My body is a room filled with (JOY)

In 2025, Penkova begins a new phase of artistic collaboration, engaging dancers across Europe in a series of one-week residencies. Each residency centers on the tools and methods developed in her earlier solo work My body is a room filled with (Antiques), originally created in 2020.

The solo is conceived as a twenty-minute uninterrupted walk based on a loop of 18 steps. The goal is to refurnish, update, and recycle. To establish a movement dialogue between a dancers past and present experiences. How to embody, disrupt, have fun with, laugh at and reinvent inherited vocabularies. Inviting each dancer to see their body as a room. What is it filled with?

Rooted in Foucauldian thought, Penkova’s work is guided by the belief that to understand where we are going, we must reflect on what has come before us.

The one-week format is not only a time of exploration and mutual discovery, but also a proposal — and a solution — for continuing to make work together in precarious times for performing artists.

Residency 1:  21 feb- 2 march with dancer Natalia Drozd (PL)  with a showing at ATALANTE, Göteborg

With support from: Art of Spectra, and Culture Moves Europe.

Working session 2: with Mikael Marklund (september)

Working session 3: with Pontus Sundset (october)

Working session 4: with Jim de Block (november)

Working session 5:  with Ingeborg Zackariessen (december)

Original work support 2020:

Le Boson/Bruxelles, Tutti Frattelli/Atnwerp, 3e Våningen/Göteborg, MDT/Stockholm, Danscentrum Väst, Hallen/Farsta, Stora teatern/Göteborg.

Subsidized by: Gothenburg city arts council, Swedish arts grants committee.