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Justin Locklear and Danielle Georgiou: Photo by Danny Fulgencio

 

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Most neighbors go to a Danielle Georgiou Dance Group performance expecting to see a dance, but what they find is much more than that.

“A lot of people don’t even realize they’re watching dance,” the group’s founder Danielle Georgiou says. “By the time they leave they’re like, ‘I think I saw a dance, but I’m pretty sure I saw theater,’ and that’s what we want.”

DGDG is unlike anything else in Dallas. “No one is doing this,” Georgiou says, which can make the group’s particular style a little hard to explain.

“The vision behind the company is to combine contemporary dance with physical theater,” she says.

When Georgiou started DGDG, she hoped to reach for more avant-garde and abstract ways of producing dance. Then she met East Dallas resident Justin Locklear, who soon became her boyfriend and co-producer, but his background is in theater. The dance group rehearses at his neighborhood studio.

When the pair began working together, the group became more of a physical dance company, which is a genre of dance that typically involves theatrical performances and storytelling through physical means.

“We integrate original scripts, live dance and a lot of comedy,” Georgiou says, and all DGDG performers are “triple threats,” meaning they dance, act and sing.

But don’t confuse their performances with musical theater because the scripts and songs don’t revolve around a single narrative, and the biggest difference between DGDG and most dance performances is that the audience members are “not allowed” to simply sit and watch the show unfold.

“We want the audience to be with us in the moment, so it’s constructed between the audience and the performer,” Locklear explains.

“The audience is a big part of the show,” Georgiou adds. “They’re either on the stage with the dancers or being addressed.”

And no two performances are the same.