Dallas Choreographer Explores Societal Issues Through Movement and Emotion

“We saw what could happen if we don’t talk. I think we also saw what can happen if we blindly believe everything we hear.”

By Hady MawajdehJanuary 20, 2017 11:29 am, , ,

From KERA’s Art&Seek

The 116 seat theater inside the Bath House Cultural Center in Dallas was in the process of being transformed on the Tuesday evening that I caught up with the Danielle Georgiou Dance Group. They were preparing for the premiere of a new work called “War Flower.

The usually dark black box theater was flooded with lights and the floors, walls and ceilings were all being turned into scenery  for the upcoming performance. The group’s conceptual artist and co-producer Justin Locklear and others were laying out AstroTurf on one part of the stage and mirrored wall paper on another. Danielle Georgiou, the group’s choreographer and artistic director, paced around the space and watched them work. Then she looked at her phone to check the time and asked if they’d be done before practice. Locklear told her they would be and she announced, “We’ve got four minutes.”

Georgiou then began fluttering like a bee, moving from one group of dancers to another. She watched them perform moves, adjusted arms and legs and sometimes simply greeted them. She was very busy and a little bit nervous.

“So there are lots of challenges when you are getting ready for a show,” said Georgiou. “Especially when you’re producing an original work. I don’t have – I mean I have a script that I wrote and that we’re following, but it’s not like a published play in which all of the answers are in the text.”

This work is especially challenging, because “War Flower” tackles complex topics. Loosely, it’s about how a constant flow of information makes communication difficult. Georgiou wrote much of the work during the presidential primaries, and was thinking about social media and fake news and their effects on politics.

“People were getting their information from a variety of places and it just didn’t seem like we were actually listening to another. We were just all yelling,” said Georgiou.

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