ARTISTS OF DANCEUA ARTIST-IN-RESIDENCE

Daria Hordiichuk (UA) – Forgotten Garden

Forgotten Garden
“In the garden we forgot, time grew wild.”

A garden is created to be cared for. When it is forgotten, it transforms — not into decay, but into transition.
What happens to a body that is no longer tended to?
What remains alive inside silence?
Through movement, the performance explores fragility, renewal, and the persistence of memory.
A landscape shaped by absence.
By traces of what once was there.

Daria Hordiichuk is a Ukrainian dance artist working as a dancer, choreographer, teacher, and movement director across theatre, opera, and commercial contexts. She is also the co-founder of the ACT educational dance program in Kyiv. She holds a Bachelor’s degree in choreography and dance from Rivne State Humanities University (Ukraine) and continued her studies at Biennale College Danza in Venice (dir. by Wayne McGregor). Her professional path includes work with Totem Dance Theatre and Insha Dance Company (Kyiv), an internship at Tanztheater Wuppertal, Pina Bausch, and work with Of Curious Nature theatre (Germany).

Her experience spans stage performances, opera, dance film, and interdisciplinary projects across Ukraine and Europe, including works by internationally recognized choreographers such as Damien Jalet, William Forsythe, Xie Xin, Kor’Sia, as well as participation in interdisciplinary and exhibition projects (including collaborations with MOCA).

Eszter Rápolthy (HU) & Natalie Cox (US/DK) – STAND/BY

STAND/BY is an interactive dance performance that investigates the bystander effect—a social psychological phenomenon where individuals are less likely to offer help to a person in need when others are present. As the title suggests, the work explores the dual meaning of “standing by” as both passive observation and the heightened readiness of being “on standby,” revealing a shared tension between inaction and potential action.

Music by Nick Sonne.

Natalie Cox is a Danish-American artist originally from Los Angeles. Her dance training began at Degas Dance Studio, followed by studies at the Los Angeles County High School for the Arts, the Peabody Institute of Johns Hopkins University, and later the Copenhagen Contemporary Dance School. Following her graduation, she began choreographing her own work while also teaching, acting for film, and performing. She is a founding member of Teater A, with whom she has toured throughout Europe. Most recently, she has been developing a new work, STAND/BY, alongside her close friend and collaborator, Eszter Rápolthy, which investigates the social phenomenon known as the “bystander effect.”

Artistically, Natalie is interested in exploring the expressive potential of physicality, continually challenging her own habits, instincts, and movement patterns. She is drawn to storytelling and to creating politically engaged work that uses the body to embody, question, and give voice to urgent personal and social issues.

Eszter Rápolthy is a Hungarian dancer, performer and yoga teacher based in Budapest. After graduating in Copenhagen, she joined the international touring company VERVE under the leadership of Matteo Marfoglia in the UK, where she earned her MA in 2024. Throughout the years she has worked as a freelancer in Hungary and in Scandinavia. Toured around Sweden and Denmark with Bobbi Lo Production, premiered Laura Tóth latest creation in Budapest and continued her collaboration with Natalie Cox. Their interest in creating a work about social issues drawn to their new idea to explore and create their new duett ‘STAND/BY’.

Eszter is interested in physicality which incorporates theatricality and multidiscipline art forms. She sees dance as an endless playground to explore and question norms, find different connections between nature and humanity.
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Ulrik Ørsnes Jansen (DK) & Anni Koivusalo (FI) – A Storm in a Teacup

A Storm in a Teacup is a duet inspired by a massive landslide in Greenland which left the entire Earth vibrating for nine days. The performance deals with concepts of relationality and ideologies of eco-socialism in relation to the environment and climate crisis. Bringing perspective to scale and proportion we are zooming in and out of the teacup: the individual, the shared, the collective. In the DancEUA residency in Vitlycke we are starting our creative process with this framework.

Anni Koivusalo and Ulrik Ørsnes Jansen are two freelance dance artists working with dance in a wide range of contexts – from dancing, choreographing, teaching, curating and organising. Through improvisation and other contemporary dance practices we explore themes such as relationality and subjectivity. We play with fiction and speculation as a way of imagining other ways of relating.

Mentor of the residency – Saša Božić

Saša Božić is a Croatian theatre director and dramaturge present in the field of European contemporary dance. His works rarely fit neatly into the category of choreography or directing. His distinctive combination of movement materials, visual imagery and texts follow the transformations between his multidisciplinary roles as a choreographer, director, and dramaturge. Recently his projects were presented and premiered at the Theatre ITD in Zagreb, Croatian National Theatre in Zagreb, Zagreb Youth Theatre, Dubrovnik Summer Festival, Split Summer Festival and Gavella City Drama Theatre in Croatia, as well as at the Kaaitheatre (Belgium), Hebbel am Ufer (Germany) , Pact Zollverein (Germany) and Gessnerallee (Switzerland). Since 2008, he has been the director of an independent arts organisation de facto. He works as an assistant professor at the Academy of Dramatic Art, University of Zagreb.