Julidans x WhyNot: OFF VENUE: Tour C (start Van Beuningenplein)

When he’s twelve years old, Simon Bus (Heerlen, 1989) gets into breaking after seeing a Run-DMC video. His B-boy name Statue reveals he’s always had a special feel for visual composition. Simon’s style became more and more 'experimental' and he turned out to be an outright innovator of the breakdance genre. Since 2018, Simon has been creating choreographies in which he continues to experiment with urban dance forms. “Self-portrait, man on orange floor” is a danced self-portrait on a two by two orange floor that functions as a dynamic canvas. While a painter is forced to slowly settle on a fixed self-image as he is painting, we see Simon fighting with different aspects of himself. With his hyperflexible body, he turns himself inside out and upside down, wavering between his ideal self-image on the one hand, and a caricature on the other.

Since 2002 Simon Bus has been part of the breakdance crew 'Trashcan Heroes', with which he participated fanatically in as many battles as possible, both in the Netherlands and abroad. About ten years later, he completed his study Visual Communication at the Academy of Visual Arts in Maastricht. Here Simon developed an investigative way of looking and moving that strongly influenced his vision on breakdance and led to his own unique movement language. In 2018, Bus began working as a choreographer. Virtuosity and extreme physical possibilities in his works always prove to be a source of humor and perspective. Additionally, Simon remains a much sought-after dancer, working with Guilherme Miotto, Shailesh Bahoran and Dunja Jocic, among others. Since 2017 Simon’s work is supported by ThinX/Parktheater in collaboration with Corpo Máquina Society, completing a FPK-supported New Makers trajectory with them in 2019 and 2020. This collaboration continues. Since 2021, Simon is also supported by PLAN Brabant.

Unable to attend the 40 days mourning ceremony 13 years ago, Reza Mirabi now wishes to ritualize his grief (ذکر Zikr) literally meaning ‘remembrance’) for his grandfather, Jawad Mirabi, through story. Together with cellist Sheng-Chiun Lin, Mirabi invites you to an embodied journey through time, taps into transpersonal memories and finds himself as a 12 year old boy in the Kurdish Valley of Zaman (دره زمان).With the help of a few stones, Reza Mirabi is remembering, and reimagining a fleeting moment in the childhood of his late grandfather. Listening To Stone Beings is part of Mirabi’s research into his family archives, to meditate on the stories of displacement, refuge, the loss of languages, practices, land and seeds, and to dance with the question of home.

Reza Mirabi is a choreographer, visual artist, dancer and seed collector, with a background in horticulture, environmental education, and reforestation projects in Iran, Kurdistan, India, and Portugal. Mirabi studied Fine Arts at the University of Mumbai and graduated from DAS Choreography, Master program at the University of the Arts, Amsterdam.

With his practice, he looks for ways to enter into states of embodied listening. Listening for him becomes a choreographic process and political act to tap into archives that have been rendered invisible; both personal and collective histories, memories, and forms of loss. More recently, Mirabi has moved out of the black box and into site-specific contexts, where listening becomes the ground for co-composing with the material textures, languages, and (hi)stories of a place.

Do you adapt to social norms or do you find agency and resist? Arise is a reflection on the tention between these two fields. Choreographer Astrid Boons (BE, 1988) shows a personal perspective, where the social and societal expectations placed on women prescribe which ambitions are suitable. We witness how three performers struggle in an environment where the pressure from outside is palpable. Afterwards, as they find themselves in an in-between world, we question what there is on the other side. Will there be release? Can their environment change in such a way so that it empowers them? Getting known in the European dance scene for her emotionally demanding pieces, Boons’ creations offer a space to deeply experience the body as the site of boundaries and expansion between us and the world. She creates work with a distinctive female perspective foregrounding the subjective connectivity as a form of resistance, together with the continuous search for personal agency.

In 2021 Boons was nominated for the prestigious Prize of The Netherlands Dance Days for choreography. In the same year dancer Karolina Szymura was nominated for a ‘Swan for most impressive dance performance’ for her role in Arise.

Astrid Boons received the BNG Bank Dance Award 2017 and Piket Art Award 2017 for her duet Rhizoma (2016). Since 2017 Astrid is connected as a choreographer to Korzo Theatre in The Hague, The Netherlands. Her work has been produced by Korzo Theatre, Nederlands Dans Theater, Dance Theater Heidelberg, among others.