Ulla is a dancer, choreographer and teacher of contemporary dance and contact improvisation.

I graduated as a dancer in Finland, in 2004. Since then I have done free lance dance and have been teaching all over the world. I teach contact improvisation, which is an exploration into weight, gravity or momentum, dancing with a partner. Currently, I am living in Frankfurt and studying my MA in contemporary dance pedagogy.

Just before coming here, I did a contact workshop in Frankfurt and have been performing there with a choreographer, Yasna Schindler, in an art installation in a museum, Museum for Angaventde Kunst.

For me it was a space coming from intense studies, to go back to the wild field and to relax in the process of making art, it felt like a holiday to be here. Docken was fantastic, it was nice to create the duet with Frank, we developed something and didn’t do it for the spectacle of the submarine itself but actually had a movement score and could go one step further than thinking of the technical aspects of the submarine but could think about what we were doing on it.

Frank and I did a slow motion fighting love/hate duet. It was fun, I thought after seeing other people perform on it, we started to look for what worked and what didn’t work. Simple worked, less than more; we concentrated on awareness of body, and stilness, slow motion, and relation to the other.

I think it was great and the most fun for me was to participate in the other performances, I was able to jump into a performance (such as the tracking projects) and perform without too much planning, I could improvise on the fly, in the moment. I enjoyed playing my accordian in the sunshine, or while hanging upside down suspended from a line above the water in the evening.

I could just stay here at the sea making music its really wonderful, people and the place.

We’re making an event in Barcolona which is an international laboratory for artists to come and work and collaborate together. It will be in February 19 -22, 2009. Visit www.bide.be for more information!