Simona Dabija
Choreographer and dancerThe pandemic crisis caught me at a very busy moment. I had lots of shows, which suddenly stopped. I didn’t really know what would come next or how we had to behave right then. The first reaction was to cling to all kinds of activities around the house and try to keep the artistic thrill alive.
Simona Dabija – performance
MS. SPINE, choreography and performance – Simona Dabija, music by Vlaicu Golcea
Recorded at CREART / Teatrelli – November 2021
Video concept: Virgil Oprina
INTRODUCTION
The arts have migrated online during the pandemic, where they’re holding up. I can’t say I resonate with that. I feel completely lost in the virtual world and any show filmed just to be shown online, although it was conceived for the stage, completely loses its value.
Simona Dabija introduces herself
Recorded in November 2021
SHORT BIOGRAPHY
Simona Dabija
Choreographer and dancer
(b. 1994, Focșani)
Simona Dabija holds a Degree and an M.A. in Choreography from the National University of Theatre and Cinema, Bucharest. She is the cofounder of the Delazero Association, which aims to take an artistic direction guided by projects whose themes are the social present and the ways in which the individual relates to it, and the connection between the body and perception.
She has worked with Simona Deaconescu since 2015 and is one of the principal dancers in the Tangaj Dance collective, with which she has performed in the shows Daughters, Birdville, Counterbody, and Aftertaste, in the marathon performance installation Retro Walk Decades to the Sun, and in the dance film Sonder. She has performed for the Linotype Independent Choreography Centre in the shows BASMa Curată, 2 Women, and Stabat Mater, for the Odeon Theatre in Kafka, an4d for Teatrelli in Urban GIF, choreographed by Florin Fieroiu.
In 2020, the Bucharest National Dance Centre awarded her the Prize for Outstanding Contribution to Contemporary Dance. Her most recent projects have been the LUX contemporary dance show and OPIA, a short dance film that was selected for and won awards at a number of festivals, including KnowBOX, where it won the Audience Award, FrameRush, BIDFF, Moving Images Videodance Festial, and FROSTBITE International Indie Fest. She is currently working as a performer in a new marathon performance installation entitled Isolation in a Series of Liminal States, a project initiated by SAC@Malmaison in partnership with Tangaj Dance.
Simona Dabija declares that she likes “working with variations in speed and employing atypical articulations in relation to the surfaces she encounters, since the methods whereby movement can be deconstructed, through isolation of the body’s extremities and the spinal column, give rise to a powerful corporeality and a dance that is full of volume.”
IMAGE GALLERY
