
Vasiliki Tsagkari studied education at the Early childhood Education Department of University of Athens and Dance in City of Bristol College in the U.K. She has studied improvisation techniques, release and releasing techniques (Skinner releasing technique, Mary Fulkerson's Imagery Release), Alexander technique, Body Mind Centering, martial arts (Aikido and Tai-Chi) and physical theatre (Odin Theatre). Since 2004 she has been creating performance work and collaborating with dancers, choreographers, musicians and visual artists, creating performances and performing in Greece, England, the Netherlands, Belgium, Switzerland and Germany. From 2008 to 2010 she was an artist in residence and a member of the artists' collective ARM based in artspace Rondeel in Maastricht (NL). Vasiliki has taught improvisation and contemporary dance workshops and classes for children and adults in U.K., The Netherlands and Greece. She is a mother of a twelve year old boy and the last eight years she has been looking after an olive farm in Messinia, Greece. Physical work close to the earth as well as the observation of nature's elements through the process of cultivating, opened up a wide research field and has informed a lot her approach to dance. In 2022 she created the solo ritualistic performance “The passage”. It was a project related to climate change and environmental crisis and later on, in 2023, it became a performance pilgrimage, along the line of the Hellenic Trench, a sea biome that is currently under threat of drilling for oil in the sea. For “The Passage” pilgrimage she collaborated with several local activist organisations as well as photographers and videographers. Since 2022 she has been working on her own dance pedagogy, MELT, giving workshops about dance with nature, combining several different influences, approaches on somatics and physical experiences like physically working with the earth and allowing for more than human life to have agency in the process of embodied learning. Her main interests are sensitivity and sensuality in movement, the kinaesthetics of language, as well as the transformation of elements of everyday living into physical poetry. The experience of the body moving that asks to be shared, to be articulated as a public statement. She is a certified teacher of SkinnerReleasing Technique (introductory) since 2017.