East European Performing Arts Platform (EEPAP) supports the
development of contemporary performing arts (dance and theatre)
in 18 countries of Central and Eastern Europe.

Actual Dance Association, Kiev, Ukraine

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Contact
Telephone: 
Larysa Venediktova, creator of Actual Dance Association: Lunacharskogo 7 -256, Kiev 02002 Ukraine E-mail: [email protected], phone: +380 67 3957135
Description
Information about institution: 

NGO, non-profit organization, founded in 2000.  Creator is Larysa Venediktova. She is a dancer teacher, performer, choreographer, and director based in Kiev (Ukraine).  Most important personnel: director Olexander Leledev and Olga Komisar.

Actual Dance Association works to developing an arena for contemporary performing art in Ukraine. ADA cooperates with theatres, research centers, galleries, and artists both in Ukraine and in Europe. The association organizes international projects, workshops, conferences, and laboratories in the field of contemporary performing art.

The most important projects:

  • Actual Dance Stage Festival (Kyiv, 2001 - 2003),
  • TanzLaboratorium independent performance group (since 2000),
  • Kurbas. Reconstruction (performance, 2007),
  • Clinamen 3 (performance, 2009),
  • Buza (performance, 2010),
  • Performance Laboratory (Kyiv, 2006 - 2010),
  • Performativity, Educational Art Project (Kyiv, 2011)

ADA is a founder of the TanzLaboratorium group.

TanzLaboratorium is an independent performance group that works the manifestation of time in given, random or consciously chosen spaces. The group’s artistic strategy manifests itself in permeating the gaps between contemporary art forms and destructing the linguistic conventions of these forms.

The group realizes its artistic practice primarily through working with the body as medium, with its own unique body-consciousness (proprioception) and body-imagination.

The body is not used as an instrument but acts as the author of its image and critical agent for thinking. Physical training is regarded as a method of critical analysis, and dance – by investigating its perception – becomes a way of thinking.

Objectives of Actual Dance Association:

  • Provoke discussions to further the education of arts based on international and local participants,
  • Varied experience -Investigate performativity as a leading tendency in contemporary art theory and practice and explore its potential to transform art education into curatorial research projects,
  • Create an arena that will support the further development of Ukrainian contemporary art,
  • Start a process that will integrate Ukrainian contemporary art into the world art context.

International cooperation:

  • “Value” in the SWIZHE program (2008),
  • Headless – Invisible Generation – Swedish-Ukrainian International project (2010),
  • “Use  your head” as a part of the German – Ukrainian project  “Spielstrasse/Strassen spiele” (2010).

In 2009, the performance "Kurbas.Reconstruction" was awarded the Grand Prix at the 36th international theatre festival INFANT (Serbia). Afisha Magazine named "Kurbas. Reconstruction" the most conceptual performance of year 2007.

In the year to come, ADA,  in partnership with the Adam Mickiewicz Institute, is planning to create a new project called the Museum of Perception. A part of this project will be the continuation of their Performativity project and other parts will consist of various curatorial and research projects.

Based on this project, TanzLaboratorium are making a new production/piece “Cruelity of possibilities”. It saw its birth in August of 2011 in Poland on the residence programme Fundacja Burdag.

Publications:

Quotes from “Life with TanzLaboratorium” by Larissa Babij ART UKRAINE, March-April 2011

“While observing the various images dispersed in [the theatre] space, the viewer quickly realizes that, perhaps, he is always missing something. Created in accordance with a principle common in contemporary visual and media art, the work [Buza] is  impossible to grasp in its totality through human perception. The viewer keeps returning to the thought that the performance is constructed through the movement of his own attention.”

“The criticality of TanzLaboratorium’s artistic practice manifests itself in the members’ continual reflection on themselves and on their Ukrainian context. In each of their works, the performers make themselves visible, exposing their own human existence (through nonsensical actions) and inviting viewers to think about what is happening.”

“All of TanzLaboratorium’s diverse works have a common basis in the risk of refusing conventional or habitual thinking and in the examination of one’s own being in search for the universally human.”

Quotes from “Laboratory of dance” by Rina Nikiforova
Harper’s BAZAAR, March 2010

“Project TanzLaboratorium was created in 2000 year. TanzLaboratorium is dealing with the existential questions of being... In 2007 group made a production “Kurbas.Reconstruction”, that was not a reconstruction of one of the pieces of great director but rather reflections and impressions from his artistic heritage.
Now TanzLaboratorium is working on a new production. Performance Buza, premiere will be shown this spring at Les Kurbas Natioal Art Center, is dedicated to famous director of the beginning of the 20 century – Vsevolod Meyerhold. “He interested us as a creator of special visual aesthetics, his own theatrical language, physical body training – bio-mechanics” – explains Olga Komisar…One of the main themes of performance will be fear…” Of course performers are not going to frighten anybody – they propose us, audience, to think about this strong feeling and its meaning/influence regarding our soviet past.

http://gazeta.24.ua/news/show/id/54198.htm

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