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© Geoffrey Montagu
Hopak
Since 2022, the Russian invasion of Ukraine has been accompanied by a cultural conflict whose aim is to eradicate all Ukrainian identity. Russia's official discourse insists that properly Ukrainian culture does not exist.
The Hopak project is based on research into traditional Ukrainian dances. Distinguishing Ukrainian dances from Russian ones is not easy, due to centuries of forced cultural assimilation, territorial expansion, repression and linguistic oppression. What would these dances be like today if they had been able to develop freely? What would they look like without having been stifled and dominated?
Hopak is a play between historical heritage and a minimalist approach that tends to reduce each dance to its starting point. From there, it creates new ones. And it's possible that these waves, these constant back-and-forth movements between past and future, may free the path toward metaphors, imagination or unpredictable meanings.
Credits
Olga Dukhovna Choreographer & performer
Dennis Weijers Composer
Éric Allard-Jacquin Accordionist musician
François Malbranque Performer
Érik Houllier Lighting director
Simon Hatab Dramaturge
Denis Malard Technical director
Amélie-Anne Chapelain Production manager
Enora Floc’h Production coordinator
Special thanks to François Maurisse, Julien Monty & Nicolas Marie
Production C.A.M.P
Co-produced by Théâtre Louis Aragon – Conventioned stage of national interest in Art & creation of Tremblay-en-France, Mille Plateaux - CCN La Rochelle, Le Triangle – Cité de la Danse in Rennes, Chorège – CDCN Falaise Normandie, Les Rencontres Internationales de Seine St-Denis, LA MAISON CDCN Uzès, Le Petit Écho de la Mode. With the support of the Caisse des dépôts et consignation, Théâtre de Vanves, and CCNRB – Collectif FAIR-E.
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. A show the law will consider as mine addresses this aspect in the form of a danced lecture with a copyright law researcher on stage. Looking ahead to 2027, she is preparing a new group piece on these choreographic heritage aspects.
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 Dukhovna 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.