juliaderosenwerth@gmail.com | @juliaderosenwerth
Julia Ruzyczka de Rosenwerth is an artist, teacher, researcher, and web designer. She holds a Bachelor of Music in Dance from the University of Cape Town with majors in Choreography and Philosophy and is currently completing a Master of Arts in Interdisciplinary Performance Praxis from the Rhodes University Drama Department.
Julia thinks of herself as a curious practical researcher who is primarily interested in the body: it’s potential for knowledge, movement, expression, communication, and connection. While her artistic work has become fundamentally interdisciplinary – whether the output becomes a performance, or a film, a digital sound composition, or a piece of text, or a blend of mediums within one project – her approach emanates from a particularly embodied perspective that is informed by her extensive dance and movement training that includes Ballet (1999 – 2007), Gymnastics (1999 – 2010), South African Contemporary Dance (2009 – 2015), Flamenco Dance (2009 – present) and Yoga (2016). These influences have collided and intertwined themselves in her body and mind, steering her towards a career that centres movement research in a variety of forms.
After completing her undergraduate degree from UCT, Julia spent four years teaching movement to actors and musicians at AFDA (Cape Town) and UCT (College of Music), while simultaneously creating and performing in numerous, independently produced solo and group performances with colleagues – including “Split Signs” (2016), “Split” (2016, 2017), “Rein” (2017, 2018), and “Whisper” (2017), “when we were older” (2018), and various untitled improvised performances through “MusicDance021” (2017, 2018, 2019) and through AADK: Spain (2019). In this time, Julia also curated two performance platforms in Cape Town with colleagues, “Any Body Dance Lab” (2018) and “Curated Consciousness: I call you dance” (2018), attended one artistic residency at The Forgotten Angle Theatre Collaborative (Mpumalanga, South Africa, 2016) and attended another at AADK’s Centro Negra (Murcia, Spain, 2019).
As Julia began her MA research and teaching at RU in 2020, the Covid-19 pandemic began to affect South Africa. Since this time, her artistic practice has shifted significantly away from live performance and towards the digital. The environment of the pandemic has pushed her to explore her research interests from different practical and theoretical perspectives. As part of her MA research, she has created a short process-film, “pale mint green” (2020), presented an online, interdisciplinary music-dance performance (2020), and produced a collaborative, multi-disciplinary web-project, “In the outside inside space” (2020). As her final MA project, Julia works toward a live performance, “Memento” (2021), that will be performed for a limited audience and will also be filmed to be shared digitally with a wider audience.