Sasha is an extraordinarily gifted, intelligent, original and dedicated dance artist, with a superbly tuned technical foundation and an ability to employ this skill in uniquely original and inventive ways. Within my highly collaborative process, I was always surprised and delighted by her ability to produce movement vocabularies and ideas that were sourced from some deeply inquisitive place, always searching for new possibilities and trusting her somatic intuition.
I valued greatly the opportunity to collaborate with Sasha Roubicek on my recent work, Unsignal. I invite dancers to be very involved in the development of material and the texture of the works I create, which often focus on the particular qualities and individuality of each performer. Sasha engaged in this endeavour with a depth of inquiry and rigorously detailed approach that brought an exciting specificity and clarity to my work. I particularly appreciate Sasha’s deft ability to engage in ideas and conceptual thought through physical inquiry and her imaginative and dynamic responses. Sasha is a refreshing, quick-thinking and sophisticated dance artist.
Sasha’s impressive technical ability and creative understanding continues to evolve as she matures her practice through her ongoing artistic inquiry, teaching and collaborations with other artists. Sasha has made an important contribution to British dance through her comprehensive dance career and I am very excited to see the new directions she will explore in the coming years.
I have worked with Sasha for over 10 years and I felt very close to her because she learnt and performed so openly. I watched her unfold in order to envelop new knowledge, but I always felt that there was a centre ground that was hers and any new developments had to be tested by her at this centre point. I think this is due to her commitment to learning through the discipline of her Aikido practice. The rigour of Aikido meant that she is prepared for anything but also that she isn’t a push over. She finds a way of entwining what is valuable to her which makes her very particular and then she lets rip while not losing the nuances of connecting movements. I felt that I have been able to watch Sasha at close quarters become an increasingly fine artist. I am lucky to be able to do that, as each individual artist has a particular path that they seem ready for but it takes time and work to achieve. There are rarely short cuts and so for me to be able to watch a dance artist over a length of time both uncurl to perform and draw in to learn is a privilege. Sasha has been someone who has done that for herself and for the work that I have made with her.
Performing has been her love and that is probably still true but she is now a valued teacher and knowing her and speaking with her she is as fiery in her quest to hand over knowledge as well as draw out younger emerging dance artists.
When making a new work for Small Bones, Sasha was always a significant contributor to the creative process. She was enthusiastically self-motivated, enjoying exploring choreographic tasks and developing movement phrases. With her sense of musicality and aesthetic discernment, Sasha gave sophisticated shape and nuance to the material she made. Sasha has an ability to envisage and project movement into complex spatial patterns and to orientate her-self as if the movement were mapped in her veins.
As a performer, Sasha is intelligent, expressive and courageous. She clearly enjoys performing, meeting the challenges, making choices and being in the moment. Sasha’s performances are an engaging and intriguing journey through sensory change as she lives every moment from within the movement. She has a fine appreciation for music which is evidenced in her considered response to the broad spectrum of scores and soundscapes to which she has performed. In performance Sasha appears to embody the music rather than dance to it. As a partner she could be awesome as she never committed less than completely to the challenges of the choreography.
It has been a pleasure and a privilege to work with her and to witness her developing and maturing her artistry.