As senior Avy Taylor prepared to perform at the annual Greek Food Festival, she looked in the mirror and felt pride swell within her. Clad in her Grecian shepherd costume, Taylor understood the importance of clinging to one’s culture despite becoming integrated within another. Taylor can trace her Greek roots back to her mom’s side of the family, which immigrated over to the United States from a suburb of Athens called Marousi to study poetry. In keeping with her lineage, Taylor used to go to school at the Holy Greek Orthodox Church of Dallas, the venue of the festival.

“I went back for the festival last year and I saw how they had this dance team,” Taylor said. “I saw all my old friends that I hadn’t seen in years and so I was like ‘what is this? I want to do this!’ and they said come back next year.”

On Sept. 23-25, Taylor performed both day and night shows at the festival and also participated in the promotional aspect by appearing on “Channel 4 News” and “Good Morning Texas” in the weeks leading up to the event. However, on their way to one such promotional event, the fully costumed dance team went astray while trying to find Victory Park.

“It was a funny story,” Taylor said. “We got lost so it was just a group of guys in skirts and girls dressed as shepherds just walking around downtown Dallas.”

For their television appearances, they wore their day performance costumes which involved the females dressed in a traditional maid’s costume consisting of a white long-sleeved dress with a vest, apron and decorated headpiece, commonly known as a desfina. The night performance attire posed a stark contrast as they all wore tight-fitting black clothes paired with red sashes and roses. Taylor likened the night costumes to what she would wear while performing as part of the Dancing For a Cause (DFC) chapter at West, but emphasized how the dance styles of the two groups were distinctly disparate.

“It was really different because I already do hip hop dance so having to slow down and do line dancing was crazy,” Taylor said. “With Greek traditional dance, we’re all connected so if one person messes up, the whole thing messes up. You have to be really unified as a group.”

Taylor’s group performed a total of 16, 20 minute shows over the course of the weekend with two hour breaks in between to walk around, socialize and advertise. She invited her friends, juniors Nick Kasper and Christopher Djinov to come watch.

“I came to support Avy but I also came to learn about Greek culture and experience it firsthand because it’s not that common in Plano,” Kasper said. “I didn’t expect it to be that good. I wasn’t trying to go but I was glad I went. It was exciting.”

Kasper was able to view both the day shows which consisted of slow dances as well as the night shows, which picked up the pace with faster numbers. The crowd reacted with enthusiasm during the more energetic pieces as the dancers stomped across the stage and yelled “Opa.”

“It’s not really stereotypical Western culture dancing,” Kasper said. “It’s really different. The moves they do, you’ve never seen them before.”

The daytime numbers included the kalamatianos, a popular and festive folk dance widely performed at social events. Like Kasper, Djinov was amazed by the quality of the dances. Because he had visited Greece many times, he was already familiar with the style and music of some of their numbers, but he was pleasantly surprised when the performance surpassed his expectations.

“I’ve actually seen the culture there,” Djinov said. “I was surprised they could do that in Dallas. When they actually did the zeibekiko dance with the guys, I thought that was pretty cool.”

The zeibekiko is a traditionally male-dominated rhythmic folk dance symbolizing the union of spirit and body. It was one of three night dances along with the hasapiko and pentozali. The hasapiko, meaning “the butcher’s [dance]” was performed as a battle mime while the pentozali was a high energy war dance which increased in speed and momentum of movement as it progressed. Taylor found that learning these numbers gave her insight into her past and she was proud to share her heritage on such a prevalent platform.

“I loved being a part of something so unique and so culturally different from America,” Taylor said. “No one really knows about Greek culture that much so it was cool to showcase what a small part actually is through dance.”