Originally from Kyiv (Ukraine), based worldwide. Alina has been dancing since she remembers herself, from the very early age. Having a rigorous training in a professional dance performance company Show-ballet A6 (Kyiv) since 8, Alina has been experimenting on and learning all possible dances. She met social dance at 17 and since then jazz, swing, lindy-hop, tap, blues, be-bop, UK Jazz, latin dance, traditional African dance, were the issues that excited her most.
Her dance experience met with academic formation in Arts & Humanities helps Alina to comprehend Jazz Dance, her major passion, as a historical and anthropological phenomenon of the Art of mixed identities. This helps her as a dancer to find new profound approaches to choreography, social dance, improvisation, musicality and a dancing style. She has been sharing her experience teaching both solo and partner dances with Fedor Nedotko, lecturing, performing, choreographing and collaborating with jazz bands as well as hosting dance weekends, workshops and festivals in Ukraine, Russia as well as around the world. Alina’s theoretical researches in dance are underpinned by a PhD project she is currently working on at the University of Barcelona focusing on the interrelation of literary, visual and performance arts.
She set up Jazz Workshop with Alina Sokulska in 2013, cherishing the concept of dance expression to Jazz Music of any style, elaborating on her own dance language and artistic voice researching rare jazz dance forms of the 20th century through African-American Body Movement. Alina’s main artistic search would be an answer to the question: «What would modern and contemporary jazz Music look like embodied in Movement? How could the jazz dance be innovated departing from the Tradition?»
Her dance mentors, both met and never met ones are Al Minns, Leon James, Teddy Brown, Jimmy Slyde, Alvin Ailey, Brothers-in-Jazz and Irven Lewis, Chester A. Whitmore, Gordon Neil, Frankie Martinez, Annelys Pérez Castillo, Josette Wiggan, Roxane Butterfly, others and of course… Music!
In her art she tries to follow the quotation by Hope Boykin, Ailey dancer:
Everything should be done with purpose, passion and style. Everything.