A Very Modern Famous Dancing Group
It’s not a story with a happy end. It’s a very, very sad one. My mum died on the same date, at the same time, as the war began. My world was broken, I lost everything.
I travelled through ten countries attending rallies for Ukraine before I came here. But after a year of war, people started to be a bit tired, and just to sing the anthem. It’s not enough and nobody will see it, nobody will write about it, nobody will talk about it, so we needed to do something different.
It was the end of January, exactly one month before the anniversary of the start of the war. The closer the anniversary was, the worse I felt because I didn’t know how I would survive this day. It was the anniversary of my mum’s death and I’m not at her grave, and I’m not at home, and I’m not with my relatives. I’m an orphan now and there was nobody here who could support me, and it was the anniversary of the war. I felt guilty because I’m in a peaceful country and some people are dying every single day in Ukraine. So, my moral condition was awful, I was just in a total moral disaster.
I visited an event on business in the Westgate Library to find new connections, network and maybe in the future start my own business here. Anja, the artistic director of Justice in Motion, was one of the speakers and she started to present her project not with words, not with description, but with a video about modern slavery and how they are helping people with dancing. When she finished, I was crying because all the people in the venue were crying. I decided, ‘Oh my God, it’s what I need!’
I came to her and asked, ‘Listen, I am from Ukraine, I am refugee, and in one month we will have an anniversary of the war and what you described, it’s so close, and I would like to be a part of everything you create. Please help me.’ And she said, ‘Oh no, we have so many different projects, it’s only one month, it’s impossible.’ And then I told her, ‘But listen, I don’t want something boring, I want something creative’, and then I say, ‘Maybe on railway station?’. Anja stops and gives me her business card, it was Friday late evening, and she asked me to call on Monday. And we met and started to co-create.
The trigger word was ‘railway station’ because several months earlier Anja had been given a prophecy that she would be doing a flashmob in a train station, which she had written down in her notes. From then we found a lot of similarities between us, and knew we wanted to do this together. And so it started. I don’t know, it’s magic. Maybe vibes. Maybe God.
When the war began, people had maybe five or ten minutes to pack, and they had this opportunity to take something that is important. But you are so disrupted from inside that you don’t understand what to do. Then later you open your backpack and ‘Oh my God, I have taken no warm clothes, food, or toothbrush, but I have two dresses!’ Every one of us has different stories but they are all connected with backpacks, with fleeing, with border control, with railway stations and with moving further and further. And of course resistance, otherwise we would not survive.
I started to collect people for our first workshop. Ukrainian participants were on my side because I’m leading the Ukrainian community here in Oxford. It was impossible to describe when new
participants asked me, ‘What is the project about? What will we do?’ because it was sort of political, supportive, active, sometimes reflective. I could not find any one word to describe it, because it doesn’t exist.
It was hard to all be together at the same time, in the same place, but some tried to change their shifts or to re-organise their times at school with children just to be there. Every rehearsal was four or five hours because we needed to warm up, to talk to them. We met and then talked, cried and brought our memorable things, and again cried. We cried so much, you could not imagine. Everything we discussed, they tried to recreate in movement, so we didn’t dance some strange dance, we danced our emotions, we danced our feelings.
We were complicated clients to work with because every night we were worrying about all these missile attacks and all these bombs. You could plan to have a very efficient and very useful day tomorrow, but at night, something shit happens and then no connection with your husband, no internet, no mobile, no anything. Nothing at all. And you have no strength, even just to wake up, just to wash your face, not even to go somewhere to dance. We are all traumatised. Some people have lost their husbands, some people have lost everything.
The majority of refugees are women. I call them girls, but we are all different ages and from different places. But we have got the same troubles and the same problems here. Find a school for your child, find a job, learn the language, find a sponsor, get a national Insurance number or a GP. And I think that this project helped all of us to hold off emptiness. We have some kind of plan because we have a rehearsal on Wednesday at 7pm, and then on Sunday, and then we started to ask, ‘What is next? Where could we give another performance?’ and instead of refugees, we were like a very modern, famous, dancing group!
On the day of the first performance, we arrived very, very early to the railway station. It was the 24th of February, the mood was low as Russia were bombing us, but this was the reason to get up and put on our blue and yellow costumes. It was quite crowded with Monday morning workers, and we were also like people who were going to work, because we had backpacks on. People are running or calling or looking for tickets and then suddenly, somewhere one girl started to sing, then another two girls sing with her, then more and more and more, and then triangles of twelve girls sing. From the very beginning, it’s very natural, nobody could understand that we are from some community, the only thing is we wear yellow and blue, our national flag colours, but we don’t have similar costumes, it’s just blue jeans and yellow t-shirts or something.
So many people stopped, frozen. I think that this suddenness, or this moment of unexpectedness, plays a very important role, because if we were just singing our national anthem nobody would be so impressed or so shocked. The key idea is to disrupt, not to shock, because we should show something that is important, but positive. And we decided to show all these key things, women, railway station, children, backpacks, emotions, feelings. So, it’s thirty seconds of song, and then our individual performance of our figures, whatever each of us feels, and then our general dance, wherewe are doing the same thing, at the same time and on the same stage. That’s the flashmob.
You have so many negative emotions and everything is inside you, and then when you dance it was the maximum level of nervousness because it was the first ever time. A real performance after only ten rehearsals. And people start to applause, and you start to smile, to cry, to hug, to love each other, it’s like a maximum level of feeling. People on the railway station were crying. They cried. Afterwards we were crying, we were hugging.
I feel so thankful to Anja that she helped me, to support these girls, because I couldn’t do nothing by myself because I was alone, and she created for us a meaning to live, meaning to wake up, meaning to exist. I think this project is a very good example for my children because they see that I don’t give up, I do something, and I have recreated and restarted my life. You want to be useful. You want to be a small, particular part of something big. And it worked.