PORTFOLIO
Anna Kushnerova
CV
ABOUT
WHILE SO LYING IN MY NEST
AS A TENTACLE OF THE WORLD
I INVENT AND TOUCH TODAY
WITH INFINITE TENDERNESS
I work across moving image, performance, installation, sculpture, and sound. My practice begins in listening, in the body as a sensing instrument, where perception becomes ecological participation. Drawing from Butoh and eco somatic research, I explore becoming as a way of relating with animal, plant, spirit, and matter, through breath, skin, heart, feet, and eyes.Much of this work is made with others. I create through collectives, ensembles, and community gatherings, where the group becomes a shared sensorium and the landscape becomes collaborator. I am the founder and director of Human Clay CIC, a Devon based practice led collective working at the intersections of performance, ecology, and cultural heritage. Through Human Clay I develop films, workshops, and research processes that weave land, memory, movement, and living transmission.
Butoh, becoming, ecological perception
Movement is somatic poetry, a way of renewing mystery, and keeping imagination alive through contact with more than human
worlds, with the flesh and the dreaming of the world. Butoh is my root system. The Butoh body is an ecosystem responding.
Slowness opens a field where other agencies can be felt. A method of attention where perception becomes participation, and the body becomes an ecological sensorium.
To Die into a Bird
Film | 21 min | Dartmoor National Park | UK | 2025
A fairy tale. A music epic. A visual hybrid of dance, sculpture, song, and ritual.
A fairy tale and ritual music epic revealed through Dartmoor’s ancient forest. The film follows a Bird that eats human forms, and a procession of earthly folk, guardians, and shape shifters moving along coffin roads, into decomposition as sanctuary. Dance, sculpture, song, and spoken word become a single ecology of perception, where bodies dissolve into lichen, granite, moss, and myth, and kinship returns between spirit and soil.
Credits: Written, directed, edited, costume Anna Kushnerova. Production Human Clay CIC. Cinematography Raúl Bartolomé, Ben Jeans Houghton. Music Daan Geysen. Narration Fionn Davies Cox. Vocals Ric Hollingbery. Colour grade Raúl Bartolomé. On set sound Anastasia Freygang. Costume assist Lena Marien. Woven coffin Eamonn Harnett. On set assist Becca Parkinson, Orjana Rudeloff. Cast includes Hilary Kneale, Miguel Valentini, Sofia Kovarich, Juta Eaton, Dan Faberoff, Lies Van Hee, Elise Gettliffe, Tim Russell, Ken Mai, Romain Brau, Jamus Wood, David Lautier, Jasper Salomonsz, Bodhi.
Ontological Mutany
Performance | 40min | Startelpa Performance Festival | Riga | Latvia | 2024
A Butoh rooted dance tale at the threshold of extinction. Set in a near future ecosystem where artificial intelligence merges with vanishing species, the human body moves as a prosthetic echo of the more than human world it has replaced. The work asks what is lost when velocity replaces vibration, when design overtakes dreaming, and when bodies begin to mimic the forms they helped erase.
Credits: Direction and costume Anna Kushnerova. Live sound and vocals Anastasia Freygang. Cinematography and photography Raúl Bartolomé. Performers Sofia Kovarich, Tejus Menon, Anna Kushnerova, Alexandra Jane Wynne, Miguel Valentini.
Grimspound
Performance | 40min | Startelpa Performance Festival | Riga | Latvia | 2024
A site responsive Butoh performance made in the ruins of a Late Bronze Age settlement on Dartmoor. Carried by wind, peat, and stone, the work opens a living encounter with ancestral time and elemental presence. Through somatic listening, sensorial poetry, and improvisation, the performers let their bodies dissolve and reform in response to moss, sky, myth, and the deep memory of the land. Movement becomes offering, a prayer through the skin, an act of remembering with place.
Credits: Performance Anna Kushnerova, Tim Russell. Music Tom Wheatley. Costumes Jack Davey.
Perception as ecology, studies in sensing and relation
Laboratory - alter ocular culture, worms, owls, foxes - skin as membrane, cocoon, chrysalis
response-ability and entanglement atlas
bird feet, blind eyes, rock spring seed soil, wolf mother world building, multimodal intelligence, flesh of relation, sensorial sculpture.
