed in the city’s Opera. She became a principal dancer at the National Theater of Prague, and opened a school there. She also worked in Paris and Cairo. She fled the Soviet Army in 1945, possibly because of her allegiances during the war. Cf. Mojmir Weimann, “RusRuská tanečnice, která proslavila český balet” [Russian dancer who made Czech ballet famous], Opera+, 2015, https://operaplus.cz/ruska-tanecnice-ktera-proslavila-cesky-balet/.

† I thank Elizabeth Ward for our discussion on this idea.

*From a generation later onwards, Wigman’s influence would be wider, as she taught modern dancers including Agapi Evagelidi, Maria Hors, and later, Zouzou Nikoloudi.

*It can be argued that institutionalization from the late 1930s onwards created a classically-construed ballet concept that contributes to seeing earlier iterations of the term as misuses.

*If I include a few more years to my corpus, I see that during Greece’s occupation by Axis forces, Morianov’s school performed under the auspices of and even for the Wehrmacht, a fact that should never be neglected when referring to his work.