Niek Wagenaar is a contemporary dancer and choreographer from Amsterdam. While studying at the Amsterdam School of the Arts (Urban Contemporary Dance), he joined Hofesh Shechter’s company in London. Niek continued working for the company after graduation while laying the groundwork for his own movement practice. His contemporary dance initiative, Niek Wagenaar’s Nymphs, premiered his first work Nymphs in the spring of 2022 which has since won awards in The Netherlands and abroad. In 2023, his second work premiered entitled After All, which also received positive reviews from Dutch critics.
Niek’s work is fluid and organic, sensual yet powerful, rhythmically exciting and rich in physical sensation and imagery. Rooted in today’s society, Niek, together with his international troupe of young dancers, brings major topics to his audience in a personal and intimate way. With a sensitive movement language, they tell recognizable stories based on universal feelings.
Within the context of New Adventure 2024 #2, Niek explores the physical language for his new performance Sabbath, in which three dancers come together for a witches’ sabbath. His research draws a parallel between witchcraft and the queer community, and seeks to redefine the conventional image of queers and witches from a more inclusive lens. In the November 2024 residency at ICK, he focuses on developing and specifying the dance vocabulary for the performance, and explores how choices in that language can influence the viewer’s experience to transform initial negative perceptions of queers and outsiders into positive feelings of inclusivity and belonging.
