Support Ukrainian Dancers: Lviv CI Festival 2025

Greetings dancers and compassionate humans

I am going to Ukraine in Aug 2025 to support Ukrainian dancers who are doing everything they can to keep dancing, to keep building community around contact improvisation, dance, and somatic practices.

After Trump and Vance verbally ambushed and tried to humiliate Ukrainian President Zelensky, on camera, for all the world to see, I was so angry and motivated.

My goal is to raise $11,000 from USAmericans and our international networks in a small gesture of solidarity that counters the Trump-Putin agenda. All funds would go to support a 5-day contact improvisation festival Aug 9-12, 2025 in Lviv Ukraine and to donate money to the CI communities in Kharkiv and Lviv. Funds would be used to subsidize teacher fees, some travel and housing, and space rental for the festival. Additionally, funds would be donated to pay rent on the dance and jam spaces in Lviv and Kharkiv.

Last year, after hearing that Ukrainian dancers were feeling isolated, I traveled to Lviv Ukraine to teach, witness, and collaborate. I was humbled by the experience... walking past boarded up churches to come into a room with 30+ dancers from all over Ukraine who gathered around my proposals of "dancing as political healing." The grief and disillusionment was everywhere. I heard about the struggles to stay in the country, to stay in a body, dancing, during a brutal war complicated by international political games. We held long silences for those who had been killed. We discussed difficult topics from very divergent perspectives: tyranny, war, Palestine, healing, fleeing vs staying, hatred of the enemy, the importance of language, and the fragile possibility of a future worth living. And we spent hours dancing, playing, tuning ourselves to each other, activating empathy and solidarity.

After Trump's chaotic disruptions I knew I had to go back, inviting more folks to meet me there, and inviting even more of you to materially support the project.

Maybe you can only give $25. That's amazing. Thank you.

But maybe you can convince 20 or 25 people in your network to also donate. Or maybe you've got abundant resources and can donate $100, $250, $1000 or more. We will not reach our goals unless several people give over $500. Maybe that's you. Every donation truly helps. Wouldn't it be amazing to see hundreds of donations representing hundreds of dancers and CI jam communities extending solidarity to Ukraine?

Maybe the best way for you to give is to come to the festival, to dance, to witness, to feel together, to learn.

We can do this. Please give. Please share with your networks. Please reach out personally to expand the reach of this fundraiser.

Every donation is a prayer for dancing to continue despite everything, and for dancing together to be an integral part of any current or future communities.

Maybe we are always dancing during wartime... but when your country is attacked by a nuclear superpower with no regard for international law, when your cousin is at the front, when you know people who have been killed, wounded, displaced, or have fled, when the economic struggles are intensified and one of your biggest political allies has switched sides... it is even more important that dancing continues, and that dance studios continue to be a place of renewal and refuge.

For more info about the Lviv festival click here:

https://lvivcontactimprovisation.my.canva.site/lviv-ci-festival

If you want to read a memoir/report from my visit to Ukraine in 2024, with photos and some historical context, click here .

If you want to see promo from the Lviv CI fest in 2024 that was organized around my teaching, click here .

All photos here are from the Lviv festival I helped instigate and hold space for in summer 2024.

In solidarity

Keith

IMPORTANT NOTES / LEGAL INFORMATION

With regards to US laws and GoFundMe protocols:

All funds raised here will go to support a dance festival in Lviv Ukraine and the Contact Improvisation dance communities in Lviv and Kharkiv. None of these funds will go to weapons, tools of war, political advocacy, or propaganda.

Funds will be distributed by Circo Zero, a 501c3 arts nonprofit based in San Francisco, USA, Artistic Director Keith Hennessy.

Lviv CI festival 2025 is organized by Lilia Rainivska, Lviv Ukraine.

Kharkiv CI community contact, Inna Falkova