Nurbäk Batulla (b. 1988) is a choreographer, dance and performance artist from Tatarstan. His practice, close to physical theater, uses movement as a tool to explore body and mind, focusing on the result rather than the process. He is mostly interested in body language. This search is directly connected to how Nurbäk assesses his mother tongue — Tatar, a severely endangered language whose scope of use is being artificially narrowed, whose role in school education is being diminished, and whose number of speakers is decreasing every year. He traces current linguistic policies in himself as well — before the age of seven, Nurbäk spoke and thought in Tatar, but later Russian became his primary language of speech and thought. His subsequent attempts to return to thinking in Tatar led him to seek out an even more ancient means of communication — body language, through which people express far more than they can with words.

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In his performances, Nurbäk trains his body, voice, and mind to become a medium between the world of ideas and the audience. He takes physical fatigue to the extreme, turning it into a key to understanding corporeality and a state in which the spiritual world penetrates the body at the moment when the body no longer has the strength to resist.

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