Ilya Vidrin: Everything You Do Matters, No Matter What You Do

The New Museum Department of Education and Public Engagement presents Ilya Vidrin: Everything You Do Matters, No Matter What You Do, the Museum’s summer artist residency, which foregrounds the department’s year-round commitment to contemporary art and growth through inquiry. For his 2022 New Museum Residency, movement artist and researcher Ilya Vidrin investigates the work and moral textures of intimate physical care through discussion, experimental workshops, and live performance. Vidrin’s research uses embodied philosophical inquiry to understand and practice care through somatic movement.

While 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 considers 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.

Ilya Vidrin (b. 1988, Boston, MA) is a performer, educator, and researcher working at the intersection of performing arts, philosophy, and interactive media. Born into a refugee family, Vidrin’s research and artistic practice interrogate the complex ethics of human interaction, including the embodiment of empathy, cultural competence, and social responsibility.  He is featured as one of Dance Magazine’s “25 to Watch” in 2022. Vidrin has been an artist-in-residence at Jacob’s Pillow; North Atlantic Ballet; Ballet Des Moines; AREA Gallery; the National Parks Service; Harvard ArtLab; The Walnut Hill School; Interlochen Arts Academy; MIT Media Lab; Boston Center for the Arts; Le Laboratoire; and Museum of Fine Arts, Boston. He has also worked with the ​L.A. Contemporary Dance Company; The Royal Swedish Ballet: Berlin Staatsballett; Boston Philharmonic Orchestra; The Cambrians; Erick Hawkins Dance Company; ​and dance artists including ​Sidra Bell, Aszure Barton, Ohad Naharin, ​William Forsythe, Brian Brooks, and Wendy Whelan. He is a recipient of ​several fellowships, including Byron Fellowship in Sustainable Leadership (2015); Derek Bok Fellowship in Media, Visualization, and Literacy (2015); Erasmus Fellowship (2016); Boston Foundation “Live Arts Boston” Grant (2018/2021); and Massachusetts Cultural Council Choreographic Fellowship (2020). Vidrin holds a PhD from the Center for Dance Research, United Kingdom.

Public programs
Panel discussion: Thursday, June 9, 7pm 
Ilya Vidrin in conversation with three figures whose work and research is critical to their project: Bonnie Wong, neuropsychologist and director of the Frontotemporal Disorders Unit at Massachusetts General Hospital; Mario Alberto Zambrano, Associate Director of Dance at The Juilliard School; and Çaca Yvaire, the Terran Shield and Community Conservation Co-Director for the Northeast Farmers of Color Land Trust (NEFOC).

Somatic Partnering Workshop: Friday, July 15​, 2–4pm
This two-hour workshop offers a platform to explore the roots of physical interaction in a world increasingly disconnected from the body.

Live performances 
Friday, Sept 9, 7pm  
Saturday Sept 10, 4pm  
Saturday Sept 10, 7pm