The Flemish Astrid Boons made a name for herself in our country as a beautiful dancer with Dansgroep Krisztina de Châtel, Dansgroep Amsterdam and Nederlands Dans Theater 2. A collaboration with the Japanese choreographer Saburo Teshigawara, at GöteborgsOperans Danskompani, led to dance taking on a new, took on even richer meaning for her and Boons carefully started to create himself. Back in the Netherlands, in 2016, she created the duet Rhizoma for the young talent program Here we live and now – a collaboration between Korzo and Nederlands Dans Theater – which immediately won her the BNG Bank Prize. A year later, the Hague Piket Art Prize followed and in 2020 NRC Handelsblad called her one of the great, 'indispensable' choreographic promises of our time.'
Radical
Although modest as a person and well-considered in her way of working, Boons dares to make radical choices in her choreographies. After the successful Fields from 2019 – in which, according to NRC, she opts for “a daring, almost monomaniacal approach” – she will release her second full-length production in this festival: Do you believe me yet? In this work, the choreographer makes a connection between how our body stores unresolved trauma through dissociation and our virtual 'I' in the digital age. In both cases a pseudo persona is created, an incomplete version of ourselves. In a play with reality, Boons and her dancers investigate who we really are and what the consequences are of our 'adaptability' depending on the social situation in which we find ourselves.
Empathic ability
Transformations are the central focus in Boon's work. In her creations, movement is a continuously slowly transforming form of energy. The choreographer asks himself existential questions about human movement and then tackles them physically and mentally. Do you believe me yet? is a performance that gets under our skin, appeals to our empathy and requires deep concentration from both the performer and the audience.
