the black box “Theatre Between Us” will soon take place in Zaporizhzhia!
On September 13–14, the final session of the project will take place, which in Zaporizhzhia we are implementing in cooperation with our partners — the Theatre Platform “House of the Actor”.
PROGRAM OF EVENTS
- September 13, 11:00–17:00 (break from 14:00 to 15:00) – Workshop by Viktoria Khoroshylova “The Story of One Body”
- September 13, 19:00–20:30 – Public lecture by Mariya Bakalo “The Body in Performative Practices: Art that Both Disturbs and Disrupts”
- September 14, 11:00–17:00 – Workshop by Mariya Bakalo “Exorcism Workshop (My and Your Colonial Demons)”
Venue of events:
Zaporizhzhia, Cultural Services Center “Titan”, 131 Peremohy St.
CONDITIONS OF PARTICIPATION
- Entry to the lecture — free with registration.
- Participation in workshops — free upon prior registration.
Registration deadline for workshops — September 7, 23:59.
Due to a limited number of spots, participants will be selected based on submitted applications. Registration may close before the deadline. The organizers reserve the right not to provide reasons for refusal.
The program is carried out in cooperation with the Lithuanian Culture Institute and the Embassy of the Kingdom of the Netherlands in Ukraine.
The educational program about theatre “the black box” is supported by the European Union within the House of Europe program.
Curator of the program — Liuba Ilnytska, playwright, and curator of the performative program at Jam Factory Art Center.
Workshop by Viktoria Khoroshylova “The Story of One Body”
Date: September 13, 11:00–17:00 (break 14:00–15:00)
For: actors, dancers, performers, choreographers, and individuals with various experience in performative arts.
Venue: Cultural Services Center “Titan”, 131 Peremohy St.
Conditions of participation
Participation in the workshop is free upon prior registration.
Registration deadline — September 7, 23:59.
Due to a limited number of spots, participants will be selected based on submitted applications. Registration may close before the deadline. The organizers reserve the right not to provide reasons for refusal.
About the workshop
The bodily archive holds endless potential for movement and dance: to see what I have, to arrive where I am.
“The Story of One Body” is a practice of working with one’s bodily archive through exercises in attentiveness, movement imagery, and visual codes. Participants will explore the body as possessing a personal space and view it as a medium in public space. They will receive practical assignments for both individual and public practice.
The basis for this practice is drawn from the principles of American choreographer Deborah Hay: rejection of ornamentation and demonstration, aestheticization and idealism, as well as of binding movement to music or musical atmosphere. Instead, the focus is on action arising from the foundations of our being and from time within a historical perspective.
The development of the practice enters into dialogue with the philosophical concept of Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari’s “Body without Organs.” The body serves the narratives passing through it. Its affects and positions, sounds and movements not only record past stories but also hold potential for new ones. The body becomes a source of possibilities.
The project “The Story of One Body” was initiated in November 2023 thanks to the Antonin Artaud Fellowship, established by the proto produkciia foundation and the contemporary opera laboratory Opera aperta. The practice is part of a dance performance of the same name, shown in Odesa, Vinnytsia, and Kyiv.
About the workshop leader
Viktoria Khoroshylova — movement artist, director, choreographer from Odesa. Co-founder and member of the Odesa performative group P.L.O.T. In her artistic practice, she focuses on civic activism, realization of human creative potential, questions of personal freedom and responsibility. She works in contemporary art with museums, galleries, and independent performative and dance projects.
Her work involves research of diaries, documentary materials, and the works of other artists, such as Wassily Kandinsky, Bronislava Nijinska, Deborah Hay, Steve Paxton, Pina Bausch, and Antonin Artaud. She uses phenomenological analysis of philosophical texts, scientific research, and facts. She combines visual art, physical theatre, dance, and participatory practices.
Collaborations include:
— in Ukraine: Platform for Contemporary Dance, Museum of Contemporary Art Odesa, Antonin Artaud Fellowship, Kyiv residency Center Stage 24–25, Ruban Production ITP.
— in Sweden: Skånes Dance Theatre, Skissernas Museum of Public Art (Lund), Malmö Art Museum, Studio Silk, MOA Company, Danscentrum SYD.
— in Denmark: youth organizations Crossing Borders and Youth Democracy.
Public lecture by Mariya Bakalo “The Body in Performative Practices: Art that Both Disturbs and Disrupts”
Date: September 13, 19:00–20:30
For whom: for everyone.
Venue: Cultural Services Center “Titan”, 131 Peremohy St.
Conditions of participation
Entry to Mariya Bakalo’s lecture is free for all with registration.
About the lecture
The lecture addresses questions of difficult performances in different approaches to interpreting “difficulty” or “complexity” in relation to the artwork: difficulties in execution or perception, complexities of layered contexts, or challenges to established norms.
The discussion will focus on performances that provoke strong public reactions due to unconventional engagement with the body as a medium. We will reflect on why paintings, films, or literary works depicting the same or similar ideas and actions regarding the body often do not trigger such radical societal responses as performances do.
Drawing on theories of corporeality, we will consider the relationship between embodiment and emotionality, as well as the politics of attributing sentimentality, impulsiveness, poetics, and corporeality to the feminine.
Mariya Bakalo builds the lecture on Jennifer Doyle’s text “Hold It Against Me”, the works of Audre Lorde, and also refers to examples from her own performative practice.
Performative workshop by Mariya Bakalo “Exorcism Workshop (My and Your Colonial Demons)”
Date: September 14, 11:00–17:00 (break 14:00–15:00)
For: actors, directors, performers, and individuals with diverse experience in arts and culture.
Venue: Cultural Services Center “Titan”, 131 Peremohy St.
Conditions of participation
Participation in the workshop is free upon prior registration.
Registration deadline — September 7, 23:59.
Due to limited spots, participants will be selected based on applications. Registration may close earlier. Organizers reserve the right not to provide reasons for refusal.
About the workshop
The idea of the Exorcism Workshop is inspired by reflections on how, through artistic form and with a touch of self-irony and absurdity, one can transgress colonial experience: to escape outdated behavioral, kinetic, and mental patterns imposed by dominant cultures or so-called “universal” principles.
The shedding or peeling away of what is obsolete but still clinging can be both humorous and frightening — in any case, it is an energy-intensive act of seeking the new in one’s thinking and creative expression.
Key concepts of this workshop: irony and absurdity, autoethnography, coloniality, critique of Western aesthetic canons, collective transgression, art as applied magic.
Mariya Bakalo will share ideas and formal experiments she develops in opposition to established canons applied to the representation of the dancing body, and invite participants to find their own within their context and genre.
A metaphor for the workshop’s concept can be found in the story of the life-affirming Tarantella dance, which, according to legend, was the only cure for madness.
Request to workshop participants: be ready to express yourselves through the moving body without expectations of form or norm.
About the speaker and workshop leader
Mariya Bakalo — choreographer, contemporary dance teacher, and dancer. In her current practices, she raises questions about the futility/usefulness of art during major crises and profound human suffering. Her areas of interest include the politics of touch and the weight of time.
She is a recipient of the Gluck Fellowship, the I-Portunus grant, the DanceWEB scholarship, the President of Ukraine’s Scholarship for Cultural Workers (2018), and the Tanja Liedtke Foundation Fellowship. She has performed in the USA, Germany, Italy, Poland, Lithuania, and Romania.
Mariya holds a Master’s degree in Experimental Choreography from the University of California, Riverside. She is also a certified teacher of dance practices for people with and without disabilities under the DanceAbility method.