Teacher, Scenography

Carly Everaert has designed costumes for more than 200 stage productions, ranging from huge operas to intimate dialogues, in the Netherlands and Germany. Her costumes are extremely colorful (‘I used to describe myself as painter,’), literally and figuratively multi-layered (many of them are collages of found clothing materials, tailored to fit each actor’s body – ‘their bodies are my inspiration’) and gender fluid (see interview).

Research
In my research Maria Ines Villasmil (SNDO) and I developed a movement workshop about the question how knowledge can be found in the body itself. I wrote a lecture titled ‘Creating spaces for other(ed)’. It was my contribution to the annual Costume, Scenography and Critical Theory symposium at the Arts University of Bournemouth (2021). And I interviewed Esther Snelder, who teaches acting at the Mime School on what happens if you perform on stage in your own clothes: Is there a moment when your experience shifts, when you cross an invisible boundary between clothing and costume?’

Links
Carly Everaert Website
A conversation with Carly Everaert
An interview

Teacher, SNDO

Aion Arribas is a movement artist and researcher working with dance, somatics, theory, performance, writing, and video. Their work proposes the queering of body and movement patterns as a way to produce knowledge and as a way to critically approach somatic awareness. Aion's works with different notions of playfulness and pleasure as crucial to learning otherwise and as tools for political positioning. Their practice and pedagogical approach are developed by teaching movement research, facilitating workshops with non-dancers, and presenting work internationally and collaboratively.

Research
Aion's research focuses on the reparative potential of practicing movement in relation to the word pleasure and its many notions. At the same time, they are investigating the implications and transformations within their work of former SNDO teacher Gonnie Heggen's practice of "rapid change in action", which profoundly changed Aoin's way of relating to learning and dance.

Links
shy-play.nl

Bio

Maria Inés Villasmil is a Venezuelan-born dancer, choreographer, dance educator, writer, cultural manager, and academic researcher. Her work is rooted in a strong interest in people, society, social development, and multidisciplinary, multicultural collaboration.

Based in the Netherlands for the past 29 years, she is currently a faculty member at the Academy of Theatre and Dance at the Amsterdam University of the Arts (Amsterdam Hogeschool voor de Kunsten). There, she teaches Contemporary Dance Technique, Improvisation Techniques, and Choreography, and regularly leads workshops that focus on real-time composition processes. She works closely with both the Choreography Department (SNDO) and the Expanded Contemporary Dance Department, where she serves as a coach and has also co-developed projects such as the Critical Somatic Symposium  during 2024 and 2025.

Maria Inés holds a Master’s degree in Choreography and an MBA in Cultural Management and Creative Industries from the University of Salamanca in Spain. She also holds two Bachelor's degrees: one in Sociology from Venezuela, and another in Choreography from the SNDO, where she originally trained.

She served as Interim Manager of the SNDO from October 2020 until December 2021, and was Interim Manager of the Expanded Contemporary Dance Department from February to July 2025. Since 2019, Maria Inés has also been an active member of the ATD research group, contributing to artistic and pedagogical discourse within the Academy

Research 

Scores and Practices of Disobedience

By Maria Ines Villasmil-Prieto

My work as a choreographer, educator, and researcher centers around the use of scores—as both choreographic structures and tools for improvisation and critical engagement. While traditionally understood as fixed sets of instructions, I approach scores as open-ended proposals that invite spontaneous, collaborative, and often unpredictable responses. They serve as catalysts for collective creation, reflecting and challenging broader social dynamics.

At the core of my practice is the belief that improvisation within the frame of a score allows dancers to access the natural intelligence of the moving body. This unfolding—an intimate, embodied inquiry—becomes both the process and the goal. The tension between structure and freedom, between normativity and deviation, reveals the political and pedagogical potential of dance as a relational practice.

Drawing on sociological theory, especially Durkheim’s concept of anomie—the disconnection between individual agency and social norms—I explore how moments of disobedience within score-based practices can foster creativity, innovation, and deeper group dynamics. In the studio, these micro-deviations open space for performers to renegotiate their roles in real time, enhancing both personal agency and collective engagement.

