Exhibition in Kyiv and Lviv, Ukraine 2024
“How do you Dance in a War Zone?” - a collaborative project
Often when people think of dance, they imagine something rather poetic involving arabesques and pirouettes. But this notion couldn’t be more at odds to the stark form of resistance presented by the Ukrainian dance community.
Participating dance-artists were invited to respond to the question ‘how do you dance in a war zone?’ not with words, but through the language of the body and movement.
Each location used was chosen specifically by the dancer for its relevance to their individual experience of the Russian invasion. The soundtrack consists of recordings from the invasion including the trenches, shootings, shakhed-drones, missiles, sirens and tanks. These articulate, moving responses offer an illuminating insight into so much more than pirouettes and arabesques expanding the understanding of dance and bringing its meaning and mission on completely another level.
In this multimedia exhibition visitors can find the powerful medium of dance operating in the most extraordinary and unexpected ways in Ukraine during the war. Project is the culmination of two trips to Ukraine (Lviv and Kyiv) by two photographic artists, Maria Falconer and Paul Hill, in collaboration with Viktor Ruban (as co-curator, co-producer and dance-artist), sound artist Grigory Semenchuk and a group of Ukrainian contemporary dance artists: Alla Shliakhova, Khrystyna Slobodianiuk, Kristina Shyshkariova, Larysa Venediktova, Liudmyla Mova, Mariya Salo, Mykyta Kravchenko, Svitlana Oleksiuk and Taisiia Tymofieieva.
Production: Maria Falconer, Professor Paul Hill and Viktor Ruban (Ruban production ITP and CO ICF Impulse Transformation Platform).
In Ukraine project will be presented: July 11 - August 17, 2024 at the National Art Museum of Ukraine (Kyiv) and September 7 - October 12, 2024 at the Hnat Khotkevych Culture Palace (Lviv), Vie-Laboratory (Zaphorizhzhia), October-November 2024.
The project will be available for viewing in the halls of the National Art Museum of Ukraine at Hrushevskoho Str., 6, Kyiv, on Thursday, Friday and Saturday from 12:00 to 18:00. Entrance fee: full ticket - 150 UAH, discounted ticket (schoolchildren, students, pensioners) - 100 UAH, free entrance for military.
Partners and supporting institutions: National Art Museum of Ukraine, National Khanenko Museum, National Dovzhenko Center (Kyiv, Ukraine), Hnat Khotkevych Culture Palace, Lviv municipal Lesya Ukrainka Theater, Denis Barabanza Sound Archive (Lviv, Ukraine), Assembly Festival Edinburgh, Dance Base, Scotland's National Centre for Dance, Loxley printing (Glasgow, UK), Royal Photographic Society, Stills Gallery (London, UK)
Prehistory of the project by Maria Falconer, one of the authors:
“In March 2022 I dropped into an online conversation hosted by Dance Base in Edinburgh. It was part of their Catalytic Conversions series, a platform for international dance professionals to connect and explore contemporary issues. One of the speakers was Ukrainian dancer and choreographer Viktor Ruban, and given that Russia had just invaded Ukraine, the conversation naturally turned to this atrocity. When I first posed the question to Viktor ‘how do you dance in a war zone?’, I really wasn’t prepared for his response. The enormity of the question took him a little by surprise and after a
brief attempt to provide a simple explanation for such a complex event, he neatly batted it back to me with an invitation to visit Ukraine to see for myself.
During our time in Ukraine, we saw professional dancers performing in theaters doubling up as bomb shelters and refugee centers. We witnessed emotional, psychological and visceral reactions to the invasion played out through the extraordinary language of movement. We watched dancers working in the wider community, with carefully structured movement sessions designed to provide mental and physical support. We visited a dance school whose upper floor had been converted into an international fund-raising center to raise money to buy boots, bullets, uniforms and weapons for the military. Dance Therapists work tirelessly with traumatized soldiers recently returned from the front line. And professional dancers practice military drills as they train to become soldiers. The collaboration between the military and dance communities was remarkable, particularly in Kyiv, where dancers use Tactical Choreography, a system of movement training designed by dancer Kristina Shyshkariova that prepares volunteer soldiers for combat. And in return the soldiers teach the dancers how to fight.”
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