Liza Penkova

Performance – The Gap

When Liza Penkova came to Sweden from Russia in the 1990s as a teenager, it took her some time to understand the new Western reality.

Much was similar, but even more unfamiliar. Then, as a classically trained dance student she was introduced to Western contemporary dance which later became the basis of her long international career as a dancer with the choreographers Anne Theresa de Keersmaeker, Michele Noiret, Helena Franzen, Veli Lehtovaara and Gothenburg Ballet company among others.

Thirty years later, in her first solo-work as a choreographer, she draws a parallel between the move to the West and the transition from classical to contemporary dance. She tries to make visible a sense of constant delay. An aesthetic gap that she needed to tackle in order to catch up with Western concept of freedom without losing her own cultural integrity. Is it possible?

Alternating between silence, music, voices from dance icons and her own reflections on norms and values between East and West, the audience is drawn into an hour-long skillful dance solo with elements of melodrama and humour. The solo is part of a larger ongoing research trilogy, 18 steps through (dance) history, that at its core delves into the challenges of literacy and translation of western contemporary dance aesthetics through history.