TanzLaboratorium is an independent research collective, based in Kyiv, Ukraine, that views art as life’s process being actualized through performativity. Here, performativity means a particular mode of artistic activity that thematizes temporality. The group’s artistic strategy involves permeating the gaps between contemporary art forms and destructing the linguistic conventions of these forms. In TL’s artistic practice, the body acts as the image author and critical agent for thinking. Physical practice is the primary method of critical analysis, and dance – by investigating its perception – becomes a way of thinking.

Principles:
— Transdisciplinary research, working with borders and on the borders of art;
— Resistance to the division of art into genres, disciplines, types; instead, a practice of differentiating the layers of public, common, personal;
— Presupposition of equality and investigation of the levels of the political in the group’s artistic practice and life;
— Departure from logocentrism and recognition of the body’s awareness and imagination (kinesthesis and aesthesis);
— Rejection of reflexive action and creative zeal;
— Emancipation of both the performer and spectator, attention to peripheral vision (both literally and in the abstract)

TanzLaboratorium is a group of artists, who are also the founders and members of the nonprofit organization Actual Dance Association. The organization is the legal entity of the artists TL as well as a platform for communication in the art community. Its mission is cultivating a more complex perception of the world in viewers.

Actual Dance Association was formed in 2001, with the aim of supporting contemporary dance artists (who were few in Ukraine at the time) in their efforts to synchronize the development of the Ukrainian dance scene with European (worldwide) tendencies. With time the organization began to focus more on the creative and social-political endeavors of TanzLaboratorium addressing the institutionalization of art, art education, historical memory, etc. Actual Dance Association works with subjects like overcoming the consequences of the dictatorship of socialist realism in culture; problematizing paternalistic discourse in the context of national cultural policy formulation; the performative turn in contemporary art; the existential status of memory.

TanzLaboratorium’s initial members: Larysa Venediktova, Olga Komisar (Savchenko), Oleksandr Lebediev. Current participants: Larysa Venediktova, Olga Komisar (Savchenko), Oleksandr Lebediev, Mariana Matveichuk, Anna Vinogradova, Larissa Babij, and others.

TanzLaboratorium were artists in residence at the Les Kurbas National Theatre Arts Centre in Kyiv from 2007–2010 and 2013–2019.