Backstage with Neda Ruzheva (TREVOGA)

Neda, you are part of Amsterdam-based dance collective Trevoga. Who is behind Trevoga and how did you come together?

Everyone who is now Trevoga is behind Trevoga. It all started with Antonina Pushkareva and me. We met at the Academy of Theatre and Dance in Amsterdam. We both hated it very much. Because in the context of our studies, we had to role-play this classic hierarchical division into choreographers and dancers. That was not the way we wanted to work. We graduated during the pandemic, so we had a lot of time to think about how we wanted to work, how we wanted to come together. It is a bit like tarot cards, with the upside-down symbol that allows for new ideas. We soon came up with the idea of founding a collective. We saw an open call from the International Choreographic Arts Centre in Amsterdam – and we simply pretended that the collective already existed and wrote an application. We got a residency there and invited Erikas Žilaitis to become part of it. We started working on our first piece together there. Now we have a new member, Dovile Krutulyte, who is joining us for the next piece.

Your website is called ‘trevoga means anxiety’, and your visuals play with a dark, gothic aesthetic. I was struck by that. What is your relationship to anxiety? Whose anxiety are you referring to?

The Bulgarian word trevoga means fear. At first it was meant a bit ironically, because we all have social anxieties and have decided to embrace them. But there is more to it than that. We wanted our work to reflect a kind of anxiety that characterises our generation, the so-called Gen Z. The economy is in recession, the housing market is in crisis, there are social tensions and a rising number of armed conflicts – for us, it is a pretty scary time to be living in. Naming our collective this way is a promise we have made to each other not to hide these feelings, not to close ourselves off, to remain sensitive, and to express these sentiments in our pieces. Our problems or anxieties are not personal. We see them as systemic, and only by working together can we begin to think about alternatives.

I am specifically interested in your image of the body, or of bodies, in your work. You state: ‘For Trevoga, the white capitalist body is not a temple – it is an abandoned shopping centre filled with consumerist relics, synthetic chemicals, and sexually suggestive images.” This is a powerful and stirring image. How do you proceed choreographically, aesthetically, from this conclusion?

We have found a very interesting paradox within ourselves that inspires this statement and much of our work. We feel so full, so overloaded with information, images, and chemicals that we basically feel empty. We are somewhat jaded, so full that we started to become a little numb. In the piece 11 3 8 7, there are these characters that are visually very complex, they are shiny, they are very polished, they are in-between human and other things, they have these prosthetics, these perfect details, but there is this emptiness within them, and in the way they perform their actions. We specifically worked to create scores that put us in a state in which we can detach ourselves as much as possible from the movements we are performing. We were specifically looking to depict this emptiness that we feel. It made many people angry, but that is okay. People who are more into traditional dance scenes said that the piece was empty, that there was no emotion in it. We cannot agree with that; it is full of emotion. I think if you have been working a 12-hour service shift and then went on to scrolling on your mobile phone for another 5 hours, you know that this emptiness is full of emotion. As a generation that has grown up with the internet, we see so many representations of a life that we almost become observers on the sidelines of it all. When you are so overloaded, sometimes it is hard to feel connected to what you are experiencing.

Your works are very specific, visually and movement-wise, idiosyncratic – costume design, make-up, and scenography are important elements. I recognise references to digital and pop cultural, also commercial imagery and iconography. What inspires you? What are you working on or towards?

I think we are very inspired both in a good as well as in a bad way by the contexts we grew up in. We all grew up in Eastern Europe, in a time of transition; we grew up with a flood of US media, literally everything that had ever been produced and not already exported to that part of the world, coming at us. We saw all these beautiful images, and they did not match our own experiences or environments, and I think that created a special kind of humour in us. So many things inspire me. I like to dive into the internet and find the most abject and confusing moments of this hyper-reality. I find it exciting to twist these moments back onto viewers as a reflection of the complex present we live in. And endeavours of resistance inspire me. I like when the root of a tree grows so strong that it breaks the perfect pavement that was built upon it.

Let us talk about the guest performance at tanzhaus nrw a bit more. The piece 11 3 8 7 was – as you stated before – your debut as a collective, and you got off to a flying start in the dance scene with it. 11 3 8 7 was voted into the top 20 selection of the European Aerowaves network. The first thing that comes to my mind is that the titles of your pieces seem very cryptic. What does the series of numbers 11 3 8 7, providing the piece’s title, stand for?