This interplay is not limited to individual sessions. In collaboration with Carly Everaert, I co-developed a workshop for scenography students around the concept of "aware-wearing"—inspired in part by Eugenio Barba. We investigated how the wearing of specific costumes made from particular materials affects the experience of the body and its performativity. Here, somatic awareness, costume, and score intersected in a shared exploration of embodiment, aesthetics, and affect.

Across all of these projects, my teaching and research invite performers to engage critically with how they relate to structure, to one another, and to their environments. By integrating disobedience as a pedagogical tool, I aim to foster more inclusive, flexible practices that support individual expression and collective responsibility.

Ultimately, this work imagines the dance studio as a microcosm of society—a space where power, identity, and creativity are continuously negotiated. The practices developed in this context do not stay confined to the studio; they carry into the world, equipping performers to navigate and reshape the social structures they inhabit. Through this lens, performance becomes both an artistic and social act, cultivating more critical, creative, and engaged individuals.

Links
Interview met Maria Inés Villasmil

Rose  Akras (she/her) was born in São Paulo, Brazil, and has lived and worked in Amsterdam since the mid-1990s. She studied and danced in São Paulo, London, New York, and Amsterdam, holds an MA in Education in the Arts (University of the Arts Amsterdam), and is a certified Somatic Movement Educator.

Since the beginning of her career, Akras has chosen a hybrid path—working as performer, initiator, and teacher-researcher—believing that these roles inform one another, creating an interwoven field that nurtures practice-based research. Akras is the founder - director of the performance art platform FLAM Live Art Amsterdam www.flam.online and is starting a position as performance programmer for a new art space opening in Amsterdam.

As a teacher, she defines her practice as movement research, offering embodiment-based classes and mentorship in diverse areas such as performing and visual arts, architecture, and corporate businesses, both in the Netherlands and abroad (at ATD -Docent Dans bachelor-, ArtEZ, Minerva Academie, Nike Europe, and various institutes  in Brazil, Norway, and Poland, among others). Since 2020 Rose has been developing a practice with people on the autism spectrum, applying embodiment principles in individual coaching.

As a performer, she returned  to the stage in 2019, working with choreographers Vincent Riebeek and Fernando Belfiore.

Ongoing Research in Practice

I am fascinated by the materials that constitute the human body and how their innate qualities and textures can influence and shape a personal movement language, presence, and expression. From the solid to the fluid, from structure to senses, and from internal to external perception of the body…

I intend to facilitate a deeper physical sense of embodiment. My proposition is to explore features of anatomy and physiology while in movement : the skeleton with its sophisticated design, fluids that run like rivers through the body, the delicacy of cells, and the different layers of body tissues. This exploration acknowledges the dialogue between brain and body, sensing and thinking.

When teaching or coaching, the focus is shaped according to participants and each group poses new challenges and questions. Therefore, the practice is not static but rather a flexible container where principles can be dynamically combined in diverse ways. Although grounded in Western anatomy and physiology, it is never a proposition for moving towards ideas of a “universal” or “correct” body. Instead, it is an invitation to explore movement through personal filter—for instance, with one’s bones —allowing perceptions to emerge through movement, words, images, colours, textures, and more.

At the Academy of Theatre and Dance in Amsterdam, the diversity of the Docent Dans student population requires adaptability in both propositions and language, in search of an effective dialogue with students to promote new insights and development of  their qualities.

Research Proposition

Being part of the Embodied Knowledge in Theatre and Dance group (EKTD) allows participants to share research in progress with peers , free from deadline pressures. These meetings generate new perspectives while encouraging us to engage into further developments. Questions from peers can be as challenging as they are supportive, helping  thoughts to evolve.

In 2023 and 2024, as part of the EKTD, I created a graphic map of my teaching practice at ATD. The intention was to clarify the process  and method of the classes. Looking ahead, I propose to research a new aspect of mapping:

How can visual, graphic tools be designed for students to facilitate the creation of a personal movement archive?

Approaching movement as archive is not a new idea, but building from the graphic map already created, the intention is to design graphic forms that ATD students can use as tools to create a personal movement archive, using their own words and input. This could serve as a useful instrument for students to visualize their movement, inspirations, and development during their studies at ATD, and after school, when organising classes or creating work.

By visualising, naming, and tracing areas of interest and inspiration—through words, textures, images, or relations—students can gain new insights, dive deeper into known and unknown aspects of their movement identity, make new connections, and grow.

