This is a performance with two dance pieces that wander around in a non-staged environment. The two choreographers and dancers, Tatyana Chizhikova and Yulia Arsen, detach their creations from their original stage versions, relying on the solid choreographic structure, resonant imagery and emotional density to create a shared experience for the viewer. Together they create a charged space, a landscape of shared reflection.
Yulia Arsen begins the performance with The Whip. In the context of the white gallery, we feel the gravity of an object even more strongly. She takes its complicated symbolic meaning as a backdrop. Fear, disgust, power relations - it's all there. And yet, through her "partnership" with this concrete piece of material world and subtle exploration of movement, she ultimately develops her own embodied knowledge of fragility, fluidity and agency that she has learned from a whip. There is a strong sense of revolt in this subversion of symbolic narrative and recognition of something that is simply at hand. The cracking of the whip is not actually a cracking sound.
In Fractional Step, the classically trained accordionist Roman Malyavkin and dancer Tatyana Chizhikova deconstruct Russian folk dance and in particular its steady percussive step. They engage with charged and ambivalent sensations of bravura and despair, their virtuosity colliding with pauses of hesitation. Over the decades, this language of movement has been constructed in Soviet Russia as the most "natural" public bodily expression - as if these postures and gestures were inherited into people's bodies. In fact, they have as much in common with authentic folk dances as they do with the ballet schools in which they were taught. What do these clicking steps mean today and how does it feel to perform them? Both choreographers belong to the younger generation of artists from Russia, which is currently undergoing change in every respect. In their works, they enter disturbingly solid narratives and question them, subvert them and complicate them through embodied practice. This is what dance can do.
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