It is a code. It is cryptic because we wanted it to stand out in the programmes. When you see a lot of titles and then, suddenly, these numbers, you become curious: What is this? How do I read it? Who dares to name a piece like this? The other reason is that we were still shy to show our feelings and speak our minds. A code made it possible for us anyway. 11 3 8 7 is actually a way to spell the word meat with numbers, 11 is M, 3 is E, 8 is A and 7 is T. It came about a bit as an inside joke because when we came up with this title, we had all recently graduated and still could not get over how much the world around us is centred around profit and using our bodies to make profit. As dancers we felt like we are flesh for sale, labour units, numbers of an algorithm; we felt like our bodies were literally programmed. We found a way to address this feeling in the performance as well. At that time, this NPC – non-playable character – was trending on TikTok. People were imitating characters from video games. For us, this was such a curious feedback loop. You are imitating something that is supposed to imitate you. Somewhere along the lines, this imitation of imitation is distorted and pretty uncanny. 11 3 8 7 deals with all these topics that we never found out how to come to terms with. The algorithmic function of everything around us, the commodification of our bodies, the distorted images of the world and ourselves, the high expectations that come with it. How hard it is for us to cope with it. All the violence that kind of slips through the cracks of these very pretty representations.

So, you are inspired by current emotional states and strongly concerned with atmospheres, social sensitivities, and phenomena that are very of the moment – what do you want the audience to experience?

We feel that the time for artists to deal with abstract concepts and universal truths is over. We believe that we have our personal experiences, and we have the myths, stories that have been passed on to us. We have our emotional luggage and our sensitivities. We really see our bodies as symptoms of the various physical and symbolic environments that they grew up in. We express our personal feelings in our works and try to connect them to the many processes that inform the moment of time we are living in. By collaborating and getting to know each other’s different experiences, we better understand our own. That is also what we hope for the audiences, that they can see themselves, resonate and find something new, new stories to change the script that binds us together.

You developed 11 3 8 7 in different variations for different venues – stages and exhibition spaces. You just mentioned that you question the abstraction of art – but you perform in white cubes and black boxes of museums and theatres. How do you relate to these supposedly neutral infrastructures of art, and how do you move within them? What kind of relationships do you build with the audiences?

We are definitely not the kind of artists that are prejudiced towards art institutions. We use many references to art and to classical, contemporary, and postmodern dance. What we do is not in opposition to but more an upgrading of these histories. We are adding on to existing conversations. We are very playful with the formats; we like to receive inspiration from these different spaces. We always make each show a bit site-specific, and we are very excited for the tanzhaus nrw version in Düsseldorf. I think it is going to be our best version – we completely re-worked the choreography. The audience can be all around us; they can look at us more closely. The make-up process is so complicated – and so, when you see it up close, you can see the body sweating underneath all the prosthetics, the chemicals, all the eyes running from the contact lenses. There is something special about that. We open ourselves a bit more.

The question is a bit banal, but I would be very interested to know how long it takes for you to apply the make-up?

It takes four hours! The performance then only lasts 30 to 40 minutes, but the time in the make-up booth takes that long. What I said earlier about these states of being disconnected and jaded – I think this whole process of preparing for the piece is already a psychosomatic experience itself.

Here you touch upon my next topic. The piece 11 3 8 7 is part of the programme focus dances of transgression. What makes your work transgressive? Is that one of your primary goals?

Absolutely. I think there are many ways in which we relate to transgression. We mix many genres; we have a very visual approach to choreography. We all have a dance background, but essentially, we wanted to do more performance. Everything we are creating is blurring all these borders. We mix commercial dance with ballet, with heavy theory, and with our humour, so, we like to push the buttons of many tacit conventions, not only of choreography. What we also wanted to blur, right from the beginning, is this separation of choreographer and dancer. I think the moment you change the way of producing, all the things that have been established also start to dissolve. We hope what stays most transgressive is our methodology. And concerning the experience of our performances, I am sure that the audience can tell us more about what is transgressive. For the future, I wish us all to be more transgressive because there are so many things to crush and unlearn.

You mentioned your shared Eastern European and post-socialist upbringings earlier. How do you make these perspectives productive in your work? Do you intervene in certain historiographies or traditions?

