Gravitas

Directed by Vadym Ilkov

When I first entered the Kyiv Polytechnic Institute Library's interior, I felt as if I were floating in the middle of the eight-floor atrium, gliding from one level to another. However, the reality of gravity made me climb the stairs and explore all the compositional variations in the architects' spatial design. Together with dancers Yaroslav Kaynar and Anastasia Kharchenko, we came up with a game: to imagine that we had suddenly found ourselves on an unknown planet. An environment of which we know nothing - what is soft and what is hard, what we can lean on and what can harm us. A space where familiar objects - like stairs and tables - have unknown uses that we still need to discover. This was our departure point for all choreographic improvisations, as we experimented with our own gravitas and moved towards a certain still point.