by Keith Hennessey, 2024
Using my phone I read a few things about the war today including the surprise Ukrainian incursion into Kursk Russia. I also tried to learn more about the Air Alarm system so I could emotionally prepare for my first air raid siren. I joined an English-language Telegram channel, which was recommended for tracking potential bombing.
Then I researched queer Ukraine and learned about an amazing 2018 photo project and exhibition featuring queer soldiers within Ukraine’s “Anti Terrorist Forces.” The photo project affirms the presence of LGBTQ+ Ukrainians in general and heroic soldiers in particular. Despite the subjects’ identities being hidden, the photos bring queer visibility and pride into public space.
I went to two large old Catholic churches, both with extremely elaborate interiors. Murals, arches, wood and marble, tiled floor designs, statuary and icons, alcoves and pillars… The first one had a sign outside requesting prayers for Ukraine.
A little later, after visiting a couple second hand stores, I passed a church from which I could hear singing. I entered to a Catholic mass honoring “defenders,” which is how Ukrainians refer to their soldiers. Alongside the interior of the church were photos of hundreds and hundreds of deceased defenders. I had read that both sides were under-reporting their war dead to not weaken national esteem. But everyone knows someone who has died and even more who are physically injured, traumatized, and displaced from their homes.
In a small plaza outside the church I witnessed a combination of info display and memorial for the over 900 Azov brigade soldiers and crew still held in Russian prisons since 2022. The Azov brigade began as an independent “army” made up of predominantly Russian-speaking Ukrainians who were then assimilated into the Ukrainian National Guard and were the last line of defense in the terrible siege on Mariupol. They are highly regarded in Ukraine for their bravery and sacrifices, and there is a movement to keep pressure on negotiating prisoner release.
There’s a lot of follow up study if you’re interested in Azov, torture as a war tactic, and the siege on Mariupol including:
- The extreme torture perpetrated against Ukrainian soldiers.
- The critiques of Azov members with neo-Nazi affiliation, and the normalization of radical right Ukrainian nationalism.
- The bombing massacre of a theater/cultural heritage site used as a citizen refuge in Mariupol.
Walking back to my temp rental I saw a young guy with his bandaged foot casually yet intimately supported by his buddy’s leg as they sat on a street bench. When I looked closer I saw that he was missing half his foot. I’d heard that I would occasionally see wounded soldiers including amputees with prosthetics.
My first appearance at the weekend Contact Improvisation festival organized around my visit was an informal lecture on the politics of dancing, and the political potentials of CI. My talk-discussion was attended by 35-40 people, including two people I’d met before, plus a small livestream audience in Kyiv. The talk happened in a very new studio run by a physical theater company in a renovated-gentrified factory complex of multiple buildings. Next door was a hip gym called Smartass whose logo looked like a tech startup’s.
My talk offered three ideas or frames for thinking about dancing as political engagement and political healing. Ideas and inspirations I’ve been working with for at least 10 years:
- Gustav Landauer’s analysis of the state as a system of relationships, a mode of behavior, that cannot be destroyed as an object but rather needs to be replaced by contracting new relationships, by treating each other differently. I proposed the studio and CI jam as a research lab to develop, rediscover, and practice these new relationships.
- I introduced a few women from US Black feminism whose work considers and responds to oppressive power and state violence. Quoting Audre Lorde and adrienne marie brown I encouraged them to consider self and community care during a multi-year invasion by one of the world’s biggest military empires as “self preservation” and “political warfare,” and supported care-tuned dancing with brown’s “we learn to love by loving.” Using the touch and change prayer from Octavia Butler’s dystopian novel Parable of the Sower, I offered some fresh ways to understand touch and consent as tools of social
transformation. - My final idea was to propose solidarity as an ethical goal of these dancing, caring, loving, touching experiments. Identifying the radical right, neofascist, and anti-democratic movements around the world as an intensification of neoliberalism’s crisis of solidarity, I proposed CI as empathy training that might expand our capacity for solidarity, to care for those we don’t know, those who are different from us.
After each idea the circle was opened up to comments, questions, discussion. Several of the questions circled around the gap between the studio and the world, the counter cultural gap, the power gap, the hopelessly small scale of the CI network. At one point, even though I had decided to not critique nationalism given how it was functioning as a primary tactic of Ukranian survival and defense, we got into it. I suggested that nationalism is resonant with the tactically effective yet dead-end strategy of identity politics. This was the edgiest thing I said. One person pushed back and said it was crucial to their survival right now. One person thanked me for bringing it up. One person said let’s move on. I apologized. One person responded, we forgive you, because you dared to come here.
After the talk there was an open CI jam. Approximately 30 people stayed to dance. As usual I watched more than danced but I had a couple of lovely dance connections. The floor was hard but new.
Will there be dancing during wartime? Yes. There will be dancing.
At the jam’s closing circle one person praised that there were dancers from at least 7 different cities including a few from Kharkiv and other places experiencing active bombing. They were so grateful to have Ukrainians from around the country dancing together at a jam. One of the long term CI teacher/organizers in Ukraine reported that she could feel love in her dancing tonight, maybe for the first time in over 2 years. A young enthusiastic guy finished his comments by saying, “Slava Ukraini (Glory to Ukraine.)” Someone asked for a moment of silence for the “defenders, without whom we wouldn’t be dancing.” The “moment” lasted six full minutes. It was intense and reverent.
After the jam a young dancer came up to thank me for talking about nationalism. She said she was from the Eastern part of Ukraine, in the contested Donbas region. Speaking Russian as a first language she felt excluded from Ukrainian nationalism despite her identification with Ukraine and critique of Putin’s Russia. I asked her where she was living now and she replied, Krakow (in Poland), describing it as “heaven on earth.”
A couple people including my main host took me out for pizza where the conversation continued for another hour. A young man explained why he hadn’t registered for the draft and how he was prepared to defend his refusal to military recruiters who sometimes pick up young men in the street. He felt that his family had served enough already. His older brother was at the front for five years and is now disabled. His father, a former journalist previously jailed for criticizing the army, was now serving in the Ukrainian air defense. He said, “It happened in late 90s. My father wrote about government crimes in a newspaper. One evening, he was illegally abducted by the police. Without a trial and unlawfully, they held him in the forest for half a year. We didn’t know if he would return alive.”
It was getting close to the midnight curfew and we were all tired so we hugged goodnight.
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