Sofia Mavragani

Sofia Mavragani was born in Athens in 1978. Her route into dance was unusual. She first studied business administration at the Athens University of Economics and Business, graduating in 2000, and only then turned to choreography. From 2001 to 2005 she studied dance making at the European Dance Development Centre of ArtEZ University of the Arts in Arnhem, in the Netherlands. The European dance network Aerowaves has called her an unusual case in dance precisely because she never followed a regular dance curriculum.

Back in Athens she began making her own pieces, starting with M in 2007 and continuing with The Silence of the Parrot, Incorrect Me and Mind the Map. She is a founding member of Fingersix, an international artistic network, and of the non-profit organisation Fingersix/Athens, which produces much of her work. Her performances have been presented at the Athens Epidaurus Festival, the Athens Concert Hall, documenta 14, the Kalamata International Dance Festival and the National Theatre of Greece, as well as in Buenos Aires and Madrid. In 2019 Aerowaves chose her for its Twenty19 selection of artists.

Teaching runs alongside her stage work. She leads workshops on improvisation and composition, including Breaking Art, which brings young choreographers together with composers at the Athens Concert Hall, and the research project playforPLACE, which has travelled to 17 cities in Europe, Latin America, Africa and Oceania.

Mavragani’s pieces sit on the border between dance, theatre and music, and writers on her work note their socio-political focus and playful humour. The Hero (2015), a solo for a dancer who is also an athlete, built a hybrid hero who tells his own story on stage. Lady R (2017), created for documenta 14 within Sanja Iveković’s public art project Monument to Revolution, drew on the last text Rosa Luxemburg wrote before her arrest and murder; Hara Kotsali performed it through speech and movement to music by Martha Mavroidi.

Speechless, which opened at the Theatro Technis Karolos Koun in June 2018, followed women’s voices through the centuries, from Hildegard of Bingen and Christine de Pizan to Virginia Woolf. Mavroidi wrote vocal music in which the three performers themselves were the instruments, and the piece travelled to the Aerowaves Spring Forward festival in France in 2019. ΧΟΡΟΣ: We Are Here Prepared for Tragedy (December 2023, National Theatre of Greece) started from the choruses of ancient tragedy to ask how a body keeps its autonomy inside a group. Glorious Epic (2024) placed a tragic duet in Alcatraz, a well-known Athens strip club. Horse Me (2025), co-created with the visual artist Janis Rafa for the Onassis Stegi, turned three dancers into horses to examine taming, obedience and power.

Mavragani’s career shows Greek contemporary dance moving between festival stages, national institutions and unexpected venues, while her workshops pass a collaborative way of working on to younger artists. For learners, her work opens the Greek vocabulary of movement and power. Read her Greek comments on Horse Me in the Efimerida ton Syntakton review of April 2025 and note the abstract nouns she uses: κυριαρχία (domination), υπακοή (obedience), εξημέρωση (taming). Then describe a gesture in a sentence of your own, for example Η χορεύτρια σηκώνει αργά το κεφάλι (The dancer slowly raises her head), and change only the verb, to σκύβει (bows) or γυρίζει (turns), to see how the whole image shifts. This practice sentence is our own and does not describe a particular scene.

• She studied business administration before training as a choreographer.
• Lady R was performed in Avdi Square in Athens as part of documenta 14 in 2017.
• Glorious Epic premiered at Alcatraz, an Athens strip club, on 1 June 2024.
• Her playforPLACE project has travelled to 17 cities on four continents.