This film explores ways transnational hip-hop and competition dance styles are embodied by female street dancers in contemporary Greece. The film captures the everyday lives of two young girls who practice freestyle hip-hop, popping, locking, waacking and house dance in Athens. Moments of their friendship and their relationship with male hip-hop dancers and members of their crews are graphically portrayed and narrated. The camera follows them through different activities ranging from teaching, practicing, travelling, preparing and participating in hip-hop dance competitions, street shows and events. Above all, the film unravels aspects and perceptions of their femininity and gender identity in a male-dominated hip-hop dance scene and the role that street dance plays in the production of sisterhood, female affectivity, team and street spirit.
Natalia Koutsougera
Natalia Koutsougera is a social anthropologist (Laboratory Teaching Staff, Department of Social Anthropology, Panteion University) who works at the intersection of the anthropology of youth cultures, the anthropology of entertainment, the anthropology of music and dance, popular culture and gender, visual anthropology and hip-hop studies. She uses interdisciplinary approaches as well as multimodal methodologies inspired by both anthropology, cultural and media studies. She is the author of many articles and chapters in international and domestic scientific journals and volumes regarding hip-hop, gender studies, anthropology and youth cultures, while for the last seventeen years she has been working as a critic and columnist for the contemporary dance and performance portal dancetheater.gr. She has directed and produced three ethnographic dance documentaries: “Born to Break” (2011), “The Girls Are Here” (2015) and “An Element of Hope” (2025) on the topics of hip-hop, urban dance styles, spiritualities in hip-hop, hip-hop femininities, street cultures and gender. In 2024 she published her monograph “Bred in the Western Suburbs: Dance, Music and Youth Cultures in Ellinadiko” which explores “laiko” (popular) and trap cultures in nightclubs of Western Attica from the 1990s to the present. Natalia has also been a postdoctoral fellow at the Centre of Hellenic Studies in Greece (Harvard University) and is also the Scientific Officer of the Erasmus Program (2025-2028) UFemTP: A Mobilizing Training and Multimodal Platform (Panteion University).