From 2025 to 2027, Vitlycke-CPA will offer two artistic residencies per year for emerging artists from Ukraine, Sweden, Croatia, Romania and Hungary. Each residency will host up to three dance projects, with one dance artist from Ukraine and two from other partner countries. The DancEUA residency program is designed to foster artistic dialogue, support the development of individual projects, and encourage collaboration between artists from Ukraine and the partner countries.

Artists of first DancEUA Artist-in-Residence

Anastasiia Kovalenko (UA)

Anastasia Kovalenko is a contemporary dance artist, dancer and performer from Donetsk, Ukraine. She started dancing in age of 4 with ballet and modern dance. Practiced various dance styles, since 2021 she practices contemporary dance in combination with street dance styles. When full-scale invasion started Anastasia moved to Tbilisi, Georgia. During 2022-2023 she participated in the performance “tempor[e]ality” as part of the Biennale festival (Tbilisi, Georgia), co-created the performance “Evening Song. So Good! Check Out” based on the post-colonial trauma of women (performed twice in Tbilisi, Georgia), participated in charity events in support of Ukraine.
Since 2024 lives in Poland, became an artist in the performance “Every Minute Motherland” choreographed by Maciej Kuzminski. She currently works internationally. In practice, she combines different dance styles and movement practices, using experimental approach.

Polit[I]cal Body by Anastasiia Kovalenko

This solo explores language as a form of bodily memory and as a site of political struggle. When language is occupied — so is the body. Reclaiming language becomes an embodied process: unlearning silence, shedding inherited gestures, and discovering new rhythms of
being.

The solo emerges from physical research rooted in rupture — between two identities, two mother tongues, and two homes. It is grounded in the personal story of a dancer from Donetsk, whose transition from Russian to Ukrainian reflects not only an act of resistance, but a deep and often painful process of redefinition. Her personal experience intersects with broader historical trauma: the russification of Ukraine, the erasure of local cultures, and the long-term impact of war on voice, presence, and identity.

Credits
Coreographer / performance: Anastasia Kovalenko
Composer: Ivan Martynenko

Irina Marinescu (RO)

Irina Marinescu is a movement Artist, dance therapist and stand-up comedian. The dancer fell in love with contemporary dance in 2009. She has studied contemporary dance and various somatic and performing arts techniques (Feldenkrais, Viewpoints, Axis Syllabus, Das Theater Feedback Method, Contact improvisation, Gaga) and film production. She works as a Movement Artist, Cultural producer, Dance Therapist and Stand-up Comedian.

She has worked for The National Dance Center Bucharest, she is the founder of the UnShame Dance platform and cofounder of the cultural NGO Developing Art. Her interests lie at the intersection between art and therapy, art and science and art and anthropology.
From 2019 she started doing Stand-up Comedy because she wanted to not take herself so seriously and because she didn’t feel represented by the stories that she heard on stage. From 2022 she has started a long-term training specialization on dance-movement-therapy. Through DMT she intends to channel her contemporary dance experience to bring connection, healing and relief with tested and recognized methods from movement and therapy systems and techniques (Laban-Bartenieff, Somatic movement, Psychotherapy methods, Kestenberg, Authentic Movement, etc.).

Remember when.. by Irina Marinescu

Our age is one of obscene quantities of information, of real time re-writes of history and of multiple realities. One that deals more and more with memories in the technological and virtual appendices (smart phones and digital territories).
What if you could be allowed to remember only one person, one place, one event and one object? What would those be? Does it pain you to have to make a choice? What else do you remember – do you remember the way the air felt, the temperature, the sounds or smells, what was on the radio?
Sometimes the oppressors are political contexts, often is our faulty biology that leads to reshaping our identity and relationships. Most battles are left unknown and are fought daily.

During this residency, Irina will be exploring somatic and digitally the theme of memory loss.
Irina will be working with the tension between gaining and losing control of one’s territory and space, starting from the body, extending to the world. Privacy is sacrificed for the sake of care through surveillance devices. Work ethics, cultural biases and migration paths are reshaped by forces that seem as much out of our control as neurological maladies. While moving through and with these topics in mind, Irina’s mother’s initials will be guiding her in creating about what it means to be – OM – a word that, in Romanian means Human.

More information here

Isabella Khanamidi (SE)

Isabella Khanamidi is a Malmö-based freelance dance artist and graduate of the Copenhagen Contemporary Dance School. She has worked with companies such as Bobbi Lo Produktion, Svalholm, Holstebro Dansekompagni, Ildance, NoXsense, and Memory Wax, and collaborated with choreographers including Israel Aloni, Lee Brummer, Mia Habib, Nønne Svalholm, Gwyn Emberton, Ian Yves Ancheta, and Ana Kreitmeyer.

This dance is about us by Isabella Khanamidi

This dance is about us is a solo work that began with a series of poems written by the performer, as a way to process emotions that were difficult to name. These poems now serve as the inspiration for a movement-based exploration of emotions, memory, and identity. Through the body, she aims to reflect, embody, and transform these experiences.

The movement grows from the breaking down of emotion, through a physical process of examining, reshaping, and giving form to inner experience.

The title carries many layers. “Us” may refer to the performer and their emotions, the different versions of the self, or the relations between self and other. The work is shaped by questions around identity, themes that also surface often in the performer’s poetry.
This dance is about us wants to invite to a space for intimacy, honesty and reflection.

Photos: Hanna Olsson