Rūta Pūce | Latvia
is a contemporary dance artist interested in the body as a tool for exploring the world and the role of women artists in society. For her contemporary dance performance "Divotne" (in collaboration with Anna Novikova-Tilčika) she received the Dance Award 2017-2018. She is a teacher at the Riga Ballet School and a board member of the Latvian Dance Information Center. She is currently studying choreography at the Latvian Academy of Culture's MA program "Audiovisual and Performing Arts".
Choreographer: Rūta Pūce
Dancers and co-authors of the movement material: Agate Bankava, Agnese Bordjukova, Anna Novikova-Tilčika, Marija Saveiko
Set and costume designer: Līga Ūbele
Lighting designer: Niks Cipruss
Sound designers: Alise Pieče, Rūta Pūce
Visual identity: Aleksejs Beļeckis
Produced by: Ģertrūdes ielas teātris
Premiere: 24/04/2024
Created with the financial support of the State Culture Capital Foundation, Riga City Council, Latvian Academy of Culture, Latvian Dance Information Center, Choreographers’ Association.
ENTRAILS (2024)
The body is an archive that holds both internal experiences
and external collective imprints. This performance highlights the clash between
the individual and the collective, between the inner and the outer, between
hidden desires and the existing reality, using the Latvian contemporary dance
industry as a metaphor. It is an industry that is still on its path towards
emancipation in Latvian cultural policy. The performance gives importance to
the subjective, celebrates the body, unleashes the voice and outlines the daily
life of independent artists, which consists of doing several things at once,
burning out, fighting for their field, constantly daring and adapting at the
same time.
I want to give voice to the
insides that have been searching for a way to break out for so long – with
a bead of sweat, just after an exhale, with a louder scream and brazenly
through uncontrolled movement. The insides can no longer adapt to the outside
world. They seep through the skin and cover everyday life, loudly manifesting
themselves.
My insides are contemporary
dance – a hollow feeling of freedom in the limbs, an exhale through all
parts of the body at once, a disappearance. Once it was enough to feel that I
liked dance, that it excited me, healed me and improved me. Now it is a
resource that anchors me in a fragmented world. It is also a political act to
choose to do something so ambiguous, bodily, multi-layered,
vulnerability-inducing, honesty-demanding and marginal.
If the Sun King Louis XIV
had been a woman in the 17th century, would he have invented contemporary dance
instead of ballet? Does contemporary dance in Latvia deserve its own house, its
own palace? Could we stop adapting?
ENTRAILS is exploring what is
characteristic of contemporary dance in Latvia. The choreographer works with the
bodies of four dancers as archives in which possible answers have already been
stored. The archives are opened both by stirring the body's interior and by
uniting in collective memories of experiences and manifesting dreams for the
future. How to build an industry and be an artist at the same time?
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