Valasia Simeon
© Photo by: Valasia Simeon
Valasia Simeon is standing indoors beside a large window which reflects her image. She has dark tied back hair and she wears a fitted black long-sleeve top and light-colored trousers. The photo is in black and white. Valesia is looking out of the window with a serious and melancholic expression on her face.
© Photo by: Pinelopi Gerasimou
Valasia Simeon is captured on stage in the midst of a performance. Her black hair is tied in a braid. and she is sitting on the floor under a warm spotlight. She wears a sleeveless dark top and is positioned at the center of a large circular structure made of folded, fan-shaped, orange-brown material that spreads out around her. Valesia rests one hand on the folded surface and looks downward with a focused, calm expression. The background is almost completely dark.
© Photo by: Pinelopi Gerasimou
Valasia Simeon is captured while she is performing on a dark stage floor under a spotlight. She has her hair tied in two braids, she wears a sleeveless dark top and loose dark trousers. Her body is bent forward, with one hand and her forehead close to the floor, creating a low, curved posture. Behind her lies a long, folded structure with a light, warm color and visible circular cutouts along its side. The stage around her is mostly black and empty, with the light highlighting Valesia, the wooden object, and a small area of the floor.
© Photo by: Pinelopi Gerasimou
Valasia Simeon stands barefoot on a dark stage, facing away from the viewer toward a large vertical folded panel. She wears a sleeveless dark top and loose dark trousers, and her dark hair is braided down her back. With one arm raised, she touches the top edge of the structure. Strong stage lighting casts a large shadow of her body onto the slatted surface.
Valasia Simeon is a dance artist, choreographer, and movement educator focusing on inclusive practices. She is a graduate of the National School of Dance in Athens and holds a degree in Mechanical Engineering from the Technological Educational Institute of Central Macedonia in Greece. She then continued her studies by attending the postgraduate program in choreography at the ArtEZ University of the Arts in the Netherlands, where her research focused on the relation of dance to visual arts through diverse media, including objects and design practices.
Her early artistic practice investigated the interaction between the body and object in choreography, leading to dance performances created through the fusion and intersection of performing arts with other spatial practices, such as visual arts and architecture. Following an acquired kinetic disability that reshaped her relation with her body and its movement, Valasia was led to explore unconventional ways of making and experiencing movement. This experience became the central impetus for her current work. She now focuses on sensory practices and explores the relation between material and movement as a means for reinventing her movement as well as her relation with the environment. Building upon this methodology, she extends further and experiments with crafting to turn choreography into objects, aiming to introduce experiential ways for exploring movement among diverse audiences.
By bringing together the senses, body and material, her research practice, seeks to connect people to their inner thoughts and movement, to foster bodily awareness, as well as to enhance social inclusion and particularly the participation and accessibility of people with disabilities in dance education and artistic creation. In the framework of this research, she created the solo “Ephemeral Body” (2023) in collaboration with Onassis Stegi. Her works have been supported and presented by various organizations and festivals, including ArtEZ University of the Arts, the Greek Choreographers Festival Athens, Punch Festival Amsterdam, Ernst Busch Berlin, and Dans atelier’s Art Centre, Netherlands, among others.
In addition to her creation work, Valasia designs and curates inclusive workshops in several places in Greece, and participates in different projects and discussions that aim to empower and increase the accessibility of artists with disability in the arts.
Contact details
Valasia Simeon
dance artist, choreographer, and movement educator
Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/valasia.simeon
Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/valasia_simeon
Ephemeral Body
Description: Ephemeral Body is an autobiographical dance performance that outlines the journey of the reconstruction of the performer’s body who experiences now as a dancer mobility impairments.
How can the body remember what once experienced?
Extra information: Using a paper folded architectonic object, which has been her last dancing partner before disability comes to her life as a bearer of memories that folds inside it the traces of movement that has left behind her, the performance explores the body’s lived experience through the object. Penetrating into the materiality of the object, the performer unfolds inner gestures by transforming the object into live moving images punctuated of moments and experiences until she finally fold by fold reconstructs her body. Through an inner dialogue, body and object breath life into each other, while at the same time they construct, develop and create spaces where dipoles, such as movement – stasis, human –nonhuman, dance and disability coexist and correlate incorporating in that way the changes of life.
“Ephemeral Body” was first presented at the M-POWER Onassis Festival 2023, a festival realized with the support of the “Europe Beyond Access” Program.
Concept &Research : Valasia Simeon
Choreography &Performance : Valasia Simeon
Research Consultant : Nicos Valkanos
Light Design :Thomas Economacos
Production Management : Cultopia
Produced by : Onassis Stegi
Folds of connection (work in progress)
Description: Folds of Connection is the second module of the performance Ephemeral Body, seeks to open a passage from the personal to the collective.
Extra information: Drawing on the movement inventions that emerged from her research with materials, Valasia now experiments with crafting practices to embody movement in objects. These objects, made from tangible materials and particularly paper, are designed to support movement exploration through sensory engagement, while also fostering access, self-authority, and the participation of people with disabilities in dance creation, tracing the folds between movement, material, and collective
experience.
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