The guest of this episode is a Bulgarian-Armenian director, choreographer, producer, and writer exploring empathy through movement and storytelling. His dancing career started with ballroom dancing when he was 5. After a childhood full of dance competitions during weekends, Kosta started working as a professional dancer at 18 with Dancing with the stars Vietnam.While he was studying dance in New-York, he made a 6-minute dance short film, Waiting for Color, about the violations of human rights of LGBT people in Chechnya. “It was really a very personal work. I think every artist is lucky if they have two or three of these works in their life, when you feel so moved to create something that it doesn't matter if it is with a budget or without, but you feel like you are really drawing the inspiration out of thin air and you feel so sure that this is the project that you were made to create.”“There is something about art, in general, when it is done in a truthful way, that just makes you stop in your tracks.” Organisations working with human rights can learn a lot from dance as dance is about growing together. Dance is a conversation where you invite the other person, you take risks together and then you finally “become fabulous” and go further together than you would have gone alone. “Sometimes you need to find that flexibility and freedom to feel that we are moving forward.”

Ask this episode

“What did the council decide on item 42?” — answered with the speaker and the moment.

Transcript

Related