“I’m half Greek, so half of my family does all of the Greek things. I go to the Greek Orthodox Church, and I do Greek dancing there and [also] dance and work in the [Greek] festival with my family.
If you can imagine Irish dancing, that’s kind of what Greek dancing is like. It’s a lot of movement in the feet and it’s often in big groups. My family has been Greek dancing for a long time; my dad used to Greek dance. In our church, you can start Greek dancing in second grade and that’s when I started Greek dancing. But you go to the Greek festivals from the day you’re born, so I was watching people dance my entire life and always dreamed of doing it too.
My first performance was in second grade. It was kind of scary, but you don’t really think about it much because they [tell you] ‘smile, smile, one, two, three.’ It’s really fun and no one really cares if you mess up.
There are two shows in the Greek Festival. One of them is the day show, which is the kid show, and then there’s the night show where the adults dance. A lot of the time the people who just graduated [from] college will come back to dance [and] everyone dances together.
Everyone’s synchronized because everyone’s doing the same steps. It’s really fun to dance with a big group of people that all know what they’re doing. It’s really like a sense of community, and it’s just fun to tap into my Greek side of the family.
I actually feel really cool [while Greek dancing]. Some people are like, ‘Oh my God, that’s so embarrassing,’ but I just don’t feel that way about it. I just think it’s cool to tap into my ancestry. You’ll be doing [a dance] you’ve been watching for years and years and finally you get to do it.
Greek dancing is very important in Greek weddings, usually when there [is] Greek dancing, but at any random Greek event people break out into [a] dance. We have a Greek basketball tournament. It sounds kind of crazy, but there’s a lot of Greek dancing there too, even though you’re supposed to be playing basketball.
There are a lot of basic Greek dances that almost everyone knows that you can throw [in] to music anytime or if someone’s like, ‘oh, let’s do the Pentozali,’ everyone starts breaking out into dance and it’s really fun. It’s like High School Musical. Everyone just knows the steps somehow.”