Category: Ukraine

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:

1. 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.
2. 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.
3. 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.

by Keith Hennessey, 2024

I came to Ukraine because I hate war and imperialism and wanted to extend solidarity to people suffering from it. Also I’m deeply curious about, and inspired by, how people, and artists in particular, think-feel-work-dance-heal-create-connect under extremely difficult conditions. How to survive a war? How to keep dancing, or not, during a war? From previous experiences* and extensive political reading I know that witnessing is a powerful act of solidarity. I came to listen and look, with a willingness to be changed and a commitment to not turn away, not be silent. I was sincerely invited and warmly welcomed.

I also came because I’m restless and confused with my own life which teeters between fabulous, and lonely alienated political despair. With the overly scheduled and distracted attention of my everyday life I don’t have the capacity to focus or learn at the level I’d like to be engaged, at the level I have found only when I leave home and immerse myself in a place and a history with the people most impacted.

I also came because it was easier, logistically and culturally, than going to Sudan, Palestine, Venezuela, or Congo, where I am also interested in learning, witnessing and offering solidarity. In early August 2024 I had paid work relatively nearby in Vienna and I had been to Kyiv before the 2022 invasion and knew some Ukrainian dancers. Karl Frost, a dancer friend, had made the trip a few months earlier to offer contact improvisation (CI) workshops in Kyiv and Lviv. Karl connected me with Lilia, a dancer-organizer from Lviv who organized a talk, classes, and dance jams around my visit. I declined invitations to go to Kyiv because the trip is long and the likelihood of bombing and regular air raid sirens was much higher.

In discussing what I might offer in this situation, Lilia said, “we’re trying to hold together a dance community during the war, to keep our love and humanity alive.”

I responded:
“I am not a therapist or trauma specialist but I recognize the healing or calming potential of the practices we do in a dance class, in somatic awareness exercises, in paying close attention to our breath and body sensations, in tuning in to another person or group. Most healing focuses on the individual. I am more interested in “political healing,” which recognizes how we share many symptoms (anxiety, depression, alienation) with other people (and other beings) and that our pain/harm is caused by social and political forces more than by isolated individuals. My work tends more to the whole forest than to the individual tree.”

Lilia responded:
“Dear Keith, First of all I appreciate your desire to come and teach in Ukraine. For us it’s very important when people abroad would like to come and to spend some time in Ukraine. To see how we keep on living and keep on dancing in this crazy world. In a war world full of violence, anger and horrible things around, somehow we choose to love, to be kind and to be honest with each other. It is a miracle for me. How is it possible in these hard circumstances to choose the humanity? We are living in the high risk right now. It’s a revolutionary world. For me CI practice is kind of the same revolutionary dance form with a high risk and a strong survival mode.

CI practice is supporting our nervous system and is helping to survive our body both physically and mentally. In your workshop in Ukraine, Keith, I’d like to experience how the physicality of CI practice meets our Ukrainian context. Through the CI exercises focused on physicality and gravity. Through the scores and performative structures. How the Russian war changed us and keeps on changing. How the political and social forces change us. How do we meet these changes? How open are we to speak and to dance with complicated things in our lives — like war for Ukrainians and like women`s rights, queer rights and so on? We have done it every day since 24.02.2022. I think we are ready for that risk — putting seeds and uncomfortable questions. We are in survival mode.

I trust you as a CI teacher and I trust your experience. We are not expecting something big from you. We are inviting you to come and dance with us and to share your experience. This is enough. Your active solidarity position is a key. And of course we’ll be healing together while gathering and doing simple CI things but risky
physical things related to the survival mode.”

Due to the ongoing war employing drones and air missiles there were no commercial flights into Ukraine. I flew to Krakow Poland were I had a lovely day of rest, and enjoyed 2nd hand shopping, hipster ramen**, and the hotel spa. Then I took a 7-hour FlixBus to Lviv. I’d heard that the border was unpredictable and we could be there for hours. I was imagining a more militarized situation… maybe like an Israeli checkpoint but it was just slow bureaucracy, not malevolent. Fortunately I had packed a lot of food.

My host Lilia, a dancer, organizer, and mother of two small kids, met me at the station. We hugged warmly despite never having met before. She told me that when she texted me that morning she wondered if I would really come, imagining that I might cancel at the last minute. In the taxi Lilia tried to explain the destabilizing and exhausting unpredictability of the Ukrainian situation. She said they no longer had any concept of the future. She went to a CI festival in Austria last year and observed that people who seem to know their future feel plastic to her after 3 years of war. I asked, plastic? She explained, “They walk around oblivious like plastic people who can count on their future unfolding in a predetermined way.” While in Ukraine I heard many versions of this feeling of alienation or critical distance from people who are not also living with war as a daily reality or who act as if a war at the border of Eastern Europe and Russia doesn’t concern them.

