Olga Dukhovna, SWAN LAKE SOLO, 2022

When Russia invaded Ukraine in 2022, Olga Dukhovna decided not to choreograph Swan Lake for 32 dancers, orchestra and singers, commissioned by Moscow's new museum. In an undertaking of ecological deconstruction, the Ukrainian choreographer concentrated the entire corps de ballet into that of a single performer, her own.

Olga Dukhovna is a Ukrainian-born artist based in France. She has been involved in the choreographic field for some fifteen years, and has always combined her own research work with an activity as a performer, notably with Boris Charmatz and Maud le Pladec. As a choreographer, she finds herself at the crossroads of artistic movements that might seem incompatible, but whose creative clashes and other unexpected collisions she enjoys exploring: on one hand, a lost Ukrainian folklore, erased by the Soviet regime, for which she revisits the movements; on the other, a heritage of contemporary dance that she discovered during her studies in Belgium and then France. This unlikely encounter gave birth to two pieces - Korowod (2012), based on traditional Slavic dances, and Hopak (2024), inspired by Cossack military training. Exposing these ancestral gestures in order to better question their meaning, she re-enacts them, charging them with a troubling political significance. She created Swan Lake, a solo piece entirely staged in her bedroom during confinement by viewing extracts from Swan Lake on Youtube, with a childhood memory as its starting point. Olga Dukhovna is the winner of the DanceWeb grant (Austria), the Aerowaves platform (Dublin) and the Danse Élargie competition (Paris). Since 2023, she has been an associate artist at the Théâtre Louis Aragon in Tremblay-en-France. Passionate about issues of transmission, she teaches at the University of Rennes. Her projects are supported by the C.A.M.P. production structure.

Parallèle programmed Swan Lake Solo in 2022 at the Fondation Vasarely, as part of the Aix-en-Provence Biennale of Art and Culture, and for the 25th edition of the Artdanthé festival.