Ukrainian Contemporary Dance: A Short Introduction

Ukrainian contemporary dance is still almost invisible on the international cultural map. It exists, it has its own history, artists, festivals, conflicts, achievements and wounds — but much of this history remains fragmented, poorly documented, or hidden in personal archives, memories, videos, conversations and bodies.

This text is not an academic history of Ukrainian contemporary dance. It is a subjective introduction written from inside the field — by an artist who has been part of this process as a choreographer, performer, curator, organizer and witness. I do not pretend to describe everything. But I want to mark several important points: where Ukrainian contemporary dance comes from, why it has remained underrepresented, how it has changed since 1991, and what the war has done to the body of dance in Ukraine.

What is Ukrainian contemporary dance?

Ukrainian contemporary dance is not simply contemporary dance made in Ukraine. It is a field shaped by several forces at once: the Soviet choreographic legacy, the collapse of state cultural systems after 1991, the absence of stable institutions, the influence of European dance education, grassroots initiatives, independent festivals, and the constant need to invent infrastructure almost from nothing.
Unlike classical ballet or folk dance, contemporary dance in Ukraine did not receive strong institutional support for many years. It grew in studios, basements, independent spaces, festival programs, workshops, informal schools, and temporary communities. In many cases, it existed because individual artists insisted that it should exist.
This is one of the key differences. Ukrainian contemporary dance was not built from above. It was built from below — by people who often had no proper funding, no permanent venues, no long-term production system, and no guarantee that their work would be seen, archived or remembered.
And yet it survived.
After 1991: the body after the Soviet system
After Ukraine regained independence in 1991, many artists faced a strange and difficult freedom. The Soviet system had collapsed, but its aesthetic, educational and institutional traces remained. The body had to learn how to move differently, how to think differently, how to exist outside prescribed forms.
For a long time, the dominant visible choreographic languages in Ukraine were ballet, folk dance, ballroom dance, pop choreography and theatrical movement. Contemporary dance was often misunderstood, treated as something marginal, strange, unfinished or imported. The only form of “contemporary” movement that reached a wider public was often filtered through television formats such as “Everybody Dance!” — but this visibility had little to do with the development of contemporary dance as an independent artistic practice.
But for some artists, precisely this marginality became a source of freedom. Contemporary dance offered another way of working with the body — not as decoration, not as a heroic image, and not as a disciplined collective ornament. However, in Ukraine this potential was not always fully realized. For many artists, imitation of Western choreographers and imported aesthetics became the main source of inspiration before a local critical language had time to emerge.
At the same time, we should be honest: the body in Ukrainian contemporary dance did not immediately become a place of deep post-Soviet questioning. Did artists really ask what it means to have a post-Soviet body? What it means to move after an empire? What it means to create when your culture is still trying to name itself? Sometimes yes. But very often, the answer was no. These questions remained mostly unspoken, while the field was busy surviving, learning, imitating, organizing and trying to become visible.
Nevertheless new practices appeared through improvisation, somatic practices, physical theatre, contact work, site-specific performance or experimental choreography. They were present. The body was searching for another grammar.
A field without enough institutions
One of the main problems of Ukrainian contemporary dance has always been the lack of sustainable infrastructure. There were artists, there were performances, there were festivals, there were workshops — but very few stable institutions able to support long-term development.
Independent initiatives had to do everything at once: produce performances, educate audiences, invite international teachers, translate terminology, organize festivals, document works, and explain again and again why contemporary dance mattered. Sometimes it felt as if we were explaining it not to institutions or audiences, but to ourselves — simply to keep going.
This is why the history of Ukrainian contemporary dance is also a history of exhaustion. Many projects appeared, burned brightly, and disappeared. Many artists left the field or moved abroad. Many works were never properly recorded. Many important events remained only in memory.
But this fragility should not be mistaken for weakness. It is also part of the identity of the field. Ukrainian contemporary dance learned how to exist in unstable conditions long before the full-scale war. It learned how to adapt, improvise, migrate, rebuild and continue.
Festivals, platforms and temporary homes
Because stable institutions didn`t exist, festivals and platforms might become especially important. But since 2010 till 2019 there was only one annual festival - ZELYONKA FEST. It created temporary visibility. It allowed artists to meet each other, present works, invite international guests, build audiences and feel that they were part of a larger artistic process.
