De Dansers, Yeli Beurskens og Youri Peters

Yeli Beurskens completed her Bachelor of Dance in 2013 at ArtEZ Institute of the Arts. After her studies she worked in various productions of Dutch companies. Creations of which she was part are Quite Discontinuous (2013) and Kraai (2015) by Jasper van Luijk, Spring Tide (2013) and About Lucian (2015) by Jens van Daele and Goldmund (2014) by Korzo and Orkater.
In 2016 she worked with Ricardo Ambrozió/Untamed for the re-creation of Mind’s Mausoleum. In 2019 they created together the solo performance just I, which toured through The Netherlands and Portugal.
Since 2016 she works with De Dansers and participated in their interactive children’s performance Tetris, physical dance-concert Ten Noorden van Nergens (2016), theatrical children’s performance Binnenbeest (2017) and Hold Your Horses (2021).
Yeli is based in Arnhem where she is part of Danscollectief Arnhemse Meisjes, with whom she creates site-specific performances and organizes a platform for contemporary dance, and is currently studying the movement philosophy of Jozef Frucek and Linda Kapetanea in the form of the Fighting Monkey Mentorship.

Youri Peters started dancing at the age of 15, learning various dance styles like house, hip-hop, jazz, contemporary and ballet. He graduated at Amsterdam School of Arts as a contemporary dancer in 2014, after finishing his Internship at the Kibbutz Contemporary Dance Company, Israel.
Youri worked for Johannes Wieland at Staatstheater Kassel, Germany, and danced pieces of Liat Waysbort, Krisztina de Chatel, Sharon Fridman and Jasper Van Luijk. He has volunteered teaching dance for the Chance to Dance Foundation and he performs now in several pieces of De Dansers for children and (young) adults, such as Spoon Spoon and Hold Your Horses.

About De Dansers and the performance Hold Your Horses
De Dansers is an Utrecht-based company of dancers and musicians, led by choreographer/dancer Josephine van Rheenen and composer/musician Guy Corneille. We create «dance concerts»: organic meetings of modern dance and live music. Performances by De Dansers tell accessible, intuitively compelling stories about liberation and surrender, in which playful anarchism is never far away.

Partnering plays an important role in all our productions, and especially so in Hold Your Horses.

Hold Your Horses is a dance concert about the desire to hold on. De Dansers tell their story with twelve hands, including the accompanying bodies, and a few guitars. We see hands grasping, mistaking, touching, taking off, falling down and plucking guitar strings. We see passion and distance. We see the passage of time, fixed in a tight rhythm. We see people, sometimes close to each other, sometimes endlessly far away. We don’t see horses, although we do feel them. We don’t see the whimsical world that we can’t get a grip on. We do feel it slip through our fingers.

Hold Your Horses is about the urge to hold on to something or someone, in a world that is becoming increasingly elusive. Six performers bring the performance to life with dedication and musicality. Hold Your Horses has a spectacular, acrobatic movement language, and never loses its human sensitivity. As one body, the dancers move in a continuous flow, propelled by Guy Corneille’s live music full of compelling guitar compositions and gripping songs.

In the workshop two of the dancers of Hold Your Horses will use the creating methods of De Dansers to work together with the participants, with the emphasis on partnering.

Foto: Bart Grietens