Diana Niepce
Duet
© Photo by: Joaquim Leal
We exist with each other, in a conflict that brings love and death closer together. There is a struggle that involves the relationship with the other, and only then can we live a truth in intimacy. The possibility of experiencing this truth on our horizon can never be done without the willingness to go through the crudeness of mutation that disfigures the very notion of the utopian body. This metamorphosis only happens together and against the body of the other, and in it lies the hidden violence of a subversion of roles. Here, the body exposes itself in the crudeness of arising from nothing, and thus becoming everything. It is lost in the transparent incomprehension of its fragility and subverts this meaning in the perverted provocation of difference. A dance that emerges from the intimate deformation of the state of the observed body. We will never be more than what we are naked.
Anda, Diana
© Photo by: Alípio Padilha
In a striking moment of contemporary dance performance, three dancers take center stage under a focused beam of dramatic lighting. Two male performers, dressed in matching beige costumes, stand face-to-face, firmly holding a female dancer between them. The woman, partially unclothed and exposed in her vulnerability, arches her back and lifts her face toward the light, embodying both tension and surrender. The trio’s physical connection suggests themes of trust, support, and human interdependence, while the stark contrast between light and shadow enhances the emotional intensity of the scene. The image captures a fleeting, intimate balance of strength, fragility, and expressive movement
The other side of dance
© Photo by: Paulo Pimenta
A dancer is gracefully suspended in the air by a specially designed structure, creating a captivating scene of stillness and tension. Her body is positioned horizontally, lying on her back with her face turned upward, inviting a sense of openness and surrender. Her arms are extended above her head in a gesture that evokes both vulnerability and strength. One leg is bent, while the other is slightly flexed, adding a dynamic asymmetry to the pose. The composition, enhanced by the suspension, highlights the dancer's physical control and expressive presence, offering a powerful visual moment within the performance
Utopia
© Photo by: Alípio Padilha
On stage, four performers — two men and two women — are seated around a round table, creating a scene that feels both intimate and theatrical. One of the male performers is completely naked. Another man, shown from behind, wears only trousers and holds a shirt in one hand, suggesting a moment of undressing or transition. A blonde woman, wearing a white top and pink underwear, holds a white blouse and smiles with an amused, playful expression. Opposite her, a brunette woman dressed in black trousers and a matching top looks directly at the audience, her gaze filled with wit and subtle irony. The tableau evokes themes of exposure, playfulness, and human interaction, set within a minimalist, performative environment
N̵O̵R̵M̵
© Photo by: Filipe Ferreira
Behind the metal bars of a cage, four performers clad only in boxing shorts collaborate to lift a dancer dressed in a black top and vibrant electric blue pants. The dancer is held aloft, her arms outstretched wide in an open, expressive gesture, while her gaze is directed upward, conveying a sense of aspiration or transcendence. The stark contrast between the cage’s confinement and the dancer’s elevated, expansive pose creates a powerful visual tension, highlighting themes of struggle, freedom, and support within the performance
Diana Niepce is a dancer, choreographer, and writer. At the age of 28, a life-changing accident reshaped her relationship with her body, dance, and performance, leading her to explore language and hybridism as political action. Her work challenges and redefines the identity of the performative body beyond conventional norms.
She graduated from the Escola Superior de Dança, completed an Erasmus program at Teatterikorkeakoulun (Helsinki), and holds a Master’s in Art and Communication from Universidade Nova de Lisboa.
An associate artist at Espaço do Tempo, Diana is the author of numerous works, including Forgotten Fog (2015), Raw a Nude (2019), 12 979 Dias (2019), Duet (2020), T4 (2020), Anda, Diana (SPA Prize, 2021), The Other Side of Dance(2022), Enfreakment (2024), Utopia (2024), and Norm (2024). She is currently developing her next large-scale project, Hornfuckers.
As a performer, she has collaborated with both national and international artists. She is also active as a curator and trainer, leading projects such as Introduction to the Performing Arts for Artists with Disabilities (2020), Fora da Norma (2023), Norma (2023), and the Political Bodies series (2024, Culturgest). Currently, she is an expert collaborator on the international project Europe Beyond Access (nominated by Culturgest).
Her publications include the article Experimenting with the Body (Coreia journal), the book Anda, Diana (Sistema Solar), and the short story Broken and Stinky, They Are the Pebbles for the Rota Memorial do Convento. She has also researched the historiography of non-normative bodies in dance, contributing to the Gulbenkian exhibition Dance not dance and its catalogue.
Diana has served as a jury member for the Acesso Cultura Prize (2018), the International Screen-Dance Festival InShadow (2018), and the NCED – EU Solidarity applications (2021).
Contact details
Associação Cultural As Niepce’s
Choreographer
Rua Orlando Gonçalves, 7-4DT
2610-127, Amadora
Portugal
Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/diananiepce/
Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/aniepce/?hl=pt
Duet
Duration: 25min
Description: Dance performance that adjust in site specifics and propose a reduce number of audience
Extra information: We exist with each other, in a conflict that brings love and death closer together. There is a struggle that involves the relationship with the other, and only then can we live a truth in intimacy. The possibility of experiencing this truth on our horizon can never be done without the willingness to go through the crudeness of mutation that disfigures the very notion of the utopian body. This metamorphosis only happens together and against the body of the other, and in it lies the hidden violence of a subversion of roles.
Here, the body exposes itself in the crudeness of arising from nothing, and thus becoming everything. It is lost in the transparent incomprehension of its fragility and subverts this meaning in the perverted provocation of difference. A dance that emerges from the intimate deformation of the state of the observed body. We will never be more than what we are naked.
Duet is a dance piece by Diana Niepce, which premiered in December 2020 at CCB, Lisbon.