Silent Forest
Sculptural performance work, created for The Breath We Share: Embodied and Creative Practices for a Living and Dying World (art.earth Books), in response to their invitation.
Silent Forest was made as a highly visual piece shaped through Butoh scores and poetic instructions. The process began with writing, short phrases held like incantations, a mechanical chrysalis, loss of bones, stitched skin craving time, a desire to touch what is behind the surface, the cold heat of fire, the barely smelled hope of the woods. These sentences became choreographic tasks, guiding the performers through states of infolding, claustrophobia, determination, and a slow return toward sensation.
Costume making and direction formed the second score. Padded forms extended the body into cocoon like silhouettes, enlarging the surface for contact and limiting the passage of movement, so that gesture arrived through pressure, friction, breath, and the listening of skin. The work holds the intermediate layer where tenderness and violence share a border, where the body walks through separation, echo, stretch, and keeps turning toward what it cannot yet enter.
Credits: Direction, choreography, costume Anna Kushnerova. Performance Justas Mazeika, Orijana Rudeloff, Isaac Paul Harris. Photography Raúl Bartolomé.
Girls in Mud
Video | 7 min | Air Residence | Almeria | Spain | 2020
Girls in Mud is a sensorial video performance emerging from prolonged attunement to landscape. Mud becomes the medium of encounter, drawing the body into porous reciprocity with earth, heat, weight, and texture, until gesture begins to arise from listening rather than choreography. The work moves toward a pre linguistic mode of being where ritual arrives by itself, and the body becomes vessel for the dreaming of the land.
Rooted in somatic and phenomenological inquiry, the piece explores how inner and outer topographies interweave, and how perception becomes a site of subtle transformation. Body and land co compose one field of presence, where boundaries soften and meaning takes form through contact.
Credits: Performance Anna Kushnerova with Erika Rodin and Lliure Briz. Video Anna Kushnerova. Sound D. Sylvian.
Public practice, workshops, living transmission
We gather to listen with land, story, breath, voice, and gesture. I create workshops and participatory formats that invite shared sensing, local voices, folk memory, and community involvement. Eco somatic experience as a communal practice, carried through movement, story, listening. Communal honouring of entanglement and non human lineages. Many geatherings take form of ritual creation and unfold in the elemental matrix of land, sea, and the dreaming of forest, river, rock ecosystems.
Human Clay CIC is the organisational body through which participatory work, commissions, and longer collaborations are held.
Ocean Tongue
Oceanic Geathering | Ayrmer Cove | Devon | UK | 2025
A site-specific gathering at Ayrmer Cove & Open Play & Improvisation.
Ocean Tongue brought participants together for an evening of open improvisation and sensorial play. Using sculptural props and structures made during the coastal workshop, the studio became an aquatic environment inviting bodies to shift, drift, and transform into oceanic organisms. Soundscapes by Keiko Yamamoto held the atmosphere, weaving sound and movement into a fluid, participatory encounter, with children and observers welcomed into the shared exploration. Held by Anna Kushnerova and Zoë Binetti, the jam continued Human Clay CIC’s practice of ecology, performance, and collective imagination.
Credits: Held by Anna Kushnerova and Zoë Binetti (zozoTransistor). Soundscape Keiko Yamamoto.
It Took Four Summer Storms for Her Love to Explode into a Thousand Fruiting Bodies
Geathering Trace Film | 8.5 min | Spazio500 | Trento | Italy | 2023
This short dance film unfolds as an eco-somatic invocation, a movement offering to the fungal kingdom and the porous, decomposing body of the earth. Gathering in the mountain forest.
This film emerged in the wake of a Butoh gathering held in the mountain forests of Vigolo Vattaro. Over several days, twenty participants moved slowly into the forest floor, meeting soil, leaf litter, shadow, and rotting wood as teachers. The camera arrives after the session, as a continuation of what has already been touched, breathed, and listened to together.
The practice was structured through simple somatic invitations that tuned perception to forest temporality: weight sinking, attention widening, breath finding the humidity of moss, hands learning the grain of decay. We listened for the rhythm of fungal life, for mycelial relation as an underground choreography shaping sensation, timing, and choice. What you see in the film carries the residue of that shared encounter, a public practice held in common, then passed onward through image and sound.