For many years, Ukrainian contemporary dance developed through temporary homes and individual initiatives: the first Ukrainian contemporary dance school “Other Dances” in Dnipro; the work of Kristina Shyshkarova, Ruslan Baranov, Olha Kebas, Lyudmyla Mova and Larisa Venediktova in Kyiv; Julia Danilenko in Kharkiv; Bomond Dance Company in Novomoskovsk; Anton Safonov, Julia Artemenko and Iryna Myhalchuk in Kherson; and Oksana Lan in Lviv. This is not a complete list, but a first attempt to name some of the people and places that shaped the field.
In my own practice, organizing and curating were never separate from choreography. For me, creating a performance and creating a context for performances were connected actions. Sometimes, before a dance could happen, it was necessary to create the ground on which it could stand.
This is an important part of Ukrainian contemporary dance history: artists often had to become organizers, producers, educators, translators, advocates and archivists. The choreographer was rarely only a choreographer. The performer was rarely only a performer. Everyone carried more than one role, because the system around us didn`t exist.
2014 and 2022: dance in a country at war
The full-scale Russian invasion of Ukraine in 2022 changed Ukrainian contemporary dance profoundly.
War changed not only themes. It changed conditions of life, rehearsal, travel, collaboration, visibility, responsibility and speech. It changed the nervous system of the field.
The body became a witness. The body became an archive. The body became a territory where fear, anger, loss, displacement and resistance appeared not as abstract concepts, but as breath, muscle tone, fatigue, trembling, silence, collapse and endurance.
For Ukrainian artists, the question was no longer only “What do I want to create?” It became: “How can I create now? What is ethical to show? What is impossible to show? Who am I speaking to? What do I refuse to translate? What does the audience expect from a Ukrainian artist during war — and do I accept that expectation?”
This is a dangerous area. International contexts often want Ukrainian art to explain the war, represent trauma, offer emotional access, or become a moral document. In some international contexts, Ukrainian contemporary dance was often expected to function as testimony — as a wound displayed on stage. But it could also be thought, form, irony, anger, tenderness, abstraction, memory, refusal and survival. This complexity often remained a blind spot.
YES, the war made Ukrainian dance more visible internationally. But this visibility came at a terrible price. The task now is not only to be seen, but to find its own voice and authenticity.
Why Ukrainian contemporary dance needs an archive
One of the reasons for creating this series of texts is simple: Ukrainian contemporary dance is underdocumented. Too much has disappeared already. Too many works exist only in low-quality videos, old festival programs, personal hard drives, Facebook posts, broken links, and the memories of people who were there.
This absence is not innocent. When a field has no archive, it becomes easy to ignore it. When there are no texts, no timelines, no accessible introductions, no names gathered in one place, the field looks smaller than it actually is.
An archive is not only a storage space. It is a political and artistic act. It says: this existed. These bodies moved. These artists worked. These performances happened. This history is not secondary. It does not need to be approved by larger cultural empires in order to matter.
For Ukraine, this is especially important. For too long, Ukrainian culture was seen from outside through Russian, Soviet or “post-Soviet” frames. Ukrainian contemporary dance also suffered from this invisibility. It was often perceived as peripheral, emerging, incomplete, or derivative. But this perception says more about the lack of knowledge than about the field itself.
Ukrainian contemporary dance today
Today, Ukrainian contemporary dance exists in a scattered and expanded geography. Some artists continue to work in Ukraine. Some are displaced inside the country. Some live and work abroad. Some move between countries, residencies, festivals and temporary homes. The field is no longer located only on Ukrainian territory, but it remains connected to Ukraine through memory, language, responsibility and experience.
This creates new questions. What does it mean to be a Ukrainian dance artist in exile? How does displacement change movement? How does the body remember a place it had to leave? How can artists avoid becoming permanent representatives of catastrophe? How can Ukrainian dance remain complex, contradictory and alive?
There are no simple answers. But there is a need to speak, write, document and connect.
This text is only a beginning. Ukrainian contemporary dance deserves more than a footnote. It deserves history, criticism, disagreement, memory, visibility and care. It deserves to be seen not as a small appendix to European contemporary dance, and not as a cultural victim of war, but as a field with its own body, its own fractures, its own intelligence and its own future.

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 probably taken by Nikita Aleksandrov at the first Zelyonka Festival in 2010. There are Olga Kebas,m Ruslan Baranov & Svietlana Pashko, Black O!Range Ballet, Oleksandra Perepelytsia & Yaroslav Kucherenko, Potoki Dance Theatre on the photos