How Do You Dance in a War Zone?

In March 2022 I dropped into an online conversation hosted by Dance Base in Edinburgh. It was part of their Catalytic Conversions series, a platform for international dance professionals to connect and explore contemporary issues. One of the speakers was Ukrainian dancer and choreographer Viktor Ruban, and given that Russia had just invaded Ukraine, the conversation naturally turned to this atrocity.

When I first posed the question to Viktor ‘how do you dance in a war zone?’, I really wasn’t prepared for his response. The enormity of the question took him a little by surprise and after a brief attempt to provide a simple explanation for such a complex event, he neatly batted it back to me with an invitation to visit Ukraine to see for myself.

The resulting exhibition is the culmination of two trips to Ukraine (Lviv and Kyiv) by two photographic artists, myself Maria Falconer, and my partner Paul Hill, in collaboration with Viktor Ruban, sound artist Grigory Semenchuk and an amazing group of Ukrainian contemporary dance artists.