“CRASH”

The project “CRASH” is a constant struggle with our inner selves, with others, with the dark, unexplored parts of our mind and soul, with the anger, the desire, with the volcano boiling every moment inside.

It brings out, not only all these clashes through a way so different, raw but at the same time so familiar and true, but it also explores the clash unfolding before the viewer and the cracks it causes to its representations and stereotypes.

And it suddenly penetrates the mind like fire emerging from the body, all that river we used to drink, that used to drink us, drag us, kill us, hold power over us.
Something is stretching in my mind. Something wild like madness and love is raving in my soul.

My eyes see deeply, so deeply.
And all the sunflowers in my soul are big.

“DA.GI.PO.LI” is a contemporary dance company.
It was founded in May 2004 in Athens. The core of the company comprises physically disabled individuals. Giorgos Christakis is, inspirer, responsible and creator of this initiative. The group is complemented by other dancers without disabilities.

The desire to explore the limits of the human body, the human imagination, the human soul, as they emerge through improvisation and mould into shape as a music-dance event, spurred the foundation of this dance troupe.

The composition of the company is multi-variate. There are participants of both sexes, different ages with physical, psychosocial and “non-visible” handicaps. They engage in a game of movement, proving that any special situation can simply transubstantiate into art. A fusion of bodies, ideas, music encounters, interactions, travel and colour the human existence.

The majority of the participants are students or graduates of the Department of Psychology of Panteion University. Most of them have also had drama, music or dance training. They have wide experience in group art work; they have been involved in numerous cultural and artistic events on local and national level.

The company has organised a workshop, delivering experimentation and interaction courses to anyone interested. At the same time a research is under continuous development aiming to study the interaction and the elements which will be able to shake stereotypes and representations and set off the methodology, the reasoning and the ways through which this can happen. The open courses will aim to reach and inform anyone interested, and the wider public, of the activities and the work of the company, so that this effort can gain a solid perspective and progress continuously. This will open new horizons in the sensitive fields of Art and Culture, Physical Disability and Mental Health, as well as Social Science in general, not only in Greece, but also in parallel international contexts. The work of the company is not essentially about disability, but disability exists throughout the work; Disability just exists because it cannot vanish and the dancer and the audience cannot deny its existence. It exists discreetly in the work but it often disappears and comes back, reversing roles and the dancers’ anthropometric scale. The reversal is total to a point where one can hardly tell who has a disability and who hasn’t.

The work of the company, as a whole, is absolutely discreetly indiscrete: It is a constant reversal of physical ability by disability and of disability by physical ability in real conditions of a real earthly space, where, if gravity could technically disappear, total and complete absence of both physical ability and physical disability would be achieved.

To implement the above objectives and lay and maintain a solid foundation able to embrace all these people and promote and bring out this work, with all the particularities involved because of the participation of people with physical and psychosocial handicaps, everyone’s contribution is necessary to ensure the success of our goals and constantly, uninterruptedly and continuously produce work which future generations can take advantage of.