Collaboration with Mariia Bakalo

In August 2025, in Kaunas (Lithuania), Mariia composed the music for the unique performance ‘Strings Attached’. This project became a landmark example of inclusive art, where actors with disabilities performed alongside professional artists on the same stage. The music in this production did not merely accompany the action, but became a tool for emotional communication, helping each participant to reveal their story through movement and sound. The production received a commendation and an award from Kaunas City Council.

Is it easy for you to travel without Google Maps? To build relationships? To speak in front of an audience? Or, indeed, to communicate without words? For some, this may seem like a huge challenge; for others, a source of inspiration. What is new, unfamiliar and difficult for some is familiar and easy for others.

The performance ‘Is It Easy for You?’ explores each of our abilities to connect with another person, to turn to them for help, to love, to empathise, our shared need to feel supported and to have a friend, and our right to feel angry, anxious, confused or disappointed. The project participants’ autobiographical stories are transformed here into choreographic etudes of unity, exchange, symbolic rebirth and hope, in which the participants’ creative expressions—poetry, storytelling, sung poetry and movement—resonate.

This movement-based performance, which highlights the differences and (im)possibilities within each of us, is created by performers with various (dis)abilities alongside professional Lithuanian dancers Ema Senkūvienė and Marius Eidrigevičius, as well as choreographers Inna Falkova and Mariia Bakalo from Ukraine.

The ‘Listen With Your Body’ project was created in collaboration with choreographer Mariia Bakalo. It is a series of unique audio journeys in the form of fairy tales, games and movement exercises inspired by contemporary dance. The project aims to provide psychological support and promote emotional harmony: through sound, listeners learn to feel their inner strength, ‘dance’ with their imagination and find balance even in moments of stillness. ‘Listen With Your Body’ has become an important therapeutic tool, accessible to adults and children in any circumstances.