The first challenging arising is how to design an archiving form that provides a flexible framework—one that helps clarifies without freezing movement identity or constraining change and spontaneity, that permits updating and adaptation along the way.

Inspiration and Theoretical Research

Mariana Lanari and Dr. Nancy Mauro - Flude 

What inspires me about both Lanari and Flude is their proposal to use intuition as a guide for creating and navigating complex systems and their ability to integrate the body perception and awareness into theoretical work, transforming theory into action.

I was first introduced to mapping practices by Mariana Lanari, who, together with R. Bladel, has been developing Archival Consciousness—a complex mapping and archiving method applied in institutions such as the Stedelijk Museum, libraries, and diverse cultural collections. Lanari shared her practices—ranging from simple to highly structured approaches—and encouraged me to create the first mapping of my own classes.

I collaborated and performed with Nancy Mauro-Flude (artist, feminist theoretician, and digital caretaker) while we were both studying Somatic Movement. During this time, she began developing performative online virtual mapping as a way of hosting her artistic research. By drawing connections between body systems and computer systems, Flude brings somatics into the computing world, which she describes as “embodied coding” and “embodied cognition.”

Although my research is not related to computing, and the archiving tool I designed for students is primarily a practical device, I recognise possible intersections with Flude’s eclectic way of linking disciplines, fields of study, sociocultural contexts, theory and the experiential and perceptual. I also intend to explore some of her publications, such as Methodology of Risks and Experimental Prototyping, among others.

www.archivalconsciousness.org

https://www.rmit.edu.au/profiles/m/nancy-flude

nancymauroflude.academia.edu

Bio

S†ëfan Schäfer is an Amsterdam-based designer and researcher investigating the power of death and commemorative ritual in relation to environmental devastation. All projects result in various media and are declared D.E.A.D. (Death. Environment. Anthropocene. Design). They have been internationally exhibited and are close collaborations with people and institutions of different fields: for instance anthropology, poetry, music, hacking, dance, theatre, music-theatre artists, end-of-life care, funeral industry, green funeral activism.

Research

In June 2023 Schäfer started his Professional Doctorate (PD) at DAS Research, lectorate of the Academy of Theater and Dance, entitled “Breaking Apart Together: Performing speculative design with dying mountains and glaciers”. Given the increasing mortality rate of glaciers and mountains in the Alps and Iceland: What role can speculative design play in enabling humans and more-than-humans to face and respond to the death of glaciers and mountains? Can mountains and glaciers be equal collaborators in the design process regarding climate crisis? How are both, humans and more-than humans moved emotionally by the movement of mountains and glaciers as they cope with (future) ecological grief?

https://letdeathdanceagain.net/

Teacher, SNDO

Tiana is a dancer, choreographer, teacher, writer, healing practitioner, screamer (and doesn't think any of these things are really separate from each other). They work with voice and body to amplify the unsayable and as an adapter to be together with people in spaces in uncomfortable, present, vulnerable and porus ways. They are a certified Klein Technique teacher, a graduate of S.N.D.O. (2016), an avid pedagogue who works to question how we position ourselves in the world from physical/political perspectives. They have been teaching at SNDO since 2017 and at FONTYS since 2023. Tiana's work and movement practices are strongly influenced by Ria Higler, Susan Klein, Judith Sanchez Ruiz and the constant ongoing collaborations and exchanges in and out of the studio with numerous artists and thinkers which is a huge part of the way that they understand learning as affective and care practices. 

Research

My research looks into biases and belief systems from the point of our embodied experience. How are beliefs held in our bodies? How do they support or hinder our ability to learn or change? Change our posture? What is the relationship to healing? What are the belief systems in the institution that we are working in? In our classroom? Belief systems sometimes (often) come from our lived experiences and are often our system’s way of dealing with and making sense of the challenges that we have faced and continue to face on every scale. The solidification of these beliefs lives alongside our experience of what is mostly a patriarchal, capitalist, binary, colonial culture. I’m curious how to question these internal systems. What are the uses of the un/known in teaching and in learning contexts? Can the body through our ability to have non-linear experience be a site of change?

Website: https://itsallmoving.com/