Research

Anastassya Savitsky’s research explores how bodies transform images and how choreographic processes generate visual work. Moving between dance, drawing, painting and video, it examines the relationship between a composed image and the movement, duration and effort through which it takes shape.

An evolving image archive, including painted representations of the body, provides starting points for choreographic experiments. Poses are held, repeated and set in motion. Attention shifts towards the transitions, physical tensions and instabilities that emerge through this process. What becomes visible when an image has to be sustained by a living body? How does its meaning change through movement, repetition or fatigue?

Savitsky’s migration history and position as a woman, mother and maker inform the selection and interpretation of this material. A feminist perspective connects the representation of bodies to the lived conditions of care and displacement. Questions of vulnerability and belonging intersect with an inquiry into how images of violence enter everyday life and affect a body engaged in caring for others. Hold the House has grown out of one strand of this wider research.

Choreographic actions also become a means of producing drawings, paintings and video. Rhythm, duration and repetition shape the composition of visual material, opening possibilities for work that can develop across performance and exhibition formats.

The current research, developed within the Master Dance programme at the Royal Conservatoire Antwerp, is moving towards an exhibition combining visual work and potentially live performance. The exhibition itself is approached as a choreographic composition.