Tracking the History
Finding Your Own Voice – Workshop
Type: Workshop Proposal · Heritage / Artistic Practice
Status: Available for booking
Context: Dance archives, heritage projects, artistic education and training
Role: Workshop Leader · Artist · Methodological Mentor
Look at the archives. Find what moves you in it. Create.
This workshop begins with an encounter with dance heritage. Archival photographs, documents, costumes, gestures and other visual traces are approached not only as historical evidence, but as material for observation and artistic inquiry.
Participants look for elements that can be understood through dance: posture, gesture, rhythm, space, relationship, atmosphere, or movement quality. These observations can then become impulses for their own movement vocabulary and creative work.
“Your Voice” has two related meanings. It can mean finding words for what one sees, experiences and wants to communicate. It can also mean finding a movement vocabulary through which personal concerns can be expressed.
The workshop therefore moves between seeing, articulating, moving and creating. Historical material is not reproduced as an answer; it becomes a starting point for contemporary work.
Drawing on Ricardo Viviani’s experience as a choreographer, educator and Oral Historian, the workshop combines artistic practice with archival observation. Exercises, discussion, feedback and creative assignments allow participants to test what they discover through the body as well as through language.
The format can be adapted to universities, dance schools, artistic training programmes, archives, museums and heritage projects. It may be developed around a particular collection, local history or thematic archive.
Archival Material:
Workshop proposal; related visual-history material; examples from Euphorie und Aufbruch; selected archival images and documents used as artistic impulses.
Continue reading “Finding Your Own Voice – Workshop”
Ukrainian Dance in International Context – Panel 29 January 2027
Continue reading “Ukrainian Dance in International Context – Panel 29 January 2027”“Dance heritage will help us collect the stories that reflect this nation. Coming to Ukraine from the West made me realise how little I knew about the country and how much there still is for us to learn.”
Udance — Forum “Танцплан України 2026”
Embodied Knowledge Articulated – Reflections on 10 Years of Oral History Collection
Type: Presentation
Date: 26 June 2026
Context: International Conference Pina Bausch – From Ritual to Romance, Bergische Universität Wuppertal
Institution: Pina Bausch Foundation
Role: Presenter / Researcher
Speakers / Moderation:
Ricardo Viviani
Isabelle Charnavel
Laura Wiemer — Moderator
Embodied Knowledge Articulated
Reflections on Ten Years of Oral History Collection of the Pina Bausch Archives
This presentation reflected on ten years of Oral History work at the Pina Bausch Archives and on the experiences accumulated through working with dancers and collaborators of Tanztheater. The material considered how oral testimony can bring aspects of artistic experience, memory and professional life into historical documentation.
Drawing on approximately seventy interviews, the presentation addressed questions arising from the documentation of dance as a lived and embodied practice. It considered testimonies in relation to artistic processes, formation, cultural encounters and personal histories, and examined what such accounts can contribute to the understanding of Tanztheater.
The contribution was presented within the conference section Epistemologies and Forms, placing the experience of a long-term Oral History collection in dialogue with other approaches to knowledge in and through dance.
Archival Material:
Presentation material; conference documentation; presentation photograph; related Oral History documentation.
Continue reading “Embodied Knowledge Articulated – Reflections on 10 Years of Oral History Collection”
Embodied Personality – at II Personality as a Space for Challenge and Formation of Culture Conference
Type: Presentation
Date: 5 May 2026
Context: II International Scientific and Practical Conference “Personality as a Space for Challenge and Formation of Culture”
Location: Kyiv, Ukraine
Institution / Organisation: National University of Physical Education and Sport of Ukraine (NUPESU)
Role: Presenter
Status: Conference Abstract / Public Record
Embodied Personality in the National Cultural Space This presentation examines how embodied personality functions as a national cultural space in which values, memories, and artistic genealogies are formed and transmitted. Drawing on my practice as a dance artist and oral historian, I consider how verbal historical records can emerge from non-logocentric, embodied processes, and how such approaches reveal relationships between subjectivity, social environments, and cultural memory.
Continue reading “Embodied Personality – at II Personality as a Space for Challenge and Formation of Culture Conference”Journey to Kyiv
Ricardo Viviani – Foto: Solomiia Kozolup
Dancing against time in Kyiv
A journey to a city that continues to dance despite the war
In December 2025, I traveled to Kyiv for a workshop. I spent ten days there, having traveled from Wuppertal via Kraków – a route that felt both pragmatic and existential. How does one prepare for a journey to a war zone from the comfort of a quiet living room? There are no instructions. Preparation begins with mundane tasks and packing. Fear plays no role, surprisingly enough – only the responsibility to pass on what I have developed over the past fifteen years.
I accepted the invitation of Viktor Ruban, choreographer and cultural activist, who keeps spaces open for art and thought amidst the war. The task was clear: to support Ukrainian institutions in describing, documenting, and protecting their dance traditions – an act of cultural self-assertion, a step towards decolonization from the Soviet grip that had overlaid language, culture, and memory for decades.
In Kyiv, we collaborated with directors of museums, archives, and libraries, as well as with ten artists and researchers—from twenty-somethings to people like myself who have dedicated themselves to dance for 45 years. The Goethe-Institut made this work possible through its Resilience Fund. The first day is dedicated to getting to know each other. I explain who I am, and they tell me about themselves. A room brimming with expertise—and yet filled with hesitation, because words fail us. Only when Karina, one of the participants, spontaneously begins translating each word does everything become audible. I try to understand the different urgency. Each person brings their own idea of what needs to be preserved.
