Opa! The Greeks are a very passionate people, and it comes through in their dances. I’ve posted about Greek dances before.

Zorba the Greek. I’ve posted about this dance before, but you can never see too many versions of it:

There’s a Greek Orthodox church in the next town from us, and they hold a Greek Festival every year. They have dance groups of all ages that perform, and they also open the floor for everyone to dance. They teach a few steps, and the band plays a million verses of a song, and each musician gets to improvise a solo while the whole community dances. It feels like this—Adanali:

Axi Vaxi is an easy dance with only two patterns:

Kali Tihi means “good luck.” We do this fun dance at Phoenix International Folk Dancers. Here it is led by the choreographer, Lee Otterholt:

Alta es la Luna is based on traditional dance steps used by Sephardic Jews in Greece. This is another dance we do at PIFD:

Amoliti Gaida is a spirited dance with a lot of hopping and deep knee bends for the men:

Karagouna is another favorite we do at PIFD, but we don’t do the “look left, look right” as in this version (but I like that very much!):

Hassapiko Mozart is another PIFD favorite. You may recognize a little bit of Mozart’s Symphony No. 40 (“It’s a bird, it’s a plane, it’s a Mozart,” as we used to sing in music school while studying for a listening test). Choreographed by Ira Weisburd using traditional Greek hassapiko steps.

Ziglos involves a lot of arm swinging:

Gerakina looks familiar to me; I think we learned it at PIFD: