SNDO presents: D.R.E.D.G.E. by Elisa Zuppini and Toni Steffens, in collaboration with musician Soraya Lutangu Bonaventure and SNDO 2 & 3
A program with guest appearances by Pauline de Groot and Thomas Lehmen

D.R.E.D.G.E. 2025 is a work by Elisa Zuppini and Toni Steffens, created at the invitation of SNDO – School for New Dance Development. Over the course of a two-week workshop, they engaged with second- and third-year students, leading toward public presentations in December.

As part of the 50-year jubilee marking the founding of SNDO, Elisa and Toni entered into dialogue with Pauline de Groot, exploring her extensive choreographic oeuvre and its new life within the online archive (paulinedegroot.nl). During the Performing the Archive: Pauline de Groot Festival in November 2024 at Plein Theater—hosted and curated by Fransien van der Putt—they shared their initial explorations of Pauline’s choreographies.

Extending this intergenerational dialogue between choreographers who share lineages and references yet diverge into their own distinct practices, SNDO invited Elisa and Toni to take the next step…

During the 50-year celebration in June 2025, Pauline performed a duet with fellow SNDO alumnus Thomas Lehmen. This meeting evolved into ongoing weekly movement practice sessions at the Academy of Theatre and Dance...

Lines and lineages of vigor and persistence—bodies and dances—will converge in two days of public presentations. The program features a duet by Pauline de Groot and Thomas Lehmen, followed by D.R.E.D.G.E., the choreography by Elisa Zuppini and Toni Steffens, performed together with 16 SNDO students.

Tickets
You can reserve tickets online. Click on the date of your choice and follow the instructions:
Thursday 11 December, 19:00 at Jaakoozi
Monday 15 December, 19:00 at W139

D.R.E.D.G.E. explores possibilities for giving a body to both the friction and coalescence of different time zones interfering with one another. Revolving around the joy of dance, this process is an experiment in testing movement lineages and histories of practices.

Revisiting Pauline’s choreography V.O.I.D. (Velocity of Interfering Data), a work celebrating chance operations, improvisation, and the everyday interference of the unpredictable as a choreographer of life, this workshop aims to playfully recall those principles.

Like a dredge, from clear to muddy, this process is inevitably accompanied by a necessary surfacing of what lingers on the grounds of this collective 'memoric' endeavour.

How can we (still) resonate with the choreographic legacies we are embodying across generations and which we are inescapably part of? How can we generously make space for them to re-emerge and articulate questions we need to ask to our pasts?

Within the mesh of our intertwined timelines, we address the space for the chaotic, the murky, layered, felt, and sensed.

Made with and by Fecho Rimon, Léa Valéry, Marcel von Brasche, Noam Gil Shuster, Maite Egeolu, Yel Banto, Yevheniya Kravets Alla Kravchenko, Ana Longo Nsame, Famil Zamanli, Jozef Jie Sheng Chua, Marley Meijer, Nayo Sauter, Saghar Saharkhizan Esfhani, Yadhira De Leon Matos, Yadin Bernauer, Sofiia Butiaga, Elisa Zuppini, Toni Steffens and Soraya Lutangu Bonaventure. Styling by Noam Gil Shuster.

Commissioned by the SNDO – School for New Dance Development. Presented with Jakoozi and W139 Amsterdam.

Elisa Zuppini is an Italian-born choreographer and dancer based in Amsterdam, and a graduated from the SNDO – School for New Dance Development. Her practice explores the intersection of movement, systems thinking, and contemporary philosophy. She approaches choreography as a form of relational and affective architecture, where spatial and temporal elements interact dynamically generating meaning. Her work has been presented at a wide range of international festivals and institutions, including the Holland Festival, Dansehallerne (DK), Theater Rotterdam (Feeling Curious? Festival), Frascati Theatre, BASE Milano (FAROUT Festival), Julidans Festival, GAMeC Modern and Contemporary Art Museum Bergamo, FLAM Festival, among others.

Toni Steffens is an artist and acupuncturist trained in dance and choreography. Researching dance as a survival and community preserving mechanism, extending across human and animal lives, they approach dancing by enmeshing thinking, feeling, sensing and moving. Inquiring the cartesian dualism, pervasive to our western societies as a collective wound, Toni aims at developing ontologies that devices embodied knowledge as a tool to navigate political questions. Sensitivity, imagination and emotionality guide as intelligent technologies of our bodies, to assist rewiring the relations we have with our realities. An urgent question of theirs is how healing could look like in our futures to come and what role dance has to play in it.

