Yulia Arsen in residence

Percolate 2023 artist Yulia Arsen will be in residence at Dance Limerick for two weeks, working on her solo The Whip. This piece comes from memory and an exploration of childhood. Thinking back to the village where her father came from, Yulia a young local sheperd who deftly wielded a whip. Those lashing sounds -fast, sharp, sudden- scared the young Yulia. These blows were meant to keep the heard together, ensuring none of them got lost. That is, this horrible sound was in its own way a manifestation of love and care for the herd. With that image on her mind, Arsen now explores the whip as a fetish, as a method. It is an object – making noise, provoking movement, calling our attention, confusing us.

YULIA ARSEN is an interdisciplinary artist and choreographer who works at the intersection of dance, theatre and contemporary art. Arsen studied dance in Munich (Iwanson International School of Contemporary Dance) and in Kassel (SOZO Visions of Motion) and performed her own works at various festivals in Berlin, Freiburg, Kassel, Moscow, Tallinn, Limerick and Bucharest.

As a dance artist, Arsen is interested in the constant fluctuations between honesty and irony, the conceptual and the popular, fun and tragedy. Her work aims to engage the audience’s imagination. Yulia received the Kulturamt der Stadt Kassel Grant in 2020. She was also selected as an Aerowaves Twenty22 artist for her solo Plastic Bag. Before the war, Arsen was a resident of the Meyerhold Center and the Winzavod Center for Contemporary Art in Moscow and cooperated with independent art institutions. Arsen left Russia after the invasion of Ukraine in disagreement with the government’s actions and now shifts between Paris, Belgrade and Berlin.