Moving Borders Prague workshop

Karina Buckley’s Journal: 17 - 19 June, 2024 – Prague

After an exploratory meeting in Paris in January, the Moving Borders team gathered in Prague in the middle of June to further its research into the experience of Ukrainian dance artists displaced by the invasion of their country. Led by Yana Reutova and hosted by Tanec Praha Festival director, Yvona Kreuzmannova, the core group was joined by ten guest artists, all bar two of whom are now based in central and eastern Europe; a couple remain in their war-torn homeland. Our mission for this session was to explore what practices might be deployed to counter the impact of trauma. Over two and a half days, we danced around the topic – literally and figuratively – to tease out how embodied trauma might be acknowledged, processed and even exorcised.

Fittingly for dancers, our ice-breaker introductions were gestural, not verbal and developed a whole sequence of movement that generated enthusiastic laughter and positive energy. When we eventually sat to listen to each other’s stories, the place names dropped like bombs – Donetsk, Zaporizhzhia, Dnipro City – our artists’ home cities familiar now for all the wrong reasons, pulling us back to the reality that had us here and the suffering now shaping these artists’ work.

We were joined by some children for the first practice proper, which was led by Yana Reutova. In the subsequent discussion, she told us she had developed it to help displaced Ukrainian children to unblock, having noticed that they didn’t voluntarily interact with one another and didn’t want to be touched. The practice had us working in pairs but interacting as a whole. It gave each dancer their own space and required them to pay attention to what was happening elsewhere in the room. We would discover later that it was a device Reutova employed to build rapport and a sense of mutual support among the children, as well as an awareness of the needs of others. The second half of the practice used ropes to create a sort of “no-contact” contact improvisation. The ropes allowed us to swing around the studio with abandon – like human sleds being pulled by or pulling around our partners. They were snaked along the floor and swung like lassos to provide a non-human target for interaction. It was another session that we laughed our way through but whose serious purpose of creating cohesion among a group was roundly achieved. In the subsequent discussion, the session also opened up a conversation that explored how the other artists had adapted their dance practices to help Ukrainian children process their trauma and give them a sense of security. Play was the common thread in all of these practices, proving Piaget’s assertion that play is the work of children.

To kick off day two of our workshop, Daria Koval had us check in with our bodies before introducing a practice she is developing that is informed by psychotherapy, and prioritises self-care. She reassured us that, though we would be dealing with trauma, it would be a gentle, joyful practice that introduced small amounts of discomfort to help the body process them in bitesize chunks. She pointed out that, like therapy, each individual’s experience would be unique and encouraged us to be explorers of our own bodies and feelings. We start the practice by searching the space with our eyes before turning the focus inwards, looking for our inner smile. We express a whole range of emotions with our faces and bodies before planting ourselves on the spot, and feeling the security that comes with being rooted in the here and now. We breathe awareness and love into our bodies as we observe them with our gaze, transferring that positive regard to those sharing the studio with us as we interact with eyes, hands, and open hearts and senses. Later, we massage our bodies as we envision ourselves relaxing on a beach in a restful and restorative sequence that is difficult to shake off. We conclude with some embodied breathwork – first matching our breathing with movement; large, expansive gestures releasing tension with each exhale. Later we breathe to help us sustain difficult balancing positions and to animate a series of fight, flight or freeze movements. We finish by checking in with our bodies again, to see if the practice had improved our sense of physical and emotional wellbeing. The session was followed by a group discussion on the genesis of the practice, its usefulness in the context of dealing with trauma, as well as a broader discussion around care practices that could be employed in professional settings to minimise any further trauma to Ukrainian artists.

Yana Reutova was joined by Brazilian artist Clara da Costa to lead the second movement workshop of the day – a wild and energetic booty-shaking samba-rich practice designed to be empowering and therapeutic, but also provocative. Inspired by Reutova’s experience of Brazil and its culture, it encouraged us to dance outside the box – to break our usual patterns and be more open-minded about how we move our bodies. Our dramaturg, Monica Gillette led the final session of the day, inviting Ukrainian dance artists to reflect on the new influences in their artistry precipitated by the forced migration from their homeland. This exploration of their new cultural contexts, the new artists they had discovered, the training and development opportunities they had had, and the new disciplines they had been exposed to generated some spirited discussion around the funding and practice of contemporary dance in Ukraine when compared to the European context.

We walked in silence up towards the Vítkov war memorial at the start of our final day in Prague. Nika Horiacha, Nastya Pavlovksa and Olena Korotkova (all now based in Prague but originally from Ukraine) led us in trust exercises and had us embody our spirit animals in a carefree practice that introduced us to their happy place on the serene hill overlooking the city and its river, the Vltava. Vita Vaskiv harnessed the power of words for the final movement practice of the workshop, inviting us to articulate our chosen word and its opposite with our bodies, isolating limbs and other body parts, travelling with its quality. It became a study in using a technical process to navigate emotions, which could prove a useful tool when the feelings are overwhelming.

The workshop concluded with another space for reflection, which evolved into building and rebuilding Ukrainian dance and creative arts culture and infrastructure, and how the Ukrainian artists’ current experience and learning could feed into this. The Prague workshop took place in the context of Tanec Praha dance festival, which gave the group the opportunity to experience world-class performances, to deepen bonds with each other and to connect and reconnect with other dance professionals. Our next session will take us to the bucolic surroundings of outdoor gallery Arte Sella in Northern Italy, where Ukrainian artist-in-residence, Anna Kushnirenko will curate the programme.