Baltic Dance Network workshop: Navigating Body Archives

Baltic Dance Network Program 2025
On November 5–6, 2025, Baltic Dance Network will host two open dance workshops in STL, featuring artists from Latvia and Lithuania. The workshop program aims to provide a collaborative space for the Baltic dance community to explore its shared identity, amplify the presence of Baltic dance in Europe, and deepen understanding of each country’s unique cultural context.

Navigating Body Archives is led by two Latvian artists — Rūta Pūce and Rūta Ronja Pakalne, whose artistic journeys converge around the theme of the body as an archive. Their collaboration began during a 2023 dance lab in Sweden, where questions of memory, presence, and bodily knowledge sparked an ongoing joint research inquiry. This workshop is a convergence point, a space where their two trajectories meet to explore Baltic dance identity through embodied memory. This identity is approached not as a fixed tradition, but as a constellation of embodied memories shaped by education, politics, local contexts, and movement heritage.

The aim of the workshop is to explore how individual and collective dance archives—stored in gestures, rhythms, and felt experiences—can become a tool for understanding, questioning, and shaping Baltic-ness through the body. Participants will engage in somatic and improvisational practices, memory-based movement tasks, partner work and choreographic composition rooted in lived experience. These practices aim to surface both individual and collective archives and serve as tools for accessing the body memory. The outcome is not a finished product but an expanded awareness—of one’s own movement heritage, of shared patterns, and of the complex, sometimes contradictory forces that shape Baltic dance identity.

Structure

The workshop is designed as a 5-hour session to allow participants time to drop into their physical and creative processes without rushing.

1 Arrival phase: somatic tuning and guided improvisation—to awaken the body’s sensory memory and poetic awareness. This phase includes tasks rooted in both instinct and observation, inviting participants to listen to their body’s internal landscape and explore stored gestures and sensations. We then move into tasks focused on individual archives: mapping habitual patterns, recalling embodied experiences, and slowly unfolding one’s own choreographic memory. Movement, voice, and guided improvisation blend with spatial tasks and group reflection.

1h break

2 Collaborative task phase: working in pairs or small groups to share, reflect, and recompose each other’s material. Research includes improvisational tasks like “bad idea” charades, live-choreography games, echos and group writing (“Why I Still Dance”), allowing participants to connect personal experiences to wider cultural and social frameworks. The session concludes with a collective improvisation inspired by the group’s written reflections and shared embodied discoveries. This closing practice anchors the experience and opens space for poetic, open-ended meaning-making.

Rūta Pūce is a freelance contemporary dance artist based in Latvia. Her work focuses on the body as a socio-political site where dance, choreography, art, and daily life intersect. She holds an MA in Audiovisual and Performing Arts (2024) from the Latvian Academy of Culture, with a thesis on the body as archive. Since debuting with Twoness (2017), she has created works such as Until Death Do Us Part (2023) and Entrails (2024), which explore embodied archives and the Latvian dance scene. Pūce teaches at Riga Ballet School and contributes actively to Latvian dance culture via the Dance Information Center and Dance.lv Journal.
Website: rutapuce.weebly.com

Rūta Ronja Pakalne is a Latvian freelance dance and film artist based in Estonia. Her interdisciplinary practice spans choreography, performance, filmmaking, and teaching, investigating body, presence, and everyday experience. She holds a BA in Choreography from the Latvian Academy of Culture, further training at P.A.R.T.S. in Brussels, and an MA in Film Arts from TLU, BFM. Since 2019 she has taught at TLU-BFM, Tallinn Ballet School, and ETA. Her recent projects include Body of Dreams (2023)—a collaboration with Laura Kvelstein exploring body archives, Freedom to Lose Control Together with the Many (with Laura Gorodko 2023). She also creates experimental dance films that explore movement and embodied storytelling, recentl films include H61 and Centrifugal (2024).
Website: rutaronja.com

Baltic Dance Network is a new joint initiative led by partners from Lithuania, Latvia & Estonia. It aims to create a safe space for Baltic contemporary dance artists to connect and analyse their shared past, explore Baltic dance identity, as well as understand each Baltic country’s context and uniqueness. Together we aim to recognize and express historical legacies, enhancing confidence in the international dance field, and empowering artists to reflect current political or other challenges through their art.

The Network consists of six partners: Lithuanian Dance Information Centre (the leader of the project), Contemporary Dance Association (Lithuania), Latvian Dance Information Centre, The Association of Choreographers (Latvia), Sõltumatu Tantsu Lava (Estonia), Estonian Dance Art and Dance Education Union. The Network has received Long-term Network funding from the Nordic-Baltic Mobility Programme for Culture to establish the project “Baltic Dance Network: Navigating Identity in the Face of Changes”.