For his 2022 New Museum Residency, movement artist and researcher Ilya Vidrin investigates the labor and moral textures of intimate physical care through discussion, experimental workshops, and live performance.
Ilya Vidrin’s research uses embodied philosophical inquiry to understand and practice care through somatic movement.
Many discourses of somatic knowledge, therapy, movement, and meditation center interior sensation, reflection, and shifts within an individual’s physical experiences. Vidrin’s research and practice, in contrast, consider the social potential for a more bodily understanding of community care, focusing on the ways we move through and take up space with others.
Creating scores for iterative, intimate movement, Vidrin nurtures conditions for partners to search within themselves, one another, and in their shared connections to interrogate how meaningful relations are experienced. Partners co-develop and co-discover bodily knowledge, and in the process create new ways of being in space together. Rather than keeping in step with efficiency-oriented value systems (in which goals do not take into account ethical imperatives necessary for good relations), somatic partnering re-authors what physical expertise means. In this redefinition, typical standards of excellence in movement—expertise demonstrated through particular athleticism, rhythmic alignment, or visual lines, for example—are transformed into embodied processes that cultivate and sustain mutual aid.
Across workshops, conversations, and performances with trained and untrained dancers, Vidrin’s residency will explore the possibility of communicating aspects of embodied trust, empathy, consent, and agency in partnering studies.
Ilya Vidrin: Everything You Do Matters, No Matter What You Do, the New Museum’s 2022 artist in residence program, is organized by Andrew Westover, Keith Haring Director of Education and Public Engagement, and Emily Mello, former Senior Associate Director of Education.
