MONOCHROME

Screen danceDuration 15 minutes

On February 24, 2022, on the evening of the day when Russia began its war of conquest with Ukraine, I urgently left Kyiv and went into forced isolation. Kyiv began to be shelled with cruise missiles and I moved to the village of Morozivka, 50 km from Kyiv. I thought life would be safer there.
A week later, the war was 20 km from the place where I stayed. Around the clock we heard explosions and shooting, and a week later we got used to these sounds. Already in early April, Ukrainian Army drove out Russian troops from nearby villages and it became quiet here. Gradually, I began to regain mobility in my body and come out of the stupor. Then I decided to shoot a few videos of improvisations in order to look at the bodily transformations that happened to me from the outside. All the time before that, I felt completely paralyzed - I couldn't force myself to move or do anything at all. The only thing I could do was writing poetry - suddenly the thoughts and the feelings began to take the form of words.
When I analyze my perception of events and information during this time, I get the impression that everything has become completely black and white. Halftones disappeared and all people were divided into "friends" and "foes". In texts, which I began to collect on Facebook, I was searching for these same halftones to bring the ability to feel back into my life. It also become the ability to preserve the imaginative perception of the world beyond good and evil.
I felt it was important to capture this moment. That`s how the movie come out of being isolated in war time.

Choreographer, performer, composer Anton OvchinnikovBlack O!Range Dance Productions
April 14th, 2022Morozyvka Village, Kyiv region