ART
dance & choreography
Photo Sjoerd Derine
I create dance theater productions, of which I'll share about below, and you can see more about the dance theater company Project Zahira
For the company, I facilitate creative coaching sessions for dance makers and choreographers.
We also host healing women's gatherings. The next one during fall equinox in September.
V - an ode to women
Let me take you on a near twenty year journey of creating dance theater.
I produced, wrote, designed, and created my first full-length dance theater work when I was 22 (in 2006). I had entitled it V - a reference and reverence to women. I created this performance to show gender (in)equality. Of course I didn't know yet what my professional work would look like twenty years down the road. I was always guided by something inside me that burned like a passionate fire. And that was to use the arts to give voice to unnamed parts; of personal stories, of society... to make the invisible visible. It's woven through all my life's projects.
the road of discovery
While I attended graduate school in the US (2007-2010), I continued deepening my research of how I could use choreography to be a feminist voice. I created various shorter pieces in which I was exploring the distortions and connections between men and women. I was discouraged by several professors at the university's school of dance, saying that my work looked 'european' and 'gimmicky' and that it was more like 'performance art' as if it was some kind of insult. Even though it was challenging to face rejections, I kept going to explore what kind of dance artist I could be. For my master's thesis I researched various feminist choreographers, such as Edouard Locke, Marc Morris, Anne Teresa de Keersmaeker and Pina Bausch. I discovered that there were definitely people who had been working with themes of gender. And I proceeded my choreographic research and quest for using my beloved art form of dance as a means of communicating topics close to my heart. I created XX/XY (about who's the 'stronger sex'), Vacuum (about the psyche of women and the pressures of patriarchal society on her), and v revivivied (a continuation of the research of V).
v revivivied (2010)
dancers Olivia Margolis (Martin), Clare Springer Ibach, Chandler Joslin (Pace)
the artist's journey
In 2013, I returned to the Netherlands. I wanted to work as a choreographer in the cultural sector in Amsterdam. I founded the Young Makers Platform and produced two mini festivals in 2013 and 2015 in which I curated work of other performing artists of different genre as well as my own. Work that can't be boxed in by a 'genre,' really. People who think outside the box; who create from their soul. Those early years in the Netherlands were about developing work as well as building a network, getting to know people, because I knew nobody and nobody knew me. There I was with a master's degree in dance, which seemed to mean very little in the midst of subsidy institutions, networks, and rules I knew very little of. I restaged Vacuum (which also toured to New York that year for a feminist collective), and created a new work called Twofold - about peeling the layers of being a woman and showing the struggles we face each day - referencing misogyny. Twofold is a work exploring public and private identities. How do we present ourselves to the 'outside' world? Does that match with how we truly feel on the inside? Together with the dancers, we created a multi-layered work of woven personal stories, intensive contemporary floor work, and audience interaction. And in 2015, I created De Doos (with Merel Cornet and Wies Berkhout in the cast), to explore all the layers that press on being a woman. It became the pre-work that led to Who am I without my story?
Photo: Jeroen Deen
twofold (2013)
dancers Helena Lopez, Natasja Bode, Therese Thonfors
who am I?
In 2017, my work became more personal. Where the previous works were linked to themes I'm personally involved in, such as feminism, I started exploring really personal themes and utilized a more in-depth co-creative process with my dancers. Through interviews, movement explorations, and improvisations, I developed Who am I without my story? with Merel Cornet and Maria Kuchowicz. The work was selected for the Amsterdam Fringe Festival and also toured to Athens, Greece for the 50th World Congress of Dance Research by the UN International Dance Council. Who am I without my story? is about this question about identity. Who might I be when I don't carry these layers of cultural, religious, and social conditioning with me? This work started a new chapter in my journey as a dance maker.
Photo Sjoerd Derine
Who am I without my story? (2017)
dancers Merel Cornet & Maria Kuchowicz
the divine feminine
Right after Who am I without my story? was finished, a big burnout came knocking. It was a blessing in disguise, because it really did make me drop my masks. I had to face what was going on underneath the layers of smiles and working hard. I had been in survival for a long time. Old traumas from sexual violence made their way up to the surface. I entered a process of deep healing, while also speaking out publicly about a very known 'spiritual healer,' named John of God. It was an incredibly intensive journey of facing a lot of negativity and danger. I utilized my art to alchemize this process from 'poison into medicine,' and explored a sacred sisterhood in the work Reclaiming the Goddess. A work in progress was performed at the Frisian Dance Days in 2018, after which I kept working on it. It was selected for the Amsterdam Fringe Festival in 2019, and saw its last performance back on Frisian soil in January of 2020, before the world stopped in its tracks.
Photo Sjoerd Derine
Reclaiming the Goddess (2018-2020)
dancers Ivana Berkhout, Maria Kuchowicz, Merel Cornet, Jacqueline Back
turning darkness into drama
The pandemic was no joke. The doors to theaters closed. The cultural sector stopped. Not being able to make art made me feel like I lost a huge part of my identity. While I contemplated who I might be without being a dancer and choreographer, I wrote my memoirs while in the Indian Himalayas. The last lockdown of December 2021 caused me to go down a dark road. I was depressed. Fortunately, a month later I saw a possibility for an arts residence at Joya Air in the South of Spain. I sent in my application and was accepted. I decided to make it an incredible solo road trip, while visiting friends long the way in Paris and Barcelona. While in Spain, I started creating work about the expression of depression, and inquired about what depression meant to me. It was a hunger to feel alive, because depression made me feel like death but in a living body. I felt a deep longing to feel alive. I named the piece Soul Famine, and dedicated as a 'funeral of mental health.' Again it played during the Amsterdam Fringe Festival in 2022. I had selected a small, white art gallery that felt like a crematorium. There I gave a face to depression.
Photo: Annelies Verhelst
Soul Famine (2022)
The call came knocking. One, I wanted to make a duet with Ivana Berkhout. Two, I felt the urge to bring violence against women more clearly to the forefront. I had come so close to facing my own death, but had to process many layers before I could actually make art about it. I never thought that I'd want to, but now the energy was there to do so.
Since my graduate program in dance, I had been fascinated by Pina Bausch's The Rite of Spring. I found it a very disturbing choreography, based on the original themes of Le Sacre du Printemps, in which a virgin is offered up by men, called The Chosen, to be sacrificed so that spring can come again. A ballet created in 1913, by a male choreographer (Nijinsky), under male artistic direction (Diaghilev), and by male musical composition (Stravinsky). Placed into modern context, this work was about femicide. It was just not spoken about. I decided that I needed to shine light on this taboo topic, that is still often referred to as 'crime passionel' (passion crime), or a 'domestic dispute' while it's endemic that women are murdered by a partner or ex-partner.
I decided to call my new piece THE RITE; starting with death. The work is created in three acts: the death, attempted revival, and the dream - with a thread running through the work: grief. THE RITE performed in 2023 and was commissioned by the City of Amsterdam in 2025, to play for professionals who work with victims and perpetrators of violence against women.
watch me roar