On my first walk around the city center, with its multiple cathedrals and churches over 300 years old, and quaint cobblestone streets lined with vibrant and crowded outdoor cafes, I saw the first visible sign of war. A church with protective covers on its stained glass windows and historic sculptures. After dinner I came upon a street musician who had a large audience of over 100 people, mostly in their teens and 20s. I was attracted by what sounded like a singalong, choral singing. Later I played the recording for someone to ask about the song and learned that it was a pop Ukrainian song from the 90s that many people know. There’s a curfew for everyone at midnight, which I appreciated because here in the dense city center there are many busy cafes, restaurants, bars, and ice cream shops just outside my window.

*My previous war and conflict experiences: Bosnia and Croatia in 1995, Chiapas after the 1997 Acteal massacre perpetrated by paramilitaries against the indigenous Zapatistas, Cairo after the 2011 uprisings, Oslo during and Bratislava following anti-gay shootings in 2022 and 2023.
**Not sure why this is turning into an Eastern Europe ramen tour but for reference, the ramen restaurants in Vienna are cheaper than SF, cheaper in Krakow than in Vienna, and cheaper again in Lviv compared to Krakow. In Lviv a dinner-size bowl of delicious ramen in a trendy spot is US$5-7. I 💜 ramen.

by Keith Hennessey, 2024

This is a serialized travel memoir from a well-intentioned yet ill-informed US/Canadian perspective that shares stories of fierce vulnerable Ukrainian dancers in the middle of a war/invasion. This isn’t well researched journalism. Yes you can share with friends —Keith

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Dear reader,

This is a 5-day collection of stories, observations, and experiences from my trip to Lviv, Ukraine in August 2024. 2024 was year 3 or 10 or 30 or 100 of the war between Russia and Ukraine, also known as, Ukraine’s righteous defense against Russia’s colonial invasion, depending on which historical date or “truth” you want to prioritize. Numbers of people killed and other data are based on what I could find online in summer 2024.

First, some historical dates to explain the above numbers, 3, 10, 30, 100:

1921-22: (100 years ago.) Russia, as part of Soviet expansion, invaded and annexed/occupied Ukraine, including a violent suppression of Ukrainian literature, culture, and language.

1932-33: In the violent take-over (forced nationalization) of Ukraine’s vast and fertile private farms, Stalin’s regime caused the Holodomar/Terror-Famine, an agricultural genocide that resulted in at least 4 million Ukrainian deaths. Followed by massive displacement, both internally and by emigration.

Nov 1989: Fall of the Berlin Wall and the beginning of dissolution of Russian-dominated Soviet Union.

Aug 1991: (30 years ago.) Ukrainian independence, and intensification of Russian efforts to control and/or destabilize Ukraine, to keep Ukraine within the Russian sphere of economic, military, and cultural influence. The US and Europe have been very active in this larger global competition, pulling Ukraine away from Russia towards Europe, maybe with promises to join Europe (and maybe even NATO?)

Feb 2014: Maidan Revolution / Revolution of Dignity, culmination of the Euromaidan protests (2013-14), which ousted Ukraine’s pro-Russian president.

2014: (10 years ago.) In response to the Maidan Revolution, Putin’s Russia invaded Ukraine’s Donbas region and then annexed Crimea. There has been an ongoing war in Eastern Ukraine since then, which Russia escalated in 2022. Ukraine re-prioritized Ukrainian language education in and out of schools.

Feb 2022: (3 years ago.) The current Russian invasion of Ukraine, occupying significant areas of Eastern Ukraine, ongoing bombing of civilian infrastructure in several areas of the country including the capital Kyev. An unknown number of thousands of Ukrainian civilians dead, estimates of over 100,000 military dead, and over 8 million Ukrainians have fled the country from a population of 41 million. Russian military deaths have not been clearly reported but it seems that over 100,000 have died.

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Through a friend I reached out to a couple of Ukrainian contact improvisation dancer-organizers saying I’d heard that there was a desire for international teachers to come to Ukraine, to share skills, witness life during war, and soften some of the isolation they have felt since 2022. A small festival was organized around my visit which included a talk, 3 days of classes and dance jams, an informal performance, and a closing hang out at a semi-rural sauna/banya. Over 50 people participated, from several cities and towns around Ukraine including Lviv, Kyiv, Odessa, Dnipro and Kharkiv, with 25-40 people at each class, talk, jam, performance.

These notes are intended as both a curious travelog for my friends and as a small act of solidarity with Ukrainian dancers feeling isolated, abandoned, and hungry for connection, witness, and support. Writing helps to organize my memories and thoughts and also helps me process what has been a deeply emotional few days. You are witnessing my witnessing.

I do not name all of the people I met and whose stories I’m sharing here. They know I took a lot of notes and photos and consented to my sharing this report with friends and beyond. They also have access to the document and know that I welcome their comments, corrections, edits. Neither my notes nor memories are precise or complete. I heard almost everything through translation and gaps of cultural understanding. I selected what to share. Any historical info was grabbed from Wikipedia and quick internet searches simply to create a broader context for the stories I heard. Please do your own research and don’t quote me. Supportive corrections are welcome. All errors, misunderstanding, and omissions are mine. Apologies to all.

At least some of you reading this should consider going to Ukraine.