Dance artist

Yulia Arsen

Dance artist
Choreographer
Performer

BIO

Yulia Arsen is an interdisciplinary artist and choreographer who works at the intersection of dance, theater and contemporary art. She studied contemporary dance in Munich (Iwanson) and Kassel (SOZO vim) and then presented her own creations at Radialsystem (Berlin), mumok (Vienna), SAAL Biennaal (Tallinn) WHAT NEXT festival (Limerick), Iridescent festival (Bucharest) as well as other venues and festivals in Germany, Russia and Austria.

In 2022, his solo "plastic bag" was selected for AEROWAVES Twenty 22. In 2023, his last solo "the whip" premiered at ImPulsTanz.

She actively develops tools aimed at encouraging creative professionals from different backgrounds to create. These tools have been grouped together in the form of a “solo.your emergency pack" which has been invited to the CNDB (Bucharest), Dance Limerick, and SOZO (Kassel).
Another of her huge interests is to create pieces through laboratory processes with a mixed group of performers. She is inspired by unique bodies and the variety of backgrounds, their differences and the possibilities of being together.

Now she is based in France, where she became an Adami fellow (2023) and established her company Bedroom Community (2025). At the moment she is working on the interdisciplinary trilogy Forever Lost: a nostalgic series of lost futures, contains of 3 chapters: Do you really wanna live forever, Utrennik and After Party.

Work- in- progress

A multidisciplinary collective work of 9 artists, where sound takes the main role merging with video and performance into the form of total installation. It dives into utrennik—the post-Soviet children’s morning celebration. A ritual where cheap costumes and scripted magic barely hid a deeper emptiness. Here, it returns as a metaphor for broken promises and futures that never arrived. Time folds onto itself. Performers drift like ghosts. Nothing starts. Nothing ends. The space is ambiguous—a school auditorium, a classroom, a New Year’s party or a graduation ceremony? The audience can roam freely or linger quietly by the wall—like at those festive occasions where you never quite wanted to join in.

Credits:
Yulia Arsen - concept and movement
Wassily Bosch - sound and music curation
Natalya Petrikowa - sound
Pavel Pakhomov - sound, design
Asya Ashman - movement
bottom escape - video
Oleg Eliseev and Jenya Kukoverov (EliKuka) - installation, performance
Anna Kozonina - outside eye

Supported by: Les Subs, Fond Transfabrik, Voices Festival (Berlin)

Do you really wanna live forever (2024-2026)

Work- in- progress

In a gray zone of frustration and uncertainty, time appears frozen, as if we are stuck in a memory capsule. Central to this experience is the inability to truly speak out or break free. We are caught in a loop of repetition, stasis, and breakdown. Is this reality or a nightmare? How do we find or identify ourselves when we have nothing to say—what can be said in such a situation? Which words are necessary to describe the indescribable and express the inexpressible?

Credits:
Concept and dance - Yulia Arsen
Sound -Wassily Bosch
Outside eye - Anna Kozonina
Photo - Mila Orishchenko

Supported by: Théâtre de Vanves, Point Ephémère, La Briqueterie CDCN, Atelier de Paris CDCN, Fond Transfabrik, Voices Festival (Berlin)

The whip
(2023)

This research was started from choosing the object to work with. The object that would balance between being a charged symbol and being a tool. So, it's the whip. It caused fear and disgust, already in the bare situation of the solo with an object.
What would be the strategies of finding the balance between these extremes? What would be my agency in this juxtaposition with a symbol of power and violence?
Arsen is constantly searching for balance between semiotic and affection, between whip as a symbol and whip as an unknown territory.

Supported by:
La Briqueterie - CDCN du Val-de-Marne (France), Station Service for contemporary dance and CC Magacin (Serbia), Percolate and Dance Limerick (Ireland), Dance Identity (Austria), SEANSE art center (Norway), ON/OFF on-line residency

Choreography and performance - Yulia Arsen
Music - Till Mertens
Outside eye - Nicole Seiler
Video - Yana Isaenko

Plastic bag
(premiered 2021)

Femininity is a product. A mass-produced product you can find in a store. Determined to achieve full-fledged femininity, Yulia Arsen goes to the shop with a plastic bag where she means to purchase it for a reasonable price.

Ironic, honest and intimate, in this piece Arsen plays with clichés about what it means to be a woman, and to examine your gender identity.

Credits:
Choreography and performance - Yulia Arsen
Outer eye - Nastya Nikolaeva
Special thanks to the STANSIA art-residency for support.
Photos: Claudiu Popescu and Egor Gogen

TWENTY22 by Aerowaves https://aerowaves.org/artist/yulia-arsen/

right here, right now. auto-colonial rave
(work- in-progress with the show premier by spring 2021)

right here, right now
auto-colonial rave

Rave party on the border of dance performance and total installation about russian eternal sense of our cultural "secondary". Rave came to us from the UK, performances-parties - from Berlin or Amsterdam, the newest theater - in Europe, well, how can Russian artists and audiences exist in all of this? We want to be like someone else, pursue originality, compare ourselves with everyone else. But rave is not a competition, not even a work on yourself. What if this practice of collective fatigue frees us from auto-colonial mood for at least an hour and a half?

Credits:
Yulia Arsen - director, choreographer and concept
Alexey Silaev - set designer
Nastya Nikolaeva - theme developer
Anna Kozonina - curator
Nika Gilmutdinova, Denis Basko, Alexey Yurkov, Ksenia Tchizhova, Lera Teploukhova, Vika Vaskina, Sergey Tchirkov, Larisa Alentieva, Lena Shirinkina, Simon Farina, Yulia Arsen - performers
Natasha Guliaeva - producer
Irina Kozlova - director`s assistant

Produced by RemPut festival 2020-2021

Photos - Alexey Kabelitskiy, Valentina Malgina

Laboratory in Kazan/Show me your love
(December, 2021)

Show me your love
Laboratory in Kazan, Tatarstan

The group of dancers with very different backgrounds (prima balerina, b-boy, contemporary dancer, actress, vogue etc) were put in the situation of re-finding the very basics of dance and than to define the connections between each other in order to be able to perform as a group.

Dramaturgy was based on the playlist of pop songs about love, and performers aimed to manifest that which cannot be named. Something that is not virtuosity, technique, charisma, but only a flicker, a vulnerable glow

Credits:
Choreography - Yulia Arsen
Performers - Akeksandra Elagina, Ildar Alekbaev, Renata Garifullina, Ed Khabibullin, Rail Norinz, Albina Nugmanova, Aya Sadykova, Indira Khabibulina,
Special thanks to Venera Galimova, Ildar Alekbaev and svoboda.fest

Artistic statement

I was born in a typical Moscow bedroom district — a space with no clear cultural code, but full of visual cues of chthonic gloom, trash aesthetics, and mass culture. With nothing better to grab onto, I chose to dive straight into those aesthetics and use them as my main material.
My practice sits at the crossroads of dance, performance, and immersive installation, often flirting with club culture. I mix whatever comes to hand — anything that feels right — into a kind of emotional speedball, the kind you’d take to shoot yourself into the sky of your own despair.
I’m drawn to how mass forms — like school proms or discos — can be deconstructed and re-coded to make sense of post-Soviet symbols within the European context I live in now. Since moving to France, I’ve also started reflecting on cultural mimicry and auto-coloniality — how we internalize and reproduce what we think culture is supposed to look like.
In my work, I’m trying to break out of the local chthonic swamp and reach for something more universal — that shared sense of being lost, lonely, nostalgic.

Contact information

Let`s share, connect and exchange

+33780016784
julia.arsen@gmail.com