Artists of 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

projectSEED by in good company – Rakeem Hardy, Jia Yi (Judy) Luo, Katherine Semchuk, David Norsworthy (CA)

During our time in Vitlycke, the company will be working on two separate works that are part of our inaugural season as a collective.
projectSEED is a container for creative process and choreographic re-imaginations with each of their mentors: Hardy – David Norsworthy (Toronto/Sweden); Luo – Liam Francis (UK) ; and Semchuk – Peggy Baker (Toronto). During our residency, they will work with Norsworthy on the development of his score ‘Self-Sustaining Situation’ and begin learning Francis’ ‘Dual Till the Death’ to prepare for its further development.

Self-Sustaining Situation; score by David Norsworthy

Choreographer Statement: I am interested in improvisation, but not whim. I want to trust an unfolding experience and see where it goes, instead of forcing my own aesthetics and subjectivity on the action. In that sense, I am not interested in improvisation as creativity or expression, but rather in dealing with a circumstance that has its own demands. (Problem solving? Attending?). I enjoy how this counteracts my learned dancer impulse to show up as ‘perfectly rehearsed’ and in control. Instead, I need to attend to the moment with all my history, training, and hope/fear/questions as possible tools. In that sense, the choreography that compels me as an interpreter and maker is constructed in a way that presence is necessitated; not as a performative theatrical device but rather as a way to navigate an otherwise impossible situation. A common choreographic problem is that any initial tensions are easily resolved, resulting in an anything-could-happen-next conundrum. I am looking for a choreographic structure through which the output of one task becomes the input of the next, leading to a constantly evolving attentional exercise in which there is little or no energetic leakage. The performance just starts, and it generates itself.

Self-Sustaining Situation is the working title for a piece that deals with the above interests. I have been working with a mirroring/copying task that will form the base of the work. This work is about continuously reinvesting attention, finding yourself in circumstances that you couldn’t have invented on your own, and studying the interpersonal impacts of interdependence.

Dual Till the Death; duet by Liam Francis

Dual Till The Death is a multi-award winning duet that explores the duality of human nature; the mature and the juvenile, the aggressive and the tender, the playful and the serious, and the conscious and subconscious. The duet investigates how we balance and embrace the duality of existing. As it becomes harder to decipher whether quarrels are existing internally or externally, Dual Till The Death poses the questions “Are our conflicts ever really with anyone other than ourselves?”

in good company

“Where do we come from? Where are we going? Who are we moving with?”
in good company is a new contemporary dance collective comprised of Rakeem Hardy, Jia Yi (Judy) Luo, and Katherine Semchuk. As artists who work nationally and internationally, we identified a common desire to cultivate stability in the city we call home. This collective is a vessel for us to share our experiences and evolving values with the Toronto dance community. We formed to facilitate relationship building, continuity in practice, and opportunities to inhabit and perform dancework (formally and informally). Through ongoing peer-to-peer professional development, we share diverse approaches to process and practice, engage in critical conversations, and converge our communities.

David Norsworthy (he/him) is a Tkarón:to/Toronto-based dance artist, choreographer and curator/producer of mixed Japanese immigrant/British settler descent who is “an exceptionally lucid performer, impressive and articulate” (Globe and Mail). A graduate of The Juilliard School where he trained in Euro-American contemporary dance, David delights in asking questions, and believes deeply in the transformative power of dancing. David has performed with dance companies and collaborated with dance creators in Canada, USA, Sweden and Australia, and his choreographic career has included independently produced full-length works, international tours, and commissioned projects for companies, universities and schools. His choreographic work has focused on community-building through co-creation; cultivating participatory environments that work with the materiality of emotion and dialogue through improvisational scores. David is the grateful recipient of the Living Arts Centre’s Ron Lenyk Award and was one of three finalists for the Toronto Arts Foundation’s Emerging Artist Award. He recently served as a Board Member of CanAsian Dance, and as a part-time Rehearsal Director for Norrdans, a contemporary dance company in Sweden. David is a Co-Founder/Co-Director of TOES FOR DANCE, and a Co-Executive Artistic Producer for DanceWorks.

Liam Francis is a dance artist based in Brighton (UK). His career began with the hiphop theatre company Zoonation Dance Company (2009-2014). Between 2014 and 2021 he was a leading dancer with Rambert Dance Company where he performed and created roles in works by choreographers including Sidi Larbi Cherkaoui, Merce Cunningham, Ben Duke, Sharon Eyal, Andonis Foniadakis, Wayne McGregor, Marion Motin, Hofesh Shechter, Imre and Marne Van Opstal and Wim Vandekeybus. In 2021, Liam was nominated in Dance Europe’s ‘Dancer of the Year’ and Tanz Magazine’s ‘Best Male Dancer’.
Liam’s choreographic practice seeks to combine his extensive performance career with his interest in Flow State and Play (the subject of his 2022 Master’s Degree Study). In 2024 with the support of Arts Council England, Liam is working with Ben Duke (LostDog) and Jill Johnson (Forsythe Company) to expand his choreographic practice and explore the relationship between text and movement in performance. Liam has been commissioned by Rambert Dance Company, Skånesdansteater, Ballett Theater Trier, Sally Dansgezelschap Maastricht and Shechter2.

Liam has performed his own choreographic work in Hannover, London, Massachusetts, New York, Oxford, Rome and Rotterdam. In 2022, Liam’s duet, Dual Till the Death, received 4 awards at Rotterdam International Duet Choreography Competition and another at Choreography Competition Hannover. This year Liam will premiere his new creation, entitled MIXTAPE, at the Dans Élargie festival in Paris.