Giving Back the Blessings

Giving Back the Blessings

Giving Back the Blessings approaches choreography as something unstable, porous, and shared. Moving between club culture, folk ritual, and hybrid spaces atmospheres, the workshop invites participants to enter choreography as a field of relations rather than something to master.

Together we ask:

How can choreography emerge from the complexity of bodies rather than shape or control them?

What becomes possible when authorship is shared between dancers, witnesses, materials, and space?


How can collective movement hold protest and tenderness at the same time?

What happens when peripheral gestures, pauses, mistranslations, and mistakes start carrying meaning?

Participants work with practices of channeling, circulation, and spatial decentralisation, engaging sound, natural lighting, and architecture as active collaborators. Neo-folk references, club influences, and everyday gestures function as movement archives that surface and transform through encounter.

Moving through friction and care, visibility and withdrawal, individuality and collectivity, the workshop approaches choreography as a shared ecosystem, where knowledge is produced through presence, negotiation, and attention.

Bio

Alina Belyagina is Munich-based choreographer, performer, and facilitator working across dance, theatre, and visual media.

Alina was born in Ukraine, grew up between West Siberia and Berdychiv. Her practice merges movement with  beautyvandalism, experimental sound and hybrid spaces  to explore how bodies generate meaning—physically, politically, and poetically.

Since relocating to Germany, Alina has developed a distinctive choreographic language shaped by displacement, multilingualism, and feminist dramaturgy. She is particularly interested in how signs, sensations, and affects emerge through physical processes, often exploring the body as a site of cultural memory and transformation. 
Alina is committed to collective support, resource-sharing, and creating spaces for exchange.

She is inspired by queer ecologies, sensory theory, and the epistemology of movement—building works that invite both intellectual inquiry and emotional resonance.

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Practical info

Dates: June 22 – July 19, 2026

Part of Symbiotic Danscapes 2026

Location: Paleohori Eco-Art Space, Lefkada

Shared accommodation & 3 full daily meals are offered 

register here

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Interview with Alina For Symbiotic Danscapes

When did you realise this is the work you need to do?

When I first immigrated to Poland, because I lost confidence, but also possibilities. Especially the possibility to speak in my mother tongue. Before that I studied journalism, so my life was very connected to language. When I moved, I lost access to that tool. And I thought: maybe I should start something more body-related. My body was always active, not only physically flexible, but flexible in accepting conditions, making decisions, crossing borders.

What are the core questions of your work and how do you approach them?

Usually I work with movement, text, sound, and video. So it’s not only about the body, it’s also about visual culture and different media. I’m interested in how dance can merge with other practices.
For example, I might combine high heels with noise sound, or work with something like cosmic erotic yoga, or extreme bending — finding extremity, sometimes hyper-intensity inside the practice itself.
At the same time, when I facilitate practices, I often think from the perspective of dance performance inside training. I’m very interested in how physicality, politicality, and poetics exist inside the body. For me, the body is always political. It carries the visions of where it exists, its sexuality, its desires, its wishes.
I’m also interested in creating poetic images in relation to space. I rarely work with the stage as a traditional stage. Mostly I create performances outside theatrical spaces — old halls, architectural spaces, or places that need specific activation. These spaces allow new interpretations of choreography every time.

You often speak about the body as political. What does that mean for you personally?

For me, it comes from being an immigrant, first in Poland, now in Germany. Crossing borders creates fluid borders inside the body. I relate to anarchism and that creates some narration for institutions immediately, even if they don’t know me or my work. This political body works through affect — how I create affect in practice and performance, and how participants or audiences are affected in return. It becomes a circulation of affect in space.
Desire is very important to me. I try to fill the space with desires, actually in practice and later in performance. Desire, empathy, sexuality, or like, high attention to space. For me, the body is not neutral. I’m not interested in the neutral body idea. I work with the political body, a body with history, desire, and position.

You work with something you call “landscape biography” (terms after Angélique Willkie). Can you explain that?

It’s about reading biography through landscapes rather than through events. Where you lived. What kind of land shaped you. What relationship you had to those places.
For example, I grew up in West Siberia. I might connect through landscape experience with someone from New Zealand, even if culturally we are very different. Landscape becomes a first layer. Local political context becomes a second layer.
Now, living in Germany creates another layer of thinking. Locality always shapes perception. I often feel connected to the idea of the periphery, geographically, politically, artistically. I’m comfortable working from there.

Do you position yourself in the center or in the margins?

I have never been in the center and it’s my choice. I prefer periphery positions. I developed tools to exist there, finding collaborators in places without strong art infrastructure, creating work even without institutional support.

Your dance path also comes from outside mainstream training, right?

Yes. It started in Poland in Bytom, I volunteered at the Silesian Dance Theatre. Because of language limitations, I offered stretching sessions instead. Surprisingly, many people came, including people without dance background, some even men.
Eventually, I started leading paid classes. That became the beginning of my facilitation practice. I also organized amateur competitions and events in cultural centers. It was very intuitive. Now, with more knowledge, maybe I would do things differently, but at that time I just did it.

What questions are you currently exploring in your research and want to share in Symbiotic Danscapes?

I work with scores for entering, waiting, listening, or interacting with sound and environment. As you said there will be nature all around us. Sound can be natural, insects, voices, the sound of air, the sound of moving bodies or technical sound from speakers.
I’m also interested in care, relationships to objects, participatory choreography, and discomfort. What creates discomfort? How can we work with it?
Objects are important, they create relationships between performers and audiences. Water is also interesting for me, it creates risk, vulnerability, transformation.
I’m working with syncopated rhythms, irregular rhythms created through body repetition, often connected to punk dance energy and visceral decision-making rather than visual form.

What do you hope people can unlearn in your workshops?

Maybe hierarchical thinking. Movement doesn’t always have to be the most important element. Sometimes sound, fog, or discomfort can become central. I like to shift hierarchies.

What does “symbiotic” mean in your practice?

It means multiple perspectives existing at the same time. Not one correct vision, but many coexisting realities.

Is there something else important for you to add?

I think a lot about epistemological position, for example, working from feminist perspective, but also questioning the tools I use. Am I using feminism or anarchism as tools, or am I acting from my own position? That reflection is important for me.

Why do you think your work is important now?

Because it opens imagination. Working with the body and abstract tools trains imagination not only visual imagination, but embodied imagination.
For me, it’s also about creating utopia through practice. Utopia must be questioned, but I still believe in creating it through practice and thought.

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