About me

About

performer

I am a highly physical performer with a strong stage presence that has been described as ‘captivating’, ‘drawing people in’ and ‘changing the air in the room’. Thanks to my experience with acting as well as dancing, I am strong both at embodying characters as well as finding authenticity of self in the moment. I am primarily a mover, but my background of singing and speech therapy has equipped me with vocal skills as well. The physical body, however, always remains my vehicle. I access emotions through deep kinesthetic awareness.

In my (pre-)education I was very form-oriented, developing awareness of shape and space and attention to detail. It is largely after my bachelor of Dance in Education that I shifted towards a more somatic approach, centring around movement research, sensation and imagination. This unlocked a whole new movement language in me, which I continue to develop as a dancer and choreographer.

Recently I have mostly performed my own work and small-cast pieces with collectives in Morocco and Egypt. The process of my own choreographic work has contributed enormously to my development as a performer and dancer, both physically and creatively.

I thrive as a performer when the creative process involves movement research, improvisation or the researching of a character or social theme. When I am between projects, I feed myself with a variety of movement languages. My main discipline is modern/contemporary but I keep myself versatile by working with hiphop dancers, belly dancers, acrobats and by trying other sports such as rock climbing.

My creative practice includes a playful wrestling with themes such as identity, the individual and the collective, culture and the sensory perceptions that make us human. These themes are inspired not only by my dance education, but also my background in anthropology and dance pedagogy.

My teaching background resonates in the way I adapt my performance to the frame of reference of my audience – without compromising my artisticity. I try to meet my audience halfway in order to expand their comfort zone. I draw inspiration from introspective questions about individuality and collectivity, and from anthropological observations of human behaviour.

I enjoy working in intimate audience settings, sometimes with interactive elements. Although contemporary dance is my expertise, I am also active as a creative writer. I often draw from my own texts to add reflexive, educational or political layers to my choreographies. In the end, however, embodiment and multisensorial experience always remain central to my work.

Text, soundscapes and audiovisual elements can challenge, support and contrast the movements, but in the end the moving body remains the main storyteller. I intend to evoke kinesthetic, affective and emotional experiences that challenge the limits of rationality.

After a period of mostly solo and small collective work, mostly site-flexible, I am now looking to work again on group pieces, both site-specific and black box. I prefer casts of a limited size which give room to the individualities of the performers, over large group, synchronized pieces with ‘anonimized’ dancers. My creative approach in working with my dancers largely overlaps with my teaching approaches.

About

educator

As an educator I teach, organise projects and develop curriculums. I have alround teaching experience in the styles of contemporary dance, modern dance, jazzdance, musical dance and dance (contact) improvisation; with ages ranging from 6 to 60. 

Recently I have worked mostly with emerging (pre-)professional dancers as well as adult amateurs in Morocco and Egypt. I have developed my own methods of improvisation-based technique – borrowing from and extending upon methods such as Gaga, streamflow (Heidi Vierthaler), Asymmetrical Motion (Lucas Condro) and others.

This approach allows for a broad diversity of levels and backgrounds within my class (which in places like Cairo, due to the small size of the contemporary scene, is a must). I have worked across language barriers using my own illustrations, that aim to uncover basic technical principles through exploration. Although awareness of shape and detail is important, I believe my students benefit most from making their own technical discoveries through a sensation-based approach.

I thus aim for an inclusive, learner-driven teaching style in which I stimulate students to be in charge of their own learning. Besides teaching regular dance classes I love to develop projects in which dance meets society, using dance as a tool to discuss social issues, to stimulate connection and dialogue (e.g. teambuilding) or to shed a new perspective on theoretical perspectives.

Currently, my background in anthropology finds its indirect ways into my creative work. I am not active as a scholar but employ my research skills in the studio (artistic and arts-based research to support my own and others’ creations) and at the desk (writing projects, writing and editing articles for online magazines). My knowledge of anthropological theories and methods makes me address my work in Morocco and Egypt with awareness of my intricate positionality and colonial histories.

I am fascinated by embodied knowledge. I study the body and its senses as an instrument of knowledge, in relation to its human and more-than-human environment. My fascination especially goes out to the pre-rational and the more-than-verbal. In other words: how can we draw scientific knowledge from intuitive, sensory, physical-emotional experiences that we struggle to put into words? What can they teach us; the subtleties of living (in) a human body, that we tend to write off as ‘subjective’ or not speak about at all? I seek to stretch the limits of the academic framework by using arts-based research methods and creative ways of presenting my findings, driven by my background as an artist. This way I hope to do more justice to emotional, affective and kinesthetic aspects of human experience that tend to remain uncredited in standard research methods, such as questionnaires and verbal interviews These are methods that I appreciate and happily apply, but wish to complement with alternative perspectives, such as visual, auditory (e.g. through soundscapes) and movement-based.