Three hundred dancers from 20 countries met on Friday night on Dionysiou Areopagitou Street under the brightly lit Acropolis, to dance zeibekiko and other popular Greek dances.
A crowd of Greeks and tourists were left speechless watching a mass of 300 people in white shirts and black pants n the busy street leaving Greeks and tourists speechless with their impressive dance figures.
The event was part of the second three-day “Xenios Zeus Dance Festival” organized by the Zeibekiko Academy Dimitris Petropoulos. The dancers performed in the most popular – and busiest – streets around the emblematic Acropolis hill.
The images were impressive with the dancers following – among other tunes – the rhythm of the favored “Zeibekiko of Evdokia”.
The organization and details of the festival took months before the three-day weekend. In addition to zeibekiko, the participants also danced pentozali, aptaliko and Cypriot dances.
Ηistory of the zeibekiko dance
Zeibekiko has its roots in the Aegean coast of Asia Minor and takes its name from the Zeybeks, an irregular militia living in the Aegean Region of the Ottoman Empire from the late 17th to the early 20th century.
People would dance zeibekiko in cities with a strong Greek element, such as Constantinople and Smyrna. It originated as a dance for two armed men facing one another and developed into an improvised solo dance.
After the population exchange between Greece and Turkey in 1922, the dance became popular in mainland Greece as well, usually danced to the tune of folk music songs.
As a solo Greek dance, it was traditionally performed by men, but in recent years women dance zeibekiko as well. It is an improvisation dance as it has no set steps. The dancer makes circular moves and moves his hands as he feels, while the figures he makes are improvised according to the lyrics.
In many cases it is a show-off dance, with the male dancer making extravagant moves. In other cases, the dancer would stand on a chair or on a glass of wine, pick up a chair and use it as a prop, or lift a table, adding drama to the dance.
In other cases, it requires an inner intensity, because it is based on improvised movements that express the feelings of the individual who gets up to dance. It is not a joyous dance. It often expresses feelings of defeat, of sadness, life’s despair as well as unfulfilled dreams.