The Journey of Yuliya Globa
- Dance
- Theatre
Every career in the arts follows a different path. The Journey of is the ArtEZ Business Centre's series in which teachers share the key moments in their professional lives. In a classroom setting, we often lack the time to talk about these personal histories. Find out what choices they made and how they got where they are today.
Yuliya Globa was born in Ukraine, emigrated to Germany and later moved to the Netherlands. She graduated from the Dance in Education programme in 2015 and is now a teacher at the interdisciplinary Education in Arts programme and coordinator of the DanceLAB introduction programme in Arnhem. In this episode of The Journey of, Yuliya will discuss the origins of her socially engaged artistic projects and her ambitions to make an art education truly accessible to everyone. She founded her company YU GLO to create inclusive dance theatre performances as an Artist Educator.
When you don't speak the language
I was born and raised in Ukraine, a beautiful country with a rich culture. Making music, singing and dancing was a part of every festivity, to celebrate life and come together as a community. My identity is deeply rooted in art, culture and togetherness. When I was 8, we moved to Germany. My grandmother made that possible, because she wanted a better future for my mother and me than she had experienced in her own life. Once we arrived in Germany, I didn't speak the language and I didn't know anybody. Dance and music became a way for me to have a voice, to express myself and connect to others. Art was a way to survive and integrate.
Roots in hip-hop culture
When I was young, I was always looking for a coherent identity. Where did I belong, between east and west? In hip-hop culture I found myself and wonderful people from across the world. Here, nobody was a foreigner, but we were dancers, rappers, MCs or sprayers, in short, artists. Around 2009, when I graduated high school, I was part of a dance crew called Bam Sistaz. We made hip-hop shows, performed dance battles and gave dance workshops in Germany. Other friends had part-time jobs at the bar; I was organising performances and teaching workshops to refugees or special education kids. In this period of my life, I laid the foundation for turning my passion into my business. But only doing shows and teaching workshops was not going to be enough for me, and that's how I met Tanja.
Stronger together, and going solo
I wanted to specialise as a dancer and learn more about different dance styles and art forms. Coincidentally I met Tanja Nierling, a graduate of the Dance in Education programme in Arnhem. She saw my eagerness to learn and my commitment to dance, and she recommended the programme to me. After my second attempt I was finally admitted to ArtEZ and I graduated in 2015. The lesson I took away from this is that you should make your ambitions known and tell everyone about them, because this will open doors for you. During my time at ArtEZ, I developed a special connection to a classmate, Bart Merks. We became soulmates and collaborated a lot. In the last year of our studies, we founded our interdisciplinary art collective by BY. We made productions together for, among others, Hoogte 80, Valtifest, Festival de Oversteek and artrelease, and we collaborated with other artists in the Netherlands, Sweden and Germany. After four intense and very educational years, we decided to end our business relationship and simply go on as friends. We both learned a lot, but we were ready to go solo. I wanted to do more socially engaged artistic work and had to follow my own path. But I learned many key lessons from this collaboration. First, you're going to meet very few people in your life that you'll have a strong enough connnection with to run an art company together. Secondly, building an art collective and managing it is an enormous amount of work and it doesn't necessarily pay the bills. If it doesn't energize you, you won't be able to keep it up. And finally: you're stronger together, and that was a very good feeling right after graduating.
Connection as the common thread in work and life
Around 2018, both my grandparents passed away shortly after each other. They were my link to my Heimat, to Ukraine. I fell into a crisis that made me question the value of everything. I began to contemplate what I really wanted from life. Until then, I didn't have the courage to dream big, but after losing two people who were so incredibly important to me – who felt, in part, like my parents – a hole opened up inside me, and I had to fill it with meaningful things. I wanted my work to be meaningful to others and to connect people. Other than that, I didn't really know what to do. It was exactly then that Margreet L. asked me if I wanted to work as an interdisciplinary coach for socially engaged art projects at the ArtEZ Education in Arts programmes. This coincidence later turned out to be a turning point, since this interdisciplinary and intermediary role brought me closer to realising my own ambitions.
Developing, researching, creating, ambassador of inclusion
Right after getting hired by ArtEZ, my friend Eva Luca P. asked if I wanted to come by her workplace. She taught dance to people with intellectual disabilities at theatre workshop MOMO. When I saw the morning ritual at MOMO, I felt very comfortable there right away. Eva had not told me in advance that she was planning to leave her job there. After my visit, she asked me directly if I wanted to take over her group. I had almost no experience working with people with intellectual disabilities and I thought long and hard about my decision. Intuitively, I ended up saying yes, and it was the best decision in my career. With the MOMO dance studio I now make performances and inclusive collaborations between MOMO's performers, dance students and professionals. We play at festivals too, like Holland Dance and Vuurol. At this company, I learned how important it is to me that dance is accessible to everybody, both for participants and audiences. And that sometimes you need to make an intuitive choice, because you can't predict everything in advance.
Photo: Alina Fejzo
Yu Glo: everything I do under one roof
While I was employed at ArtEZ and working with different target audiences, I was also founding my company Yu Glo. In the beginning, it was difficult to define all the different things I was doing and move them under one roof. Jocelyn B., then the coordinator of DanceLAB, helped me by having numerous conversations with me. He knew the dance world through and through. Talking to others helps you make the connections between things and focus more. That's how I finally found the connection between my background, my culture and my work in the notion of embodied culture.
Back to school during COVID
As commissions were trickling in and new collaborations were forming between the Netherlands and Germany, suddenly the COVID crisis hit. For me, it felt like my harvest got taken away from me and I was left standing on barren ground. After a year of COVID and intensive work as an inclusive dance maker at MOMO and educator at ArtEZ, I felt a growing desire for more depth. That's why I started the MA Artist Educator in Zwolle. I developed a didactic method that I want to use to make art education accessible for truly everybody. In addition, I am exploring my role as a choreographer and I have expanded my creative toolkit.
February 2022, war in Ukraine
Unimaginable, truly horrible. A part of my family lives there, divided across three cities. On top of all my emotions and an urgent desire to house every single refugee, my heart as an Artist Educator and an activist is set ablaze. In this crisis situation, work and private life merge completely, I have to relate to the bigger whole, I can't and won't look away anymore. This is the moment for me to use my role to make the world a better place, in my own small way. I'm working as a volunteer interpreter in Arnhem and am also trying to start activities for Ukrainian newcomers. Sharing stories, dancing together, cooking food or helping repair a bike. Of course, this isn't a business. But it's important for me as an Artist Edicator to use art to form connections between others. Do you want to join me or contribute any of your ideas? Feel free to e-mail me at yu.globa@artez.nl or info@yuglo.nl.
I'm not sure yet exactly how, but this will be where my own foundation will begin. A foundation with community and caring for each other at its heart, and art as the way to make that possible. Thank you for reading and I wish you all good luck with your careers.
Follow Yulia
Please read this news item from Studium Generale about KADE, where Yuliya Globa and May Heek organize meetings between refugees and the ArtEZ community based on solidarity.
Please find the key moments of other ArtEZ teachers on our page Teachers and their professional practice.
