Korzo UP | Lea Ved about the great unknown

Move into the unknown

Choreographer and dancer Lea Ved is currently in the middle of a pressure-cooker project: creating a full performance in just one month for Korzo and NDT’s Here We Live and Now. How do you navigate such an uncertain process – and really, the uncertainty of life itself? 

Who is Lea?

Born in the US in 1991, Lea Ved has built an impressive international career. She has worked with RUBBERBAND Dance Company in Montreal, the Royal Swedish Ballet, Nederlands Dans Theater, and is currently an artist-in-residence at Korzo.

We meet her in one of Korzo’s dance studios and take a seat on two chairs in an empty room surrounded by mirrors. Once the conversation begins, the studio seems to disappear and we step into her universe. Lea speaks almost like a poet, her words full of metaphors that open new worlds. She moves freely through them and invites you to travel alongside her into a parallel reality, just as she does in her dance. 

Growing up in the US: The seed of curiosity                                                                                  
For Lea, the unknown is not an abstract idea. It’s been woven into her life from the start. She grew up in five different US states, with an Indian father who often moved for work and a Filipino mother. “My home has always been wherever my family is,” she says.

As a professional, Lea continued to move. “The longest period I lived in one place was the first eight years of my life. But living in so many different places made me adaptable and curious. Every new environment became a different lens through which to see the world.”      

Living with not-knowing                                                  

In creating and dancing, Lea is constantly exploring without needing to know exactly where it will lead. Navigating the unknown is not a deliberate artistic concept, but a way of life. “I think the urge to create always comes from that space in between,” she says. “Not from what is already certain, but from what has not yet been named.”  

The body as a place where the world comes in

In her piece for Here We Live and Now, Lea explores what it means to be human in a time when the world seems to be getting louder. “There’s so much information, world news, polarization, discussions about gender, climate, migration: it’s a lot. Not that my work is about that at all. It’s about the state of the body under that pressure. About how you sometimes shift between impulses at lightning speed, how you feel yourself reacting to things you can’t even put into words."

She describes this state as “erratic”. Constantly moving, sometimes awkward, sometimes angular, sometimes too fast. It’s a physicality she deliberately refuses to categorize. “We put ourselves in boxes so quickly, and that makes everything smaller. I want us to leave space for what has not yet been defined. For that ambiguity.” 

What lives beneath the skin

For her piece, Lea chose a minimalist set: a chair, a table, a lamp, and a rug. A room without a name. “It’s a canvas,” she says. “A place where the inner state can exist without having to be ‘something’ yet.”

This idea was inspired by two artists. The first is Edward Hopper, best known for his Nighthawks, where four people sit in a diner bathed in evening light. “Hopper shows a moment of stillness: four figures, nothing moves, and yet you feel their inner world and want to know their lives,” Lea explains.

The other is Austrian painter Egon Schiele, famous for his raw, almost unsettling self-portraits. “Schiele’s works are full of tension, with jagged skin, expressive hands, showing life that is almost visible under the skin. Hopper and Schiele are not opposites, but have different approaches. What interests me about both is that they allude to an inner state. Their visual language evokes so much for me.”

Finding home in searching

What drives Lea as an artist isn’t repeating what she already knows, but exploring where the line has not yet been drawn. “For me, creation is something that happens now,” she says. “It asks that you dare to move without certainty, to take a step toward something that has no form yet.”

She often uses improvisation, but it is never random. “Sometimes it is, of course, but it’s also analytical and intense. I have notebooks full of notes about my body language: what it wants to tell me, the questions I have, the physical and psychological paths I want to explore. For years, I went to the studio alone just to investigate this. That is my ground, my home.”

The word “home” comes up often. For Lea, creating from not-knowing isn’t a task, but a sense of home. “The unknown no longer evokes fear,” she says. “It’s where creativity begins. Where I rediscover myself, and where the body is allowed to speak before it has to explain anything.”

A tip for anyone who wants to wander like Lea

“For me, music opens the imagination, in mind and in body. And changing the music shifts our perspective, our feeling, perhaps even heightens how we relate to our surroundings and life. Max Bruch's Violin Concerto, Jeff Buckley's Live at Sin-é, Kendrick Lamar, Tim Hecker, Pink Floyd. Put on some headphones, listen to an album, get lost. Go into the unknown in your imagination. Start there, and then take that feeling into life.”