Roos Helena
Performing artist, choreographer and somatic facilitator exploring intimacy, somatic inheritance and the political body.
Roos Helena is an interdisciplinary performing artist, choreographer, and facilitator. Her work investigates how bodies absorb, negotiate, and express relational dynamics shaped by cultural, social, and environmental contexts. She explores intimacy, protection, and tension through movement, durational practice, text, and material-based and site-responsive environments.
About
With a foundation in contemporary dance and education, her practice has expanded into contact improvisation, eco-somatic approaches, and interdisciplinary collaboration. Working nomadically across multiple continents, she has developed a sustained inquiry into how geographic and cultural contexts shape embodiment, perception, and relational behaviour.
Her work is informed by social constructionist thought, intersectional feminist perspectives, and trauma-informed practices, positioning the body as a site where personal experience and collective structures intersect.
Selected Works
Nadie Me Enseñó Esto
Guadalajara, Mexico
Date: 30.10.2025
Invitation: Cultura Jalisco, Festival Internacional de Danza
About the Work
Nadie Me Enseñó Esto - is an interdisciplinary performance that moves through the inner terrains of survival and desire. The work examines how guilt, shame, and unspoken histories imprint themselves into the body, shaping its strategies of protection, withholding, exposure, and longing.
‘’Déjame hacer el amor con mi culpa. Estoy congelada y ardiendo, en un mundo que ensaya el sueño.’’
Choreography: Roos Helena van Barneveld
Sound: Fernando Feria
Light: Jerry Salas
Costume: Guadalupe Montes
SIETE DÍAS
Guadalajara, Mexico
Date: 18.07 - 25.07
Collaboration: Rayon 376
Durational Performance / Exhibition
Siete Días is a week-long durational performance in which I lived in solitude and silence inside a four-walled room, continuously witnessed by daily audiences and by cameras operating 24/7. Through writing, movement, and sensory listening, the work examines how memory inhabits the body, how inner architectures surface when external stimuli disappear, and how one begins to rebuild after rupture or collapse.
Over seven days, I wrote continuously—tracking sensations, thoughts, dissociations, and small reorganizations. These texts, accumulating as a material archive of duration, were later exhibited inside the same room, transforming the space from a site of living into a site of witnessing.
“I asked myself what would shift in me if I were observed continuously—or not at all. I feel every encounter either shrinks us away from our truest selves or expands us toward it. If love were an action rather than a sentiment, how would we behave?”
Frecuencias Tangibles
Guadalajara, Mexico
Date: 25.10.2024
Invitation: PHI MOVEMENT
About the work
Frecuencias Tangibles is a multidisciplinary choreographic work that explores the heart as both a physical engine and an emotional, energetic, and symbolic center. The piece investigates how cardiac rhythms—cellular, cultural, spiritual—shape movement and connection, revealing the body as a vibrating field of memory and relation.
The choreography moves through layered heart-scapes: the biological pulse, emotional resonance, and mythic dimension. Drawing from cardiology, cellular intelligence, and the imagery of the “golden heart,” the dancers inhabit the tension between what is seen and what is sensed, what is tangible and what remains invisible.
Choreography: Roos Helena van Barneveld
Music: Pauli Campos & Jorge Vargas Bravo
Bleeding Fruits
Cozumel, Mexico
Date: 08.08.2025
Invitation: Ben Amil/ Amalgama Residencia
About the work
Bleeding Fruits is an eco-somatic performance in which red fruits stain and bleed across surface and skin, creating a visceral map of love and grief, creation and rupture. The work explores resilience, sensuality, and the embodied memory held within the female body, tracing the edges of societal expectation, reclamation, and the complexities of womanhood today. The feminine appears here as both tender and untamed—an ecosystem of story, hunger, silence, and resistance.
‘’I have ripened into depth, carrying love and grief, in the same pulse, at the same time.’’
Photography by Yolanda Vidal
Solo Preguntas
Guadalajara, Mexico
Date: 30.05.2025
Invitation: Phi Movement
About the Work
Solo Preguntas is a choreographic inquiry into the body as a questioning, relational being. In a moment when global ruptures repeat and uncertainty becomes a daily condition, the piece resists resolution. Instead, it treats not-knowing as a physical state—an embodied negotiation between doubt, exposure, and the longing to be held.
At its center, the work holds a single question:
When everything collapses, how do we hold one another when we arrive with nothing but ourselves?
Created and choreographed by Roos Helena, with live noise improvisation by Fernando Feria.