© Raynaud de Lage
Legal dance
With this new creation, Olga Dukhovna continues her exploration of choreographic recycling, a central theme in her work since her debut. After developing a form of dance lecture with Un spectacle que la loi considérera comme mien (A show that the law will consider mine) at Vive le sujet ! Tentatives for the Festival d'Avignon 2025 and the SACD, which questions her conception of recycling from a legal perspective, she wishes to deepen this research by giving shape to a new piece for five dancers.
This group work is in line with her repertoire while opening up new perspectives. By revisiting and transforming material from previous works, Olga wants to question the memory of movement, the traces left by gesture, and the way in which a dance can be reborn, borrowed from another piece. The goal is to compose a choreography that falls within predefined legal limits: through a process in which the legal framework becomes a score, the piece questions artistic freedom and the dynamics of appropriation in art.
Credits
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Olga Dukhovna
Born in Ukraine, Olga Dukhovna received her training at the P.A.R.T.S school in Brussels, under the direction of Anne Teresa De Keersmaeker, and later at the National Center for Contemporary Dance in Angers under the direction of Emmanuelle Huynh. She moved to France and embarked on an intensive collaboration with Boris Charmatz while pursuing her own research.
As a choreographer, she navigates the intersection of incompatible artistic approaches while exploring creative clashes and unexpected collisions. On one hand, she draws inspiration from a lost Ukrainian folklore erased by the Soviet regime, reinterpreting its movements ; on the other hand, she incorporates elements from the contemporary dance legacy that she kept from her studies in Belgium and France. Out of this confrontation, two pieces emerged: Korowod (2012), based on traditional Slavic dances, and Hopak (2024), inspired by the military training of the Cossacks. Removing these ancestral gestures to question their meaning, she reenacts them with a political resonance. !
Her collaboration with Boris Charmatz's Museum of Dance has influenced her perspective on what she terms "recycling", a key element in her work. She explores how gestures from the collective memory of world wild dance are appropriated and transformed. She is preparing a dance lecture on this subject planned for 2025.
During the pandemic, she created Swan Lake a solo piece entirely crafted in her room by watching excerpts of many different version of Swan Lake on YouTube. Since 2022, Swan Lake has enjoyed rapid success and initiated an international tour. The piece originates from a childhood memory: in the ex-Soviet bloc countries, whenever a leader died, programs were interrupted to broadcast Swan Lake. Today, Olga explains that she dances Swan Lake while awaiting news of the fall of the Russian government of Vladimir Putin.
This reversed logic, humorously referred to as "magical thinking," is another driving force in her choreographic research. Infused with audacious vitality, Olga Dukhovnaya's dance confronts forgotten or mutilated narratives with the challenges of history. She also holds the conviction that if a culture disappears, it falls upon artists to reinvent it.
Olga Dukhovnaya has been awarded the DanceWeb Sponsorship (Austria); from the Aerowaves platform (Dublin), and won the Danse Élargie competition (Paris). Since 2023, she is an associated artist at the Théâtre Louis Aragon in Tremblay-en-France. Passionate about transmission, she also teaches at the University of Rennes. All her projects are produced by the production structure C.A.M.P.