Nurbek Batulla

Nurbek Batulla

dancer, performer, actor

Kazan, Republic of Tatarstan, Russia

Artist in Residence at Rote Fabrik from January to March 2023

Nurbek Batulla (*1988 Kazan) was trained as a classical ballet dancer at the the Kazan Choreographic School (2007) and received his degree in Drama and Cinema Acting from the Russian State Institute of Performing Arts (RGISI, Petersburg, 2016). From 2007 to 2014 he worked as a classical ballet dancer and choreographer at the Tatar Opera and Ballet Theater named after Musa Jalil in Kazan. From 2016 to 2018 he was instructor in classes of acting at the Kazan Choreographic School, was a choreographer on a various theater projects.
He was awarded the "Golden Mask" Russian national theatrical award in the nomination "Ballet - Contemporary Dance / Male Role" for his performance in "Alif (Call of the Beginning)" (2018).
The style of the dancer Nurbek Batulla mostly resembles physical theatre. For him, movement is a means to explore the body and mind, the priority is not the result, but the process.
Nurbek Batulla is also interested in the question of self-identity. He intends to explore it on a deep level, as if trying to decode the information contained in the body and in the DNA. His act of creativity serves as a means of communication with ancestors. Nurbek in his performances trains his apparatus: body, voice and mind, so that he (the artist) becomes a guide between the world of ideas and the viewer.

24-hours Improvisation
The mission of every person is to realize her or his potential. I work in the field of dance and theatre. For me there are no borders between these two arts. The purpose of art in my view is to discover and push the borders. The borders of physical capacities and borders to inner freedom.
In this project “24-hours Improvisation” I will experiment with my own borders but also push the borders of others.

I want to prepare and perform a 24-hours improvisation which will push and remove the borders between the individuals and the cultures in which we were born.
The process of preparation in the forefront of the performance / improvisation will be an important part of the whole project. Since it will be also about pushing the borders of physical capacities in order to achieve inner freedom, it will include various practices of inner relaxation (meditation) but also physical sports training for the dancers.

The tree is living in different directions. While the crown of the tree is reaching towards the sky, the roots are going deep underground. The borders that we have are also given by the cultures in which we were born. I was born to a Tatar family, to a minority culture in Russia with its own cultural (gender, religious) norms. Rudolf Nuriev was the most famous Tatar-Russian artist, a great world-famous dancer who managed to go beyond external but also internal borders. He was my idol figure for the long time but I had to go out of his shadow in order to find an inner freedom and identity (through my one-man performance “My Nuriev”).

Coaching by Meret Schlegel cie-zeitsprung.ch

Courtesy of IG Rote Fabrik and Swiss Arts Council Pro Helvetia Moscow

www.prohelvetia.ru