Feminine Futures : Ukraine

“War | Oppression | Dystopia” with its white shadow “Peace | Freedom | Utopia” has been conceived by Adrien Sina in 2020, in a pre-war period, as a contemporary section of his “Feminine Futures” exhibitions anticipating future tragedies: dances in the midst of destruction or devastated environments, intersubjective or collective dynamics shifting due to dramatic factors, dances of war, love, tolerance, resistance and resilience, leading to the highest level of creation, emotion or abstraction surpassing cruel realities.

With choreographies and dances by Vladyslav Detiuchenko, Svitlana Oleksiu, Anna Gerus, Konstantin Koval, Liza Riabinina, Irina Bashuk, Inna Matiushyna, Olya Shevchuk, Nadia Tomazenko, Sofia Naumenko, Alisa Makarenko, Natalia Trafankowska, Anastasiya Kharchenko, Kate Luzan, Alisha Kobilyak, Gelya Andryushina, Olena Meshcheriakova, Alona Stoliarova, Anton Obukhovskiy, Zhenya Goncharenko.

Several choreographers have chosen to stay in Ukraine despite the incessant bombing. Others pass among us:

Konstantin Koval is a choreographer, co-author of the film UPROOTED made for UNHCR – the United Nations Refugee Agency, under the first fires of war. UPROOTED 2, his new and unprecedented initiative, is a series of one-minute dance films made with the artists who experience war in their daily life in Ukraine, as uprooted from their former peaceful lives as the refugees he follows through their unfamiliar environments. In-between spaces, empty and solitary architectures or landscapes haunt the poignant poetics of this collection of individual, even intimate, expressions, in front of the violence of future uncertainties.

Irina Bashuk, born in the small mining town of Donetsk, is a choreographer, dancer and multidisciplinary artist from Kyiv, now based in Paris. With her geometric and angular movements, inspired by urban dances, Tutting or Voguing, she experiments with the body of the future within technological environments (NFT, AR, VR, AI). A fashion muse, she creates the accessories of her performances often linked to futurist or modernist lines of design. She has performed in the exhibitions "BAUHAUS-100" in Qingdao and at the MoCA in Shanghai. In Kyiv, her dances embracing the utopian architecture of the Soviet era, aim to raise public awareness about the political threat of demolition in the name of de-Sovietisation, and the importance of the preservation of these historical singularities as part of the Ukrainian collective memory.

This contemporary itinerary will be briefly introduced by “Dance and War”, an historical thinking of the major theme of “Feminine Futures”, with art pieces of Valentine de Saint-Point, Giannina Censi, Mary Wigman, Julia Marcus, Myra Kinch, Martha Graham, Anna Sokolow, and Pauline Koner.