Credits: Camera Serafina Parmelee. Direction and edit Anna Kushnerova. Music Huhtamaki Wab. Dancers Adam Koan, Eleonora Salvato, Sofia Kovarich, Giacomo AG, Monica, Celeste Combes, Luca Venditoru, Charlotte De Waegenaere.
Weaving the Threads of Bhutanese Heritage
Film | Feature-length | Khoma Village, Eastern Bhutan | Commision by The Rubin Museum of Himalayam Art | Supported by The Royal Textile Academy of Bhutan
Feature length documentary, in development.
Weaving the Threads of Bhutanese Heritage is a feature length documentary exploring the cultural and ecological life of Bhutanese textile weaving. Filmed in Khoma village in eastern Bhutan, home of Kishuthara, the film follows the living transmission of an intricate silk tradition sustained through generations of women, and reveals how weaving binds community, landscape, and daily life into a single fabric of relation.
Grounded in the ethnographic research of Yeshey Choden, a Bhutanese heritage scholar, the documentary attends to the conditions that sustain the practice, plants that yield natural dyes, the rhythms of water and light, the gestures of making, and the shared spaces where skill, story, and care continue to circulate. Through a slow participatory approach, the film moves with village time, inviting the viewer into an ecology of attention where each woven thread carries continuity, reciprocity, and belonging.
Credits: A Human Clay Productions CIC project. Research and cultural collaboration Yeshey Choden. Directed by Raúl Bartolomé and Anna Kushnerova. Supported by the Royal Textile Academy of Bhutan. Development supported by a grant from the Rubin Museum of Himalayan Art. Photography by Yeshey Choden.
Hole in the Ground
Dartmoor National Park | UK | 2025
A site-specific gathering around a vast earth cavity, exploring burial, dissolution, and re-formation as thresholds of body and land.
Site responsive ritual film, Dartmoor Forest. Hole in the Ground arises from a ritual gathering in Dartmoor forest, where participants encircled a more than human sized cavity in the earth and entered practices of descent, burial, and re formation through movement. Rendered in a comic animation aesthetic, the film holds the body as a contested site, shaped by visible and invisible regimes, and loosened through collective gesture. The hole becomes a political and metaphysical threshold where landscape, matter, and performers co compose an intra active field, and decomposition turns into composting, a slow dreaming toward new and unforeseen worlds.
Credits: Written, directed, sound, narration, edit Anna Kushnerova. Production Human Clay CIC. Camera Raúl Bartolomé. Performers Kait Dron, Hannah Sneyd, Tallula Bentley, Kate Joyner, Tim Russell, David Lautier, Maite Alonso, Sky Williams, Ric Hollingbery, Christy Cruft, Miguel Valentini, Raúl Bartolomé, Anna Kushnerova. Narration with Juta Eaton.
Workshops & Public Facilitation
Workshops are held as sites of ceremony and deep listening, rooted in Butoh and the transformative potential of ritual practice. We gather at thresholds, where the visible and invisible meet, and the body becomes a vessel for myth, memory, and elemental presence.
Grounded in eco somatic inquiry and animist cosmologies, these sessions unfold as rituals of dissolution and becoming. We enter through breath, sensation, and image, moving with slowness, silence, and the strange intelligence of the body, where old forms soften and new sensitivities emerge. Sometimes we work with materials, paper, earth, words, as extensions of dreaming.
The Butoh body is an ecosystem responding. To slow down is to let the world recompose you. The body becomes a terrain of multiplicity, carrying ghosts, animals, dust, weather, memory, and training begins with forgetting, a gentle unlearning of habitual movement, identity, and narrative. To dance is to become the earth’s gesture of remembering itself.
Performance, audiovisual rituals and curatorial constellations
From the ocean of subconsious arriving onto the land of santient matter. These works move between live performance film, sound, gesture, and installation, inviting non human lineages and body vessel dreaming to enter the social space of viewing and gathering.
