FUTURE ALTERNATES

SIMONA DEACONESCU, VANESSA GOODMAN

20250420_1217_Faceless Portrait_remix_01js97r6qfe94rsbr2vcfs59pd

THE BODY IS BECOMING

PROJECT SUMMARY

Future Alternates is Vanessa Goodman’s and Simona Deaconescu’s second work as a creative duo, scheduled to premiere in March 2027, inviting the audience to reflect on what defines us as humans and how our future will unfold in relation to nature and technology. The performance proposes a speculative look at the body and looks upon the politics of modifications, through a group piece with an international cast, and music created by acclaimed electronic music project loscil (Scott Morgan).

Future Alternates interrogates these politics of modification out of necessity, vanity, and enhancement. The artists are interested in applying simple body-prosthetics used in the makeup industry for special effects to augment and explore modification and build an abstract idea of a future body. In a society that is often consumed with the beauty industry, they will work to dismantle the concept of traditional beauty and imagine a world rooted in function vs. aesthetics.

What will our physical bodies be? How will we remain, function, and excel? Where will failure live? What is an alternate state, body, and reality? Who will be organic, cyborg, artificial, and augmented?

Previously, through BLOT, the Romanian-Canadian duo drew inspiration from Donna Haraway’s Cyborg Manifesto to reclaim the body outside a patriarchal structural language. Their new research will continue to expand on these politics and reframe the body within a posthuman feminist phenomenology. Thus, their new work delves into the possibilities of decentralizing the human experience, exploring how the body might merge with non-human entities like machines, ecosystems, and even digital worlds.

The new work unravels the binary between self and other, flesh and machine, embracing a fluid multiplicity where identity is not fixed but an ongoing process of mutation and adaptation. The choreography will embody a sympoietic logic—where the body is an open vessel, constantly shaped by its entanglements with the more-than-human world. Here, agency is diffused, not anchored to a single being but spread across networks of life, technology, and ecological flows.

The performers move through a speculative cartography, tracing the contours of bodies that are always in flux, co-composed by the environments they inhabit and the technologies that co-create them. They challenge the audience to consider new forms of agency—how bodies can adapt, mutate, and thrive in symbiosis with their surroundings, free from the constraints of human exceptionalism.

The dance artists want to use the stage as a space of confrontation, where the audience must grapple with the consequences of a future in which the human is inseparable from the artificial. The bodies in Future Alternates are both augmented and constrained; their movements choreographed to reflect the conflicting forces of liberation and control. This duality exposes the complex layers of influence technology exerts—not only enhancing but also colonizing the human form, embedding systems of power within the very flesh.

Already awarded a Chrystal Dance Prize by Dance Victoria, the project will be developed in residency at The Scotiabank Dance Centre (CA), La Briqueterie Choreographic Centre (FR) and Vitlycke Centre for the Performing Arts (SE). The official premiere is scheduled in March 2027 with the Scotiabank Dance Centre in Vancouver. The team is now actively looking for partners to co-produce or present the work.

SIMONA DEACONESCU

Through her work, Simona Deaconescu examines social constructs, bridging fiction with objective reality. She is drawn to exploring critical scenarios involving the body and speculating on its role in both past and future societies. Her creative process often unfolds through collective work, whether in interdisciplinary groups or duos. In her projects, the performative meets the cinematic within environments where nature, history, and technology intersect—expanding the notion of choreography beyond the limits of the human body.

In 2014, she founded Tangaj Collective, a transdisciplinary production company bringing together artists and researchers. From 2015 to 2023, she served as the artistic director of the Bucharest International Dance Film Festival. Her contribution to Romanian contemporary dance was recognized with an award from the National Centre for Dance in Bucharest in 2016, and she was honored as an associated artist of the institution in 2022.

Simona studied choreography at the National University of Theatre and Film in Bucharest and film directing at the Media University of Romania. Over the years, she has developed her work within international networks such as Moving Digits, MODINA, Biofriction, and Forecast. She was named an Aerowaves Artist in both 2018 and 2022, selected as a Moving Balkan Artist for 2025, and has been an artist-in-residence at institutions including PACT Zollverein (DE), Forum Dança (PT), Lavanderia a Vapore (IT), Cultivamos Cultura (PT), and Trafo House (HU). Her creations—spanning performances, installations, and films—have been presented in theatres, galleries, museums, and alternative venues across the Balkans, Eastern and Central Europe, Canada, Mexico, South Africa, Madagascar, and the USA.

