Igor Shyshko and Albina Vakhitova lay themselves bare in a ritualistic choreography of resistance, set against a text by Elke Van Campenhout and a soundscape by NEXCYIA.

In an unnamed no man’s land, two bodies surrender to a repetitive battle for salvation. They shed their cultural heritages, the imposed gender norms and political repressions from their bodies and try, time and again, to reinvent themselves within an alternative framework of understanding and interconnectedness. 

Spell is a ritual performance that arised through research into physical forms of resistance, and a search for alternate forms of fear and grief. 

Igor Shyshko and Albina Vakhitova embody a dialogue with Elke Van Campenhout’s incantatory text - the eponymous ‘spell’ that conjures a space where empty images, sorrow and joy, ambiguity and conflict can coexist.

Spell does not produce any ready-made political messages. On the contrary, it opens up a multi-layered existential territory of uncertainty around what it means to be alive today, to work and to form relationships. As immigrants, as cultural workers, as magical beings. 

Igor Shyshko 

Igor Shyshko has developed a unique movement language in his work, balancing ‘natural’ choreography between ritual movement and meditative practice. Malus, a stunning performance he created two years ago with countertenor Logan Lopez Gonzalez at KVS, unfolded as an introspective piece infused with yogic and transformational elements.  In The Box, he let external circumstances dictate the shape of his body while locked up in a wooden box for twelve hours. This act of enforced stillness was a deliberate escape from the relentless pace of modern life. In Spell, he takes the opposite approach, instead embracing the chaotic rush of daily existence as a gateway to transformative exhaustion.