Athens Çiftetellisi / το Αθηναϊκό Τσιφτετέλι
An embodied research on the cross-cultural practice of Çiftetelli (Greco-Turkish oriental dance) as a tool for collective healing, feminist place-making and queer joy. Çiftetelli was allegedly first recorded in mainland Greece with the arrival of migrants from Anatolia, after the 1923 Greco-Turkish population exchange.
The project brings together old and new migrants from the SWANA and Balkan regions and their diasporas, to transmit stories, rhythms and dance moves. The project travels to different cities to unfold the contemporary local dance’s hybrid form: the city’s Çiftetellisi. It has been conducted in Nicosia (Xarkis Festival, 2024), Brussels (The Green Corridor, Pianofabriek, 2025), Athens (Yellow Brick, 2025), Nafplio (Performing Space Conference, 2025) and Heraklion (Heraklion Pride, 2026).
Çiftetelli belongs to the traditions of MENAHT dances (Middle East, North Africa, Hellenic, Turkish). It carries memories of the Ottoman times and can become a tool for emancipating non-eurocentric multicultural subjectivities. It is not considered a folk dance, and it has been silenced as hyper-feminine and unfitting to the national narratives of Greekness and other national constructs of the East Mediterranean. It brings ambiguous connotations seen by an orientalist gaze, but incorporates a rare potential for social, cultural and sexual resistance.
The focus on dance allows the work to touch on the trauma of cultural and physical displacement stored in the body of the communities, as well as finding joy, kinesthetic pleasure, empathy and common histories through a ‘body topography’, where the body is a topos, including historical layers of sensations and temporality. The research uses movement as social text to produce counter-narratives, new subjectivities and traditions, where the collectively owned embodied culture transcends imposed constructions of gender, sexuality, racial, ethnic, national identity, class, age and ability.
For the Athenian version, Elli and Yellow Brick studio set up a space in Nea Ionia, interacting with the neighbourhood of old Minor Asian migrants and hosting 4 study circles on the Athens Çiftetellisi and the communities who practice and still develop it. Over 70 people, aged 5 to 85, joined the four circles.
22 March — Anatolians — Asia Minor refugees, post-1922 Greekness and the Çiftetelli — body-based workshop led by Salomé Chondrouli
29 March — Egyptian Women — Baladi, Raqs Sharqi and the Arab Çiftetelli — body-based workshop led by Katerina El Raheb
11 April — Contemporary Athenians — queer legacies of Çiftetelli, ballroom culture and Tsiftetelo-Vogue — body-based workshop led by House of Kareola and Yasmine
12 April — Tsakir Kefi (Çakır Keyf / Drunk with Joy) — somatic liberation of the pelvis and intergenerational trauma — body-based workshop led by Archontia Makri
Image Credits:
1, 2 Eleftherios Panagiotou
3,4,5,6 Kostantza Kapsali
7, 8 Alexandra Masmanidi
9, 10 Dimitra Kondilatou
(Brussels) is a transdisciplinary artist, activist, and researcher. Her work intertwines concepts of migration, diaspora, intersectional and decolonial pedagogies; counter-mapping minor narratives on space and collective memory.
Elli designs platforms for co-creation, collective knowledge production and social change. She works hybridly through film, performance, storytelling, multisensorial, auto-ethnographic and p2p narrative tools, archives and spatial design. She has worked in Globe Aroma (Brussels) and Open Design Course (KASK, Ghent) and co-funded The Post Collective.
