Līga Ūbele

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Līga Ūbele (she/her) is an independent dance artist and scenographer from Latvia, now based in Naarm/Melbourne (BA Contemporary Dance Art, 2018; MA Scenography, 2021). Her artistic practice is shaped by education in both dance and scenography and moves across disciplines, with movement always remaining at its core.

Her practice centres on the concept of polarity, exploring relationships between opposing forces through choreography, scenography and embodied research. Working across performance, installation and site-responsive practice, she is interested in the spaces between control and surrender, closeness and distance, stillness and motion. Improvisation plays a central role in her practice, allowing the work to remain responsive and in dialogue with the environment, performers and audiences, rather than existing as a fixed form. More recently, her experience of living between Latvia and Australia has introduced questions of migration, belonging and re-rooting into her practice, extending her ongoing interest in states of transition and in-between spaces.

Her latest full-length performance, Untitled Movement Lecture (2022), inspired by John Cage’s Lecture on Nothing, explored nothingness through the tensions between presence and absence, structure and uncertainty. The work was selected for presentation at the Baltic Dance Platform 2024. During the Magic Carpets residency (2022/2023), she created a series of community events with elderly people in Ķengarags, a suburb of Riga, combining her dance practice with community-based approaches.

Alongside her own artistic practice, Līga has created scenography for the performances Entrails (2024) by Rūta Pūce and Femina (2021) by Sabīne Neilande. She is a member of the Riga-based dance collective LDM5 and the Latvian collective within the international iCoDaCo project (2024–2027), with a planned new premiere in spring 2027.