I think this question is very interesting in the context of transgression, which we have just talked about. The Eastern European perspective marks the border between two different worlds: the Western and the so-called non-Western. When you take a closer look at every border, you realize that nothing is fixed, it is confusing, and part of multi-layered, eclectic processes. It will need much more than one theatre performance to completely understand these interrelationships. It needs a lot of input from friends and non-European perspectives. But for now, how does it find expression in our work: we share this very basic sense of disappointment or, put better, dissolution. We grew up in a time when our countries had been hoping for a new beginning that was supposed to set societies free from the violent policing of the Soviet regime. But it became clear that Western capitalism was not what the people had hoped for. The policing is still there, it is just more subtle and less obviously controlling. This utopia of abundance and hedonism carries its own problems. I can give an example from the Bulgarian context. The first things to pop up were insurance scams, illegal real estate, unregulated tourism, forests being cut down, canal pipes of factories going straight into the rivers or the sea. If you ask my parents’ generation, they will tell you that we just did not do Western culture or democracy right, but if you ask me, these practices are exactly the base of Western economy we were trying to imitate. There is this tension in our background between the fantasy that everybody hoped for and the much more uncomfortable reality that came instead. With Trevoga, we try to work with this, aesthetically. In our works, flashy pop culture tropes go hand in hand with this very mundane sense of unease and slow decay. That is what we found for now, and we are still reflecting on it. We all grew up with this idea that what is happening in the West is the real world and that we are experiencing something unauthentic or less developed. I think to understand what the Eastern European perspective is, we first need to unlearn this. That is a long process. For the next piece, we are going to partly produce in collaboration with Bulgarian and Lithuanian institutions. This is one step of getting out of Western Europe again. There is no easy solution; you just keep on trying and practicing.

Can you more precisely describe what characterises your way of collaborating as a collective? What values do you represent, and do you fight for structural changes in labour and production contexts as well?

As I said, we were really angry with the way dancers’ bodies are disconnected to the final product. In big companies, they often just get to execute. I think this reflects a larger problem in the way the global market is structured. The people who are doing the physical work are disconnected from the final products. We thought if we refuse to reproduce this model in the scale of a choreographic collective, then it hopefully sets an impulse that may reverberate in the dance field and even inspire others. The most important thing for me is that we find ways in which people have consent over their body and in which the final product of the process resonates with them, with who they are and what they want to say and with the stories their bodies carry.

As a final question, I am interested in what you need and wish for as emerging artists in order to be able to work well.

This is definitely a hard question right now, with all the government policies getting more and more restrictive regarding art. Especially towards live art and towards getting together without profit at the heart of the endeavour. Maybe it is an unpopular opinion among artists, but I think institutions have been supportive, and they have a hard time because they need to moderate between government policies and the arts sector. However, I am also thinking about our beginnings. When we did our first work, we missed input from previous generations, somebody to give us some advice because the dance field is structured in a very competitive way and there is a lot of gatekeeping of information and resources. If you are tough enough to make the first step despite everyone trying to hide everything from you, then you can work. Otherwise, maybe you should not. That is very sad to realise when you are a young person and so motivated. We want to be there for the next generations of dance makers. We want to think with them and with the institutions on how to foster communication between the generations and be more collaborative. I am strongly convinced that when we are having fun and believe in what we do, then audiences will come in bigger numbers as well. Maybe we should put all of our efforts together against the authoritarian policies of the governments right now. When you have a common enemy, it brings you together. Since policies are so hostile, maybe we will all be friendlier to each other. 

That is the case, hopefully. We have to ensure that the field does not become blatantly less diverse because of the authoritarian shift and the cuts. But I would like to add something to a point you made before. At tanzhaus nrw, we work together with so-called urban dance artists, and in these dance cultures, the support of each other and of younger generations is very crucial – sharing is caring is one of their slogans. We also work with queer artists who build their own networks and working structures, which are supportive and empowering. So, I think things are changing, at least here.

This brings us to one of my secrets! I originally come from breakdancing in Bulgaria. And even though I love contemporary dance, I felt that I missed this sense of togetherness, a community, so much. Therefore, I wanted to recreate that in this new context. And by the way, all of Trevoga are queer. So, I totally agree with you.

Thank you, Neda, for the exciting and insightful interview and for taking the time.

Neda Ruzheva (BG, 1999) works as a choreographer, dancer, and set designer – together with Antonina Pushkareva (RU, 2000), Erikas Žilaitis (LT, 1999) and Dovile Krutulyte (LT, 1998), she makes up dance collective Trevoga. Playing with genres, registers, and symbols with unapologetic incoherency, the collective gnaws at the mental onslaught of their fast-paced lives, viewing their bodies as symptoms of their numerous addictions and the stage as a means to disentangle its many dissonant processes and conflicting forces. https://www.trevogameansanxiety.com/   

 

The interview was conducted by Lucie Ortmann, dramaturge at tanzhaus nrw.