Among her recent works is Ramananenjana, a docu-fiction performance about a forgotten mass dance event in Madagascar, co-created with Malagasy choreographer Gaby Saranouffi under the mentorship of Mathilde Monnier, which premiered in 2022 at radialsystem in Berlin. BLOT—Body Line of Thought, a nude duet exploring the complex relationship between the human body and its microbiome, was co-created with Vanessa Goodman in 2020 and officially premiered in 2022, with presentations across Europe and upcoming tours in British Columbia.

Her video installation Women at Work—Crossroads, Rhythms, and Continuities, created with Argentinian artist Flor Firvida Martin, examines the choreography of labor in the lives of women from South America and Eastern Europe. It has been shown in galleries in Romania and Mexico and will continue its trajectory with future presentations in Ecuador and a major exhibition commissioned by the Museum of Contemporary Art in Bucharest in 2026.

Her most recent collaboration with interactive designer Grigore Burloiu, Collective Cadence, is a lecture performance exploring the power of moving crowds, presented in 2024 in Budapest, Ljubljana, Düsseldorf, and Bucharest.

Future projects include The Choreography of Water, a group piece developed with acclaimed visual artist Ioana Vreme Moser, and Future Alternates, a new work co-created with Canadian collaborator Vanessa Goodman.

VANESSA GOODMAN

Vanessa Goodman respectfully acknowledges that she lives, works, and creates on the stolen ancestral and unceded territories of the Coast Salish peoples, including the Sḵwx̱wú7mesh (Squamish), Stó:lō, Səl̓ílwətaʔ/Selilwitulh (Tsleil-Waututh), and xʷməθkʷəy̓əm (Musqueam) Nations. A third-generation settler, her family history is rooted in ancestral ties to Lithuania, Latvia, and Poland.

She holds a BFA from Simon Fraser University and has been the artistic director of Action at a Distance Dance Society since 2015. Her artistic interests lie in work that carries significance beyond aesthetic appeal—choreography, for her, serves as a medium to explore embodiment and politics. Her choreographic practice focuses on cultivating intimacy between the body and its environment, often using generative systems to construct performative activations. Her work deeply investigates the embodiment of sonic propositions, drawing audiences into experiential, conceptual, and physical landscapes.

Throughout her career, Goodman has received numerous accolades, including the Iris Garland Emerging Choreographer Award (2013), the Yulanda M. Faris Scholarship (2017/18), the Chrystal Dance Prize (2018/19 & 2024/25), the Schultz Endowment from Banff Centre for Arts and Creativity (2019), and participation in the international “Space to Fail” program (2019/20) in New Zealand, Australia, and Vancouver. Her work has been supported by residencies at institutions such as Cultivamos Cultura, The Dance Centre, Dance Victoria, Harbourfront Centre, the Shadbolt Centre, and The Banff Centre for Arts and Creativity, where she has also served on faculty. She also facilitated and presented work for Trinity Laban’s 2020 Co-Lab Project in London.

In her ongoing 15-year collaboration with The Dance Centre in Vancouver, she is currently engaged in a three-year artist-in-residence position. This initiative focuses on activating liminal spaces within interior and exterior architectures, connecting embodied experience to the way we shift and negotiate our relationship with both urban landscapes and the natural world.

Her commissioned works include Tuning for Alexis Fletcher and Edictum for Juan Villegas, as well as Strike Tone for Votive Dance. She has also created pieces for professional training programs such as Springboard Dansé Montréal, Lamondance, Modus Operandi, and Simon Fraser University, with recurring engagements across the years 2010, 2011, 2013, 2015, 2017, 2019, 2021, and 2022. In 2024, she created a new work for Ballet BC 44, with another premiere scheduled for 2025.

Recent collaborations include Graveyards and Gardens, co-created with Pulitzer Prize-winning composer Caroline Shaw, which has toured extensively with over 40 performances across Canada, the US, and Europe, and BLOT—Body Line of Thought, a duet created with Romanian choreographer Simona Deaconescu. Both works are scheduled to continue touring into 2025—Graveyards and Gardens will be presented by the Celebrity Series in Boston, while BLOTwill tour through Perform Europe to venues across the continent.