Dance Takes Over London Streets (WhatsOnStage, 06/1998)

Covent Garden s Piazza, Trafalgar Sqaure and Embankment Gardens are just three of the London s many key tourist sites, landmarks and parks which will be overtaken for a week from Monday, 15 June 1998 for a large scale environmental dance event involving over 100 dancers.

At each site, the dancers, the core of whom hail from the Athens-based Sxedia Dance Company, will form a live and constantly moving sculpture with slowly choreographed images in the open air for periods of up to three hours as Londoners go about their business. Not all locations will be announced in advance.

The project, Sxedia Polis (translated as either 'Impromptu City' or 'Dancing City'), is an ongoing environmental dance event which was first launched in Athens in 1996/97. The slow, non-representational movements of the dancers function as a form of meditation on dance, sculpture and the urban environment. Dressed in black and white everyday dress, the dancers arrange themselves differently in each location, whilst causing no obstruction to traffic or pedestrians.

This is the Sxedia Dance Company s first appearance outside Greece. Twenty of the dancers are visiting from Greece, with the rest recruited from the UK. The project director and choreographer is Anastasia Lyra.

Conceived as a European Urban Dance Event, the project is scheduled to visit a number of European cities in the coming months. This London appearance is the grand finale of the Greece in Britain festival, a nationwide series of events presented by the Embassy of Greece on the occasion of the UK Presidency of the European Union. Other scheduled dance spots will include St James Park, Hyde Park and locations in the West End and the City of London.

WhatsOnStage (06/1998)

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