Viktoria T.
Interests: ART, DANCING, NATURE, CERAMICS, HEALING, DESIGNING
Blog Posts
2025-04-25: Elements
ELEMENTS | any of the four substances (earth, fire, water, air) regarded as the fundamental constituents of the world in ancient philosophy.
Circular Necklace with four rays from clay by Solar ilk
Crack. Oh know. I didn’t want to dare look underneath the pile of clothes that had fallen onto the tile floor in my bathroom. For a week, the outfit I’d carefully selected had been hanging on my bathroom door. Anticipating the feeling of watching our first co-choreographed piece entitled “ELEMENTS” take the stage at the McKinney Theater for the spring 2025 Saddleback Dance Collective, I’d been visualizing myself in a burnt orange, silk vest, grey, purple, ribbed tank and the same off-white, wide legged cotton pants the dancers were wearing as part of their costumes. What made the outfit was a circular necklace with four rays custom designed and hand crafted from clay by Viktoria Tauz of Solar ilk, my counterpart as choreographer. The horse hair burnt at a diagonal made a subtle backdrop for the gold bead placed in the center, four dots on each of the rays. Black cords stabilizing this piece both around my neck and back as it created a shield in front of my chest bone. A barrier against the elements of life. A compass that kept pulling me back to my center and guiding me home. Only problem now was I had a crack in my shield. I lifted the clothes off the tile floor with disappointment to find the squiggly break on the south ray of my compass.
INSPIRATION
Knowing inspiration comes best over good food, Viktoria and I had gone to Seabirds, a restaurant in Costa Mesa, CA after a friend’s art gallery exhibit in April 2024. Here we brainstormed the initial idea of a pedestrian style dance with off-white, simple costumes. Coming back here in September 2025 after our dance got approved, casted with three dancers (Jamie Brinkman, Wyatt Davis and Viktoria Tauz) and started our second week of rehearsals, Viktoria dropped the idea of having a single dancer (herself) be anchored in the center with two other dancers (Jamie and Wyatt) attached to this core moving within each of their hemispheres. A masculine, feminine, and intuition type of relationship. The comical part was she said it in such a simple way like “hmm…Yes, let’s do this. It will be no problem”. Fast forward to the following weekend where my father who is an engineer and I spent roughly eight hours trying to figure out how to make this work. Bringing an idea into form is not always an easy task. Asking me the right kinds of questions, my father figured out we wanted something that allowed the dancers to move and be drawn outwards while having a slightly stronger pull inward. The tricky part was doing this without any cords or rope hanging on the ground the dancers could trip over. Thank goodness for my father’s brilliant mind where the idea of using dog leashes attached to some kind of lazy susan flowed through. We introduced our concept to Justin Morris, our dance faculty advisor, who being a highly artistic, interdisciplinary innovator himself, loved the idea. Only challenge now was executing it.
My philosophy has been to “ask for forgiveness”. I’ve learned when coming up with new concepts like this one it takes more time trying to explain what you want to do versus simply showing them. Therefore, when Viktoria and I got introduced to the theater set designer at the college, we moved quickly on picking his brain about the lazy susan part. He knew right away it needed to be stable enough to hold a person and recommended a circular ¾” piece of plywood attached to a heavy duty furniture swivel base, which would hide the dog leash handles attached with zip ties. Another brilliant mind. All the right people were coming together at the right time to make this happen. After all was said and done, the dance department chair found out what we did and granted us the approval we needed after finding out the prop was safe enough to use for the stage.
Two dog leashes attached to a swivel base.
STORYBOARD
We wanted “Elements” to be a montage of a human life. Awakening with breath and heartbeat, the dance moved through the four elements of earth, fire, water and air showing the balance and imbalance of each. Concluding by rising above these four elements into a higher vibrational state of unity, peace and love, it reminded us that intuition is the center of wisdom. The pure compass within us all.
MEASURE OF SUCCESS
“Measure your success based on how much fun you’re having.”
I read this quote online during our process of developing this piece. Normally I would stress over the pressure of creating such a number, but when I flipped my thinking to measure our success based on how much fun we were having, that’s all I started to care about. Viktoria and I’s choreography sessions were full of laughter and ease, our dance rehearsals became even more harmonious and collaborative, and we accomplished tasks such as mixing our own music, designing our own costumes, putting together our own slides for the cyclorama and hand painting our swivel base with an eye.
“You Are Awesome” cards we would select before practices & performances.
“I noticed how I have less importance on the result, and more attention to the process itself. The result used to be important and I wanted to be better than everyone else, but now the result is not so important. If the process of creation is filled with pleasure, then this is already a wonderful result.”
