Butchers

What is the connection between butchers and Hasapiko dance?


Choreographer Gloria Dorliguzzo’s work takes its cue from this etymological, historical, and symbolic kinship, sparked by the chance discovery that Hasapiko – the traditional Greek dance – quite literally translates to “the butchers’ dance.” Pulling influences from Japanese martial arts – most notably the Art of the Sword – she turns to the gesture of cutting, seeking the precise point at which labour, rhythm, and everyday practice intersect.

The performance deliberately distances itself from any literal or graphic re-enactment of the trade. There are no knives, no blood, no aprons or animal remains on stage – only bodies that inhabit the figure of the butcher: a craftsperson of repetition and corporeal knowledge, rendered through a choreography that is at once painstaking and instinctive. In this way, the gestures of cutting are stripped of their utilitarian function and acquire the pulse of a language shaped by rhythm, circularity, and memory.

With Greece serving as the site of return for a forgotten practice – one that, in antiquity, was codified into dance – the research takes shape in a participatory manner, bringing together professional butchers from Athens with a specialist teacher of Greek traditional dance. The participants act not only as carriers of experience but also as performers in the final stage composition. Through experimentation with rhythm, shifting of weight, bodily stance, and precision of movement, they reactivate an ancient kinesiology.

Seen through this lens, Dorliguzzo’s work reveals how manual labour can assume a performative form and a ritual dimension through the sedimentation of history, the discipline of practice, and the rigour of repetition. As an extension of the choreographer’s research, the presentation is accompanied by theoretical reflections that feed into a broader public discourse, centred on the poetics of cutting, ritual, sacrifice, and the conception of the animal as a divine or sacred being.