Tuva Hildebrand is a non-binary / female white dance artist, performer and somatic movement practitioner with a big love for improvisation. They grew up with their mother in a low-income household in Landskrona, Sweden, doing circus and theater as a family chore and seeing her philosopher father on some weekends. Tuva’s work is influenced by studying dance, living and working artistically in UK (2009-2011) and New York (2011-2018). Her artistic research often deals with themes such as intimacy, care, non-violence, eco-queerfeminism, the power of language and states beyond it. Their movement practice is influenced by interests in philosophy, political activism and somatic techniques such as Alexander technique, BodyMind Centering, Skinner Releasing technique and her close mentor-apprentice relationship with somatic dance pioneer Eva Karczag. During 2011-2018 Tuva lived and worked in New York for the organisation Movement Research and choreographers Heather Kravas and Stacy Grossfield among others, as well as female pioneers within improvisation and somatic dance practice. In 2018-2020 they carried out her MFA research in somatics and artistic practice from a queer feminist perspective at Högskolan för Scen och Musik in Gothenburg, and is still finishing up her MFA thesis today. She has performed and shown work at venues such as Dansstationen, Inkonst and Atalante in Sweden and The Kitchen, Chocolate Factory, JACK, Center for Performance Research, Danspace Project St. Marks Church, the Dixon Place and Jersey City Theater Center in New York.

She / they enjoy slowing down to listen carefully, to listen deeply through touch and tune into all of their senses.

Today Tuva is also the artistic director and initiator of Plattform for Improvisation & Somatics in Sweden, together with dance artists and somatic practitioners Ina Dokmo and Karolin Kent. P.I.S. is a plattform with the purpose of supporting in-depth somatic movement practices and improvisational techniques of international quality, through workshops, classes, festivals, lectures, panel talks and reading groups. It’s intention is also to carry out these practices with more political awareness than our early lineage of practitioners.

Tuva also has an invisible disability with an immobile ankle after four surgeries and a rehabilitated replaced anterior cruciate ligament in the knee, which has informed their interest and work in norm critical thinking within professional dance practice.

Tuva has extensive background in traditional dance techniques such as ballet and contemporary / modern dance, but which they visually seem to have untrained and almost erased from their body today by embodying other modes of moving and thinking. However their experience within the field of dance since a young teenager influences their way of relating and making choices within making, performing and positioning themselves within the field.

They are trained at educations such as Svenska Balettskolan i Malmö, Northern School of Contemporary Dance in Leeds, the Neighborhood Playhouse School of the Theater (Meisner acting technique) in New York, Movement Research in New York, DOCH / UniArts in Stockholm and Högskolan för Scen och Musik in Gothenburg, as well as workshops with independent dance artists, improvisers and somatic practitioners.

They live just outside Malmö, Sweden, in the countryside on a tiny farm where she has the intention of growing her own vegetables, having hens and spending time close to the ground.