Condictions and riders: contact asniepces@gmail.com
People on road: 2, plus 1 access assistant
Freight: necessary
Freight details: 1 suitcase
Anda, Diana
Duration: 55min
Extra information: I want to talk about what we hide. I didn’t exist almost my entire life because of the guilt of having to exist in a body that wasn’t mine. I will stop excusing the policing of the norm, which destroys everything that differs from itself. I am not incomplete. I want to stop this violation of my privacy and no one will tell me how to be. I stopped looking for my body in the other’s body and found myself with the other. In the secret treatment that makes my body a storyteller, I found the meaning of its intimate and real state. (Diana Niepce)
In Anda, Diana, the dancer and acrobat Diana Niepce portrays the reconstruction of her self, after a fall (to which she was left with a spinal cord injury), in an honest dialogue between body and mind, between logic and chaos, until she built the dancing body. In this piece, she proposes to question what the norm is, challenging prejudices and ideas that society has regarding the aesthetics of bodies. Here, the disability, although present, does not take the place of the victim of the system. Rather, this non-standard body is positioned as a revolutionary.
Anda, Diana premiered in April 2020 at TBA - Teatro do Bairro Alto and has won the SPA2021 award, also has an autobiography edited by Sistema Solar. An inner narrative developed from cruelly real facts, contaminated by the author’s artistic perspective.
Condictions and riders: contact asniepces@gmail.com
People on road: 7
Freight: necessary
Freight details: it depends of the Theater conditions
The Other Side of Dance
Extra information: I am interested in observing the dance archive and understanding the hierarchy that organizes the body. Approaching the other side of the dance, and understanding the secret of movement. The body has not always been excluded and how the body finds its place. Looking at history and understanding in an experimental way, in the dance genre, the chronology of this other side of dance and through it challenging my body. Body that here represents matter, and presents the mapping of the representation of the invisible in the history of dance.
The work is structured around the study and deep analysis of the physics and movement of artists outside the norm, appropriating and transforming the language into an identity of its own. It is artists such as Artur Zmijewski, Bill Shannon, Claire Cunningham, David Toole, Neil Marcus, Michael Turinsky, Lisa Bufano, Raimund Hoghe who give voice and allow the emergence of this new body.
Condictions and riders: contact asniepces@gmail.com
Enfreakment
Description: Enfreakment is a dance conference performance, adapted to different spaces
Extra information: Enfreakment is a talk-performance in the shape of a multidisciplinary and experimental device based on the national and international historiography of the non-normative body in the performance arts. The body voices a reflection on the genealogy of dance, according to a close gaze that exposes the violence and eugenics enacted upon these bodies.
It is urgent to understand the evolution of the body in history and to question the policies that foster exclusion. My body will always exist and, therefore, the body of the other. Creating a new body and making the invisible visible. Witnessing our place. Existing in a no normative body is to exist in a state of constant revolution. Thinking about dance from another place. Contravening the norm and the natural limits. (Diana Niepce)
“Diana Niepce uses the autonomy of her own body’s life to question the structures of power which are inherent to the subject in relation to itself, and to subjects in relation to one another. As part of the dance not dance programme, Enfreakment is presented after Este Corpo que me Ocupa [This Body That Occupies Me], by João Fiadeiro. Through the affirmation of a body-thing, their work questions the political, human and non-human subjectivity of the body, ascribing other materialities and modes of existence to it, while also reimagining the reality of where their dances emerge from. The body, usually understood as the primary medium of dance, is also, and for that reason, the domain of the social forces that animate it. João Fiadeiro and Diana Niepce, though belonging to different artistic generations and disparate aesthetic worlds, share a common questioning of the body as matter and vehicle, proposing with their work the experimentation of its power and the reinvention of its possibilities.”
Condictions and riders: contact asniepces@gmail.com
Utopia
Extra information: We inhabit a corrosive spiral of destruction. We look at the body in a simplistic way and run after the production of another body. This one is no good. We are contaminated by the prevailing norm that only exists in the place of oppression. This body is no good. We wallow such excluded figures in the corral because nothing is ever enough. In this imagined scenario, the iron tells its story in the body, hard and violent, but there is excrement everywhere and we live in paradise.
In Utopia, Diana Niepce honours bodies for what they are through their own history and knowledge. Through the fascination of reconstructing her own body, the choreographer analyses and recreates contradictory representations of the object that is the body. She is interested in using the body as a raw, violent and erotic language, as a mirror of the body’s representativeness in society, without being forced to normalise it. Utopia is a performance based on the transgression and oppression of physical limits.
Condictions and riders: contact asniepces@gmail.com
N̵O̵R̵M̵
Description: Dance performance that adjust in site specifics
Extra information: N̵O̵R̵M̵ is a site-specific dance, circus and performance piece that is constantly under construction. The spectator is invited to be part of the work, and the body acts as a discourse of intersection between art and life. The body is observed as a unique experience, in the duality of a gravitational space and a space without gravity. Witnesses to a game of resistance and risk, where limits are relative, in that they will always be restricted, but not restrained. The work is inspired by Heinrich Von Kleist's text On Puppet Theatre and reflects on the context of Portuguese eugenics, in which the Mitra institution (extinct in 1960) responded to the institutionalization of people outside the norm. A creation that encourages us to look at history and reflect on the place of social violence that contributed to exclusionary practices and the marginalization of communities outside the norm.
Condictions and riders: contact asniepces@gmail.com
2024, Oct. 20 – The Guardian – Hofesh Shechter Company: Theatre of Dreams; Diana Niepce: The Other Side of Dance – review
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Europe Beyond Access introduces... Diana Niepce
