VOICES Festival: THE WHIP / FRACTIONAL STEP

This is a performance with two dance pieces that wander 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 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. She takes its complicated symbolic meaning as a background. Fear, disgust, power relations - everything is there. And yet, through her "partnership" with this concrete piece of material world, and through subtle explorations of movement, she ultimately develops her own embodied knowledge of fragility, fluidity, and agency 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 striking sound.

In Fractional Step, classically trained accordionist Roman Malyavkin and dancer Tatyana Chizhikova deconstruct Russian stage 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 in people's bodies. In fact, they have as much in common with authentic folk dances as they do with the ballet schools where they were taught. What do these clicking steps say 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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Programme

The whip (15:30-16:30)

Choreography and Performance: Yulia Arsen
Music: Till Mertens
Outside Eye: Nicole Seiler

Break

Fractional Step (17:30-18:30)

Choreography and Performance: Tatiana Chizhikova
Music: Roman Malyavkin
Dance dramaturgy: Tatiana Chizhikova, Anna Semenova-Ganz

 

Program curator: Anastasia Proshutinskaya

Performers

Yulia Arsen

Yulia Arsen is an interdisciplinary artist and choreographer working at the intersection of dance, theatre and contemporary art. Arsen studied dance in Munich (Iwanson) and in Kassel (SOZO vim) and performed her own works at various festivals in Berlin, Freiburg, Kassel, Moscow, Tallinn, Limerick and Bucharest. During the last years she created pieces for museums (Know-how, 7 Cringe Songs, Recursion), a theatre piece (Oxytocin) and many solo and group dance pieces. In 2022, her solo "Plastic Bag" was selected for the AEROWAVES Twenty22.

Tatiana Chizhikova

Tatiana Chizhikova is a dancer, choreographer, and contemporary dance teacher. She graduated from Moscow Choreographic Lyceum as a ballet dancer and completed her studies at Moscow State Academy of Choreography Moscow with a BA in Art of Choreoghraphy (2010). In 2015 Tatiana graduated from SOTA, a performing arts education program organized by the Institute of Theatre. In 2019 she won the 'Young Choreographers' Award at ImPulsTanz - Vienna International Dance Festival with her performance Time to Time.

Roman Malyavkin

Roman Malyavkin is a musician. He graduated from the Gnessin Academy of Music (Moscow) and is a guest musician with the Moscow Ensemble of Contemporary Music and the Studio for New Music. Roman participated in works of famous Russian composers, in cross-genre performances and in important festivals of music, theatre and contemporary art. He has won international competitions in Lithuania and Germany, as well as various music competitions in Russia.

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