— Viktoria Tauz on the choreography process
PERFORMANCE PHOTOS
CREDITS
OUR PURPOSE
To show others in a dance form that there is a way to live in a higher vibrational state of love and unity while in the body and beyond. During our on stage rehearsals, the theater manager played around with the lights towards the end of our dance. Two nights in a row a heart shape showed up on the red curtains. Of course I snapped a photo and smiled knowing we were fulfilling our purpose, to leave the audience with this feeling of love.
Video Timestamp: “Elements” 27:15
2024-05-09: Sacred Threads
SACRED THREAD | an organic state of destruction bringing people together through the invisible strings connecting us all
There are certain people you meet that seem to be instant friends. Some could argue that it’s because of shared interests that bond people immediately together and I have known this to be true, but I also understand that these bonds can seem much deeper than simply sharing a common like or dislike.
As the first law of thermodynamics states, “energy cannot be created or destroyed. It can only change form or be transferred from one object to another.” When we change form by destroying the outer body through death, this invisible string or sacred thread keeps us together until we can meet again with a different outer garment needing to learn each other’s new names and faces.
This is how I felt with my dear friend Viktoria whom I met in fall of 2023. Both of us had come from different places in the world, Viktoria from Ukraine and myself from Texas, and we landed at the same school in the same modern dance class. We instantly became friends and it was clear the timing of our meeting was divinely guided to help support one another during our particular periods of growth.
Prioritizing our artistic avenues of interest was apparent for both of us as we had each been through other careers during our earlier years that we knew we had to learn from in order to get to where we needed to be. Viktoria was an accountant and graphic designer while I had worked as a nurse and done property management. Watching each other reconnect with our artistic talents was motivating and inspiring for us to see. We continued to collaborate with one another through dance, voice, and fashion, landing an opportunity for me to showcase Viktoria’s uniquely designed hummingbird dance costume down the runway during the Saddleback College Spring 2024 Fashion Show on Thursday, May 9th, 2024 that just so happened to be called, “Sacred Thread”.
INITIAL PHASES
Anything Viktoria touches turns to gold. When I saw her initial sketches, I knew the outcome of this piece was going to be good. The hummingbird symbolizing the following:
A highly developed, open heart
The ability to fly backwards
Being brave, cheerful , and fearless
The path of the soul, when through serving other people, a person gains the joy of being and trust in what is happening
An immortal soul and creative energy
Viktoria skillfully collaborated with Tetiana Markova to construct the costume. Over the next couple of months, I met with her for fittings, each time being more and more impressed with what was surfacing.
FINAL PRODUCT
The outcome was GOOD. Real GOOD. Far exceeding anybody’s expectations.
CHALLENGES
Anything good always comes with its challenges.
Viktoria had a vision for how she wanted the costume to be presented down the runway with myself improvising dance movements and poses to tribal inspired music. Because this wasn’t Viktoria’s own runway show, she couldn’t do whatever she wanted. We had a bit of push back as the fashion department wanted our number to fit within the theme and protocol set out for the rest of the models. We understood and chose to collaborate as best as possible finding the happy medium between both sides.
The hair and makeup became another issue. Seeing the fashion department’s vision board, their model looks consisted of slicked back, wet looking hair with dark, smokey eyes. Total opposite of the curly hair mohawk updo and light eyes with black symbols / dots precisely drawn on my face look that Viktoria was hoping for. Again, we chose to keep working towards a middle ground without fully giving up on Viktoria’s vision.
PERFORMANCE READY
The day of the performance became a different story. As I sat in the chair getting my hair and make-up done by the cosmetology department, there was no resistance from the fashion staff. Viktoria expressed what she wanted done and it all became a go. After, I went to do a test run of my walk / dance down the runway and the lead gal pulled me aside and said, “You know what. Go for it. I think you should dance the entire time even in between your poses.”
Getting my hair and make up done by the Cosmetology Department.
It was a good lesson to be learned. To hold your vision, but do so with love. Meaning harmony is more important than what you desire and most of the time it’ll end up working out better than you ever would have expected.
PERFORMANCE
PHOTOS
WHAT NOW?
The hummingbird costume adorns a mannequin in Viktoria’s art room. It’s new additions…a peacock feathered crown with a card that says, “Keep bloomin…Keep becoming” that I made for her to match it.
I have a feeling this costume is going to come to life in a future dance performance using this beautiful theme of sacred threads and friendship that not only shares my story and the many lessons learned from it, but many others as well. We’ll hold this vision with love and see where it leads us.
Til then my friends…Peace out!
HOLD ON - NOT SO QUICK
FAST FORWARD Seven Months
Remember I predicted another performance with this costume. Well, it happened. An informal dance concert at Saddleback College on 12/16/2024 where I performed a solo piece entitled “Wake Me Up”. Music by Simply Three. This piece symbolizing coming back to ME. Finding myself again. Of course Viktoria was in the audience and she got a big shout out at the end. Check it out below.
