The Body as Witness: Dance, Trauma and War in Ukraine

During war, the body becomes a witness to what language cannot immediately hold. It remembers before it understands. It reacts before it formulates. This is why contemporary dance can be a powerful space for working with war — not because it explains everything, but because it allows the unspeakable to appear without simplifying it.
The body during war is never simply a body. It is a nervous system listening for danger. It is interrupted sleep. It is breath. It is muscles. It is exhaustion that begins to feel normal. It is the strange ability to continue when something inside has already broken.
For a dancer, this is not a metaphor. The body is the place where fear lives. But it is also the place where resistance may begin — not as a heroic pose, but as a return to sensation, breath, weight, rhythm and presence.
War usually produces very limited images of the body: the heroic body, the wounded body, the victim body, the military body, the mourning body. These images are not false, but they are incomplete. Contemporary dance can complicate them. It can return ambiguity to the body. It can show that survival is not always beautiful, and resistance is not always loud.
The body can be afraid and resist at the same time. It can fall apart and continue. It can be tender and furious. It can refuse to become an icon. It can show damage, numbness, confusion, emptiness and desire without turning them into propaganda or sentimental spectacle.
Before the full-scale invasion of 2022, the body as witness was already present in Ukrainian dance and performance — often in indirect or hybrid forms. In TanzLaboratorium’s "Expertyza", the witness was not represented only by professional performers. The stage became a frame in which people spoke from their own social and political positions. The body did not simply dance. It sat, listened, hesitated, spoke, and carried the tension of public presence.
In "The Sand. Homecoming" by Black O!Range dance productions (producer Oksana Rozumna), the witness appeared through the voices of internally displaced people and through the attempt to translate the loss of home into dance, music, poetry and documentary sound. The work did not treat displacement as an abstract humanitarian category. It approached it as a bodily condition: a body that remembers another city, another kitchen, another way to school, another door, another version of everyday life.
In "PostUkrainian Body", the witness was the body that had been culturally censored or absent from public thinking. The work asked: what kind of body can appear in Ukrainian culture, and what kind of body remains hidden, controlled or silenced? After 2014, this question became even sharper. The Ukrainian body was no longer only a cultural body. It became a political body, a vulnerable body, a body claimed by history.
In "Dictatorship of the Victim", memory itself became the witness. Not memory as a noble monument, but memory as a dangerous mechanism. Soviet songs, sentimentality and inherited emotional patterns became evidence of how the past continues to shape the body’s ability to think and act. This is also a form of witnessing: the body carries what it did not choose.
After February 2022, the body as witness became impossible to ignore. The full-scale invasion changed not only artistic themes, but the basic conditions of existence. Rehearsals stopped. Performances were cancelled. Artists evacuated, volunteered, joined the army, moved abroad, stayed under shelling, lost homes, lost people, lost continuity.
The body was thrown into survival.
In such conditions, the question “How to continue dancing?” may sound almost indecent. But behind it, another question appears: “How not to lose the complexity of the body completely?”
For many Ukrainian artists, movement became not only an artistic practice, but a way of staying alive. Sometimes it was impossible to create a performance. But it was still possible to breathe, to walk, to tremble, to gather, to touch the floor, to remember that the body had not completely lost its capacity to move.
One of the first collective attempts to respond to this rupture was the project "Let the Body Speak", initiated by the Ukrainian Association “Contemporary Dance Platform” after the beginning of the full-scale invasion. It gathered short video works, statements and reflections by Ukrainian dance artists at the moment when the field itself was scattered, interrupted and thrown into survival. The project was important because it created an archive almost in real time. It allowed artists to say: we are still here, even if our stages, studios, cities and plans have been broken. In these works, the body often appeared as witness, wound, shelter, signal, document and scream. It was not yet a calm reflection. It was closer to an emergency message from bodies that had not yet had time to understand what had happened to them.
This does not mean that dance must heal. And in general, we should be careful with this word. Healing can become — and has almost already become — another demand placed on the artist: suffer, transform, inspire us. But trauma does not always turn into beauty. Sometimes it remains trauma. Sometimes it destroys form. Sometimes it interrupts speech. Sometimes it makes the body heavy, stupid, tired, unavailable.
The dancing body during war does not simply represent trauma. It negotiates with it. Sometimes it comes close. Sometimes it keeps distance. Sometimes it refuses to show pain in the form expected by the audience.
This refusal can also be political.
The international viewer may want the Ukrainian body to be easily readable: wounded, brave, authentic, grateful, tragic. But the body may remain complex and even incomprehensible. It may be contradictory, ironic, abstract, exhausted, erotic, formal, silent or unclear. Ukrainian contemporary dance has the right to speak about war. But it also has the right not to speak only about war.
The body as witness is not the same as the body as evidence. Evidence serves an external demand. A witness remains alive, unstable, partial, wounded, responsible. It does not explain everything. It insists that something happened, and that this “something” has entered the body.
But here we need to be honest. Some of the first reflections of Ukrainian contemporary dance after the full-scale invasion came dangerously close to what can be called “war porn”.
I use this phrase carefully, but deliberately. I do not mean that the artists were dishonest. Most of them were working from a state of shock, fear, urgency and real personal experience. They were trying to respond at the very moment when the catastrophe was still happening inside their own bodies. But shock has its visual clichés: a trembling body, a body on the floor, sirens, ruins, darkness, flags, broken gestures, exhaustion, exposed vulnerability, the body displayed as evidence of suffering.
At first, this was understandable. Perhaps even inevitable. The body had no distance. The field had no distance. Artists did not yet have language, time or safety. They had only reaction.
But reaction is not yet reflection.
The danger is that the wounded Ukrainian body has become, on many stages across Europe, too easy to read. It has turned into an image that international audiences already expect: authentic pain, visible trauma, emotional proof, a body that suffers “correctly”. In such a situation, even sincere work can begin to feed an existing demand. The Ukrainian artist becomes not only a witness, but a supplier of affect. The audience receives access to pain and calls it solidarity.
This is a trap.
The task now is not to deny these first works. They were necessary. They captured the moment when the body had been struck before the mind had time to organize meaning. But Ukrainian contemporary dance cannot remain there. It cannot stay forever inside the first scream.
The next step is more difficult: to move from evidence to complexity, from shock to form, from pain to thought, from the wounded body to the thinking body. Not because the wound has disappeared, but because the wound alone is not enough.
Dance during war should not be obliged to prove suffering. It should be able to disturb, confuse, refuse, abstract, joke, desire, fail, remember badly, contradict itself and remain unreadable. The Ukrainian body must not be reduced to a body in pain, even when the pain is real.
Dance cannot replace history, journalism, testimony or justice. But it can reveal what these forms often cannot hold: the trembling before words, the weight of waiting, the broken rhythm of ordinary life, the silence after the news, the strange tenderness of people who continue to move together.
The body remembers. The body distorts. The body refuses. The body continues.
And perhaps the most important question now is not only how the body can witness war, but how it can avoid becoming an image that war — and the audience — already know how to consume.

Authorship

Written by Anton Ovchinnikov, Ukrainian choreographer, performer and curator. Since the 2000s, he has been involved in the development of Ukrainian contemporary dance as an artist, organizer, educator and founder of several independent dance initiatives.
All photos are stills from videodances presented in the framework of the Let the body speak project by UA Contemporary dance platform:- Kobaliya Melaniya - no title - 2022- Olena Dolgih - Sadness - 2022- Polina and Kateryna Miakushko - Bulletproof - 2022- Danyl Zenkin - Runner - 2022- Alina Sokulska - Freedom - 2022- Dmytro Zakharov - no title - 2022