Soraya Lutangu Bonaventure is a sound, video, and theater maker whose practice materializes the fugitive points of friction between ecstasy and mourning. Guided by a curiosity for how systems of violence interlock with the textures of everyday life, her work explores the degrees of legibility suspended in our gazes and the potential to imagine otherwise. Grounded at the crossroads of embodied knowledge and critical theory, she embraces multiplicity and builds choreographies of both repair and revenge that engage with the poetic notions of presence/absence. Her works and performances have been presented at MoMA PS1, Centre Pompidou, ICA London and Miami, MCBA Museum, Arsenic Theatre, Tanzhaus Zürich, Gessnerallee, Friart Kunsthalle, Hartwig Foundation, and Berghain, among others.

Pauline de Groot is a renowned dancer, choreographer and teacher. Her early training and performance experience in the U.S.A. with Martha Graham, José Limón, Merce Cunningham, Erick Hawkins and André Bernard established her kinship with the so-called Judson Church generation and her rooting in the American avant-garde.
On her return to the Netherlands in 1965, introducing new ideas about movement and aesthetics, she founded a school in her studio (1968) that later formed the foundation of the School for New Dance Development (SNDO) at the Amsterdam University of the Arts in 1975.  As one of the main teachers at the SNDO for 20 years, Pauline de Groot is influential to generations of dancers and -makers in the field.
Up to the 2000s, De Groot created more than fifty choreographies, including Regenmakers (1968), Witte Grond (1972), Paradosolas (1977), Gaps & Bridges (1980), Whole Dances – mud bird (1982), Glass Mountain (1987), Traction (1987), Consistency of Air (1990), VOID – Velocity Of Interfering Data (1995) and Pierre de Mousse (2000).   She toured her performances throughout Europe and the United States.

Thomas Lehmen is a choreographer, dancer, performer and teacher. He studied at the School for New Dance Development in Amsterdam where he was taught by Pauline de Groot, Steve Paxton, Ishmael Houston Jones, Mark Tompkins, Jaap Flier, Ze´v and others. 
From 1990 to 2010 he lived in Berlin, where he developed many solo, group works and projects: amongst others "distanzlos, "mono subjects, "Schreibstück", "Funktionen", "It’s better to...", "Lehmen lernt", which are performed worldwide. 
He gives workshops in divers formats in universities and studios internationally.
Next to guest professorships in Gießen, Hamburg, and Berlin, he held 2010 and 2011 a professorship at the Arizona State University, followed by i.a. the works "Schrottplatz" and "Bitte...". The publications "Schreibstück"("written piece/writing piece", book and score for 3 groups in canon form) and "Funktionen-Toolbox" (aiming towards emergent communicative choreographies) caused lasting international attention and numerous variations.

Jakoozi is a convergence of Amsterdam-based choreographers, who act as a fluid support structure for each other and a host body  for a multitude of movement practices and performance related events. Jakoozi is currently Elisa Zuppini,  Raoni Muzho/Saleh, Fernando Belfiore, Setareh Fatehi Irani, Noha Ramadan, Charlie Laban Trier, Clara Saito, Ahmed El Gendy and Sigrid Stigsdatter Mathiassen. jacuzzi.hotglue.me

W139 is a leading production and presentation space for contemporary art in the center of Amsterdam that has been paving the way for experimentation and new modes of autonomy, self-organization, and collectivity within the arts for 44 years.
Since its founding in 1979—when the monumental building was squatted by a collective of artists—W139 has remained embedded in an engaged and intergenerational community of makers. As an artist-driven organization, W139 puts experimentation at the forefront—providing space for artists to take risks and realize experimental, urgent, and ambitious projects.

SNDO – School for New Dance Development offers a full time four-year professional education course leading to a Bachelor's degree in Art – Choreography. The school was founded in 1975 as an attempt to find new directions for dance next to the
existing forms and styles that dominated the field. After fifty years, the SNDO remains inquisitive, open minded, and in the foreground of progressive developments in the fields of dance and performance. In the curriculum, the school establishes the conditions from which the creativity of the student can emerge. Reflection on the specific qualities of dance and performance as art forms is developed, and awareness of the body and the artistic, social and political implications of working with it take precedence. The SNDO is part of Academy of Theatre and Dance at the Amsterdam University of the Arts. www.sndo.nl