In 2023 Site Art Projects became a partner of the new contemporary art festival VOICES, which took place in Berlin from 1 to 27 October. The festival partners also included Radialsystem, HAU Hebbel am Ufer, Klangforum Wien, Karsten Witt Musik Management, ERSTE Foundation and others.

Site Art Projects with the support of AFF projects presented two world premieres at VOICES Festival: Tanya Chizhikova's "Tumbleweed" and Katya Volkova's "In da chaos" in a single programme curated by Anastasia Proshutinskaya. The premieres will take place at the Kuhlhause space on
2 October 2023.

On 13 and 14 October, Radialsystem Site Art Projects presented a programme of works by Julia Arsen "The Whip" and Tanya Chizhikova/Roman Malyavkin "Fractional step", which had their European premiere in 2023 at the Impulstanz Festival in Vienna.

Partnership with
VOICES PERFORMING ARTS FESTIVAL

Tatiana Chizhikova usually finds a solid and condensed choreographic form for her works while their emotional content is complex and highly charged. In her new solo performance she works with a simple found object, a stick. Using it she explores detailed movement around the theme of being rooted, being grounded, or being uprooted and displaced. Tatiana Chizhikova says, "I chose a dry stick, it used to be a branch of some tree. I was fascinated with that arboreal ability to hold onto, and grow deep into the soil with roots. Moreover, the stick was sort of a metaphor for this ability, and this live root movement in me. But as I rehearsed in the studio, a contradictory thought emerged: the stick is dry, and it would never again be filled with life. Moving with it, I felt its fragility, its inflexibility. Any applied force would break it. In our duet, I was the one who was alive. I clearly felt my ability to change, to feel, to see, to choose. I am the root, the one from which shoots shall grow."

Duration: 30 min.

World premiere:
VOICES Festival, Kuhlhaus Berlin, October 2, 2023

Program curator:
Anastasia Proshutinskaya

Created for the VOICES Festival with support of AFF Projects

In this piece Katya Volkova moves into "house dance", a street dance style with remarkable footwork techniques. House dance style belongs to the club culture of the 1990s, but it is clearly rooted in the steps and hops of traditional African dances, in collective experiences of rhythm, and the shared space of ritual. Community is one of the central topics for Katya's artistic research. She transfers her interest in the sociality and communal involvement of street dance, which she has long practiced, into a contemporary dance context that is often skeptical about big affirmative narratives. In her piece she constantly balances between the routines of "real work," and the subversion of the very idea of working, between being together and yet being an alienated solo dancer. Eventually, the stage transforms into a dance floor that is open to everybody, and this transition may feel like a challenge to the audience: Shall we invest our emotional and physical efforts? Is it work worth doing?

Duration: 30 min.

World premiere:
VOICES Festival, Kuhlhaus Berlin, October 2, 2023

Program curator:
Anastasia Proshutinskaya

Created for the VOICES Festival with support of AFF Projects

In fractional step, the classically trained dancer Tatyana Chizhikova and the academic accordion player Roman Malyavkin deconstruct Russian stage-folk dance and specifically its steady percussive stepping. They deal with charged and ambivalent sensations of bravura and despair, clashing their virtuosity with pauses of hesitations. In decades, this movement language was constructed in Soviet Russia as the most "natural" public body expression – as if those postures and gestures were inherited in the body of people. In fact, they have as much in common with authentic folk dances as they have with the ballet schools where they were taught. What do these clicking footsteps say today, and how does it feel to perform them? Both choreographers belong to the younger generation of artists from Russia who currently find themselves in all senses of transition. In their works they step into disturbingly solid narratives and question it, subvert it, complicate it through the embodied practice. That's what dance can do.

The projects had their European premiere at ImPulsTanz, the Vienna International Dance Festival, in August 2023, initiated by the independent project Institute of Theatre.

Duration: 35 min.

VOICES Festival, RADIALSYSTEM, Berlin October 13, 2023

Program curator:
Anastasia Proshutinskaya

Created for the VOICES Festival with support of AFF Projects

In the white gallery context, we sense the gravity of an object even stronger. She takes its complicated symbolic meaning as a backdrop. Fear, disgust, power relations – it is all there. And yet through her "partnering" with this concrete bit of material world and through subtle movement research, she eventually develops her own embodied knowledge of fragility, fluidity and agency, learnt from a whip. There is a strong sense of revolt in this subversion of the symbolic narrative and acknowledging something that is simply at hand. The snap of the whip actually is not a sound of a hit.

The projects had their European premiere at ImPulsTanz, the Vienna International Dance Festival, in August 2023, initiated by the independent project Institute of Theatre.

Duration: 25 min.

VOICES Festival, RADIALSYSTEM, Berlin, October 13, 2023

Program curator:
Anastasia Proshutinskaya

Created for the VOICES Festival with support of AFF Projects

photos: Masha Kushnir, VOICES Festival