What I’m experiencing is a city that is both wounded and alive. People who seem tired yet determined. Cafes that remain open even though the power might go out. Colleagues who work with humor and professionalism while sirens wail outside. A normality that isn’t an illusion, but a survival strategy.
It is necessary and urgent to do this work now. So many talented people are going to the front. A choreographer says goodbye because he is being drafted as a drone operator the next day. Dance teachers are working as snipers. One choreographer can no longer visit her hometowns near Chornobyl. And many have fallen. What remains are memories – and small Ukrainian flags at the memorial on Maidan Square.
My daily routine quickly becomes ritualized: reflecting on the previous day, conducting interviews on battery power, giving presentations. Everything is in the present. The workdays are packed. Memories surface, are sorted, put into words. But my question about a children’s song hits a wall: Soviet colonial overlays, foreign words, a legacy no longer embraced. And questions about the future? They remain untouched. The future is a space that cannot be entered in war, in this invasion. And then, one afternoon, a conversation with Nikita, twenty years old. A quiet moment, almost accidental. He says: “I don’t know how long I’ll live. But as long as I live, I want to dance.”
Here, everything converges: the human element that permeates our dance and makes its humanity visible. Nikita is at the beginning of his career, and yet his body already understands everything that will accompany him throughout his life. This almost unfathomable secret—a knowledge born of breath and movement—that we want to pass on before it vanishes again in the moment.
)) freies netz werk )) KULTUR e.V.
Work with me
I work with artists, dance companies, universities, archives and cultural institutions, bringing together experience as a dancer and choreographer with many years of research, teaching and Oral History work.
Universities & cultural institutions
Lectures, seminars, workshops, research and artistic inquiry
Dance companies & ensembles
Mentoring, dramaturgical and artistic consultation, composition and creative processes
Independent choreographers & artists
Composition, choreography, mentoring and archival strategies
Archives & heritage organisations
Oral History, project design, documentation and activating archives
Cultural organisations
Research, writing, documentation and embodied knowledge
You may be looking for someone who can:
- give a lecture on Oral History and dance
- teach composition or choreography
- provide an outside eye during a creative process
- develop an Oral History or dance-heritage project
- connect archival material with artistic practice
- work with embodied knowledge and its documentation
- bring practical experience of dance into research and institutional contexts
- work internationally across languages and cultures
My work is particularly suited to projects that need to move between practice, research, heritage and artistic creation.
Invite me to speak
Invite me to teach / mentor
Discuss an oral-history, heritage or research project
Kyiv Press Conference
Type: Press Conference · Video Transcript Summary
Date: 23 December 2025
Context: Presentation of the results and future plans of Oral History for Dance Heritage
Location: Ukrainian Crisis Media Center, Kyiv, Ukraine
Subject: Developing a museum protocol for archiving dance
Related Workshop: Oral History for Dance Heritage, 1–6 December 2025
Speakers:
Viktor Ruban
Daryna Yakymova
Ricardo Viviani and representatives of Ukrainian museum and dance institutions, as referred to during the press conference
Press Conference: Oral History for Dance Heritage
This page presents an English summary of the transcript of a publicly available video recording of a press conference held by the Ukrainian Crisis Media Center. The conference presented the results of the Oral History for Dance Heritage project and discussed the next steps following the December 2025 workshop at the National Art Museum of Ukraine (NAMU).
The conference focused particularly on the development of a protocol through which dance could be documented and incorporated into a museum collection. Project curator Viktor Ruban described the work as part of the broader DancePlan Ukraine initiative and as a pilot approach to preserving performative arts through the integration of oral testimony, embodied knowledge and contextual information.
According to Ruban, the protocol responds to the difficulty of preserving dance through conventional museum practices. Dance is not only a performance event but also a social and cultural practice whose histories may disappear when documentation is absent. He emphasized the need to preserve testimonies, archival evidence and research in order to strengthen historical continuity and the visibility of Ukrainian dance.
Daryna Yakymova, curator at NAMU, presented the newly developed three-part protocol for archiving dance:
- Metadata — title, authorship, performance history, dance category, format, structure, participants, documentation such as video, photography and audio, and material elements including costumes and props.
- Oral History Archive — interviews with performers, choreographers, scenographers, musicians and other contributors, creating a multidisciplinary body of embodied and contextual knowledge.
- Reconstruction Protocol — guidelines for preserving essential elements of a dance work, identifying variable components, and documenting rights, licences and technical requirements relevant to future re-performance.
Yakymova explained that museums traditionally work through the preservation of material objects, while dance presents the additional challenge of preserving an ephemeral artistic form. Within the project, Oral History provided a method for extending the museum record beyond physical objects and for incorporating the knowledge and experience of the people who created and performed the work.
The press conference also emphasized the importance of Ricardo Viviani’s experience with Oral History at the Pina Bausch Foundation. His decade of work with dance practitioners was presented as an important reference for adapting Oral History to the Ukrainian context and to the specific requirements of dance heritage.
The speakers described the need for a systematic and accessible structure through which dance could be documented, researched and, where appropriate, reconstructed. In this framework, museum collection, Oral History, archival documentation and future artistic transmission become interconnected rather than separate activities.
The press conference therefore documents a concrete institutional development following the December workshop: the work moved from methodological experimentation toward the formulation of a protocol intended to allow dance to enter a museum collection as a form of cultural heritage.
Archival Material:
Video recording of the press conference; transcript summary; documentation relating to the Oral History for Dance Heritage workshop; material concerning the development of the NAMU dance-archiving protocol.
Continue reading “Kyiv Press Conference”