Go Wherever You Wish, for Verily You Are Well Protected
Group Exhibition and Performance Programme | Dartington Hall Estate | UK | 2023
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A curated gathering of thirteen artists working with becoming, shape shifting, and return, practices tuned to the unseen, the unspoken, and the deeply felt. Across the estate, the space was inhabited by artifacts, amulets, living installations, and performance actions, vessels for microtonal communication between bodies, beings, and unseen forces. Materials spoke with weather and walls, carrying muscular memory, intuitive gesture, and a sense of continuity between people, animals, and other sentient matter.Unfolding over three days, the programme moved through seven live works, durational and time specific, activating the rooms in rhythm with visitors and land, where presence met pulse, and ritual met resonance.
Credits: Curated by Anna Kushnerova. Participating artists Eamonn Harnett, Ben Jeans Houghton, Alice Clough, Miguel Valentini, Elise Gettliffe, Maggi Squire, Hilary Kneale, Tim Russell, Tallula Bentley, Bodhi, Lies Van Hee, Rima Staines, Anna Kushnerova.
Mycelium / Mycelia Memories
Performance | 30 min | Spazio500, Palazzo Malfatti | Italy | 2022
Created within a residency process of somatic research and costume making, Mycelia Memories is a live performance and audiovisual ritual offered to fungal intelligence and the interwoven vitality of land and water ecologies. The work begins in preparation, shaping fruiting bodies from mycelium leather and wax dipped fabric into porous second skins that re tune the dancers toward what the body can host.
Five performers enter an improvisation of kinship, moving as human, fungal, and beyond, inhabiting a living entity in flux. Gesture gathers like a spore cloud, transitory and collective, carrying images of decomposition and nourishment, rot and root, algae drift and nectar threading, as the stage becomes a small ecosystem of memory and becoming.
Credits: Directed and facilitated, costume design Anna Kushnerova. Performers Anna Kushnerova, Sofia Kovarich, Julie Becton Gillum, Alexandra Jane Wynne, Tejus Menon.
Spanda
Performance | 60 min | Fivizano | Rome | Italy | 2022
Spanda is a live performance ritual developed through a ten day residency process led by Anna Kushnerova and Sofia Kovarich. Rooted in somatic and acoustic research, the work unfolds as a real time encounter shaped by improvisation, limited rehearsal, and the preservation of sensation as unknown. Each iteration becomes a shared field of attention, where the dancers tune into vibration, flutter, throb, the Sanskrit sense of spanda as the self movement of the world.
Bodies enter into intra bodily dialogue with sensory objects and autonomous sculptural elements. Strap on metal extensions, devised through a minimal sculpting method, become armature and instrument, shielding, extending, and re shaping movement. Microphones placed around the space gather breath, friction, tapping, sliding, and the dense aural residue of contact, as the performers fragment into limbs and re assemble through sound.
In Spanda, material becomes frequency. Soma becomes affect. Flesh meets metal, and the space begins to pulse with an unknowable ecology, an invitation to participate in modes of becoming that arrive through vibration rather than certainty.
Credits: Performed by Anna Kushnerova, Sofia Kovarich, Valentina Compagnucci, Claudia Toto, Pierre Antoine Vettorello, Eleonora Salvato. Live sound recording Anastasia Freygang. Set design and autonomous objects Anna Kushnerova and Jack Davey. Sound design Alvaro Labao. Video Rodrigo Mella.
Writing, scores, and research texts
Writing in my practice functions as score, ritual instruction, and research record. These texts move between documentary attention and mythic composition. They support film development, sonic ecology projects, and embodied methodologies.
A mythic ecological film in development that grows from documentary research, ecological listening, and Arctic field encounters, where story becomes a method for perceiving multispecies change.
Songs for a Thawing North
A collaborative sonic ecology project text that articulates methods for interspecies listening through field recording, instrument research, and ethical orientation in northern landscapes.
Voices for Biological Decomposition and the Spilling of the Spirit into the Afterworld
A published cycle of narration and lament songs written for To Die into a Bird, where voice becomes ritual technology for ecological transformation and mourning.
Scores For The Silent Forest
A score based text tracing detached sensation, stretched time, and shifting thresholds between realities.
Quasi-Real: The Forest Organ
A film and sculptural research text exploring the body as resonant chamber, forest instrument, and site of more than human transformation.