Simon Bus

2023 – now

Simon Bus - foto Renate Beense / DansBrabant

foto Renate Beense / DansBrabant

Simon Bus (Hoensbroek 1989) was already heavily impressed by the power moves of Kujo the Crazy Water Buffalo when he was 12 years old. He was a member of the Limburg fusion crew Trashcan Heroes and was part of the (inter)national battle scene. In 2013 he graduated from the Maastricht Academy of Fine Arts & Design (Video-Visual Communication) – at the same time he continued to dance. With his inquisitive eye and hyper-flexible body, Simon stretches ideas about breakdance. As of 2021, Simon is PLAN creator under the aegis of Corpo Máquina and Parktheater. 2023, his last PLAN year, he shaped in collaboration with DansBrabant.

This collaboration tasted like more from both sides. From 2024, Simon Bus will be working as a core creator from DansBrabant.

The starting point for Simon’s work is his fascination with the discomfort of everyday existence. The game between having control and yet losing it again is a recurring theme. Sharp, brutal and humorous. Simon turns dance forms inside out and upside down. In addition to breakdance as the ultimate source of inspiration, Simon finds points of reference in Butoh and in the work of Albert Camus, Egon Schiele, Francis Bacon and David Lynch, for example.

As part of Thinx, Parktheater’s innovation project for young choreographers, Simon and Roy Overdijk created Febris – a declaration of love to the fever dream, in which limbs seem to double on the spot.

During the first PLAN years, Self-portrait, Man on Orange floor, a solo of his own, was created on a 2×2 floor. Two dance portraits for others followed: Paulina on Yellow Floor and Balder on Blue Floor. And the portrait continues to inspire – this year Three Studies (for a selfportrait) premiered – a production for three dancers, incorporating traces of break, house, modern dance and butoh.

The last PLAN year has been all about making and research. During the past Dutch Dance Days, Simon received the Innovation Award. Under that guise, next festival he will bring together a number of dancers with whom he made contact via Instagram: an international group of kindred spirits who until now had only digital contact. Makers who all work interdisciplinary, with a focus on choreography and the power of image. In Maastricht, they are setting up a workshop together as a kind of TEFAF-like exhibition: a gallery with its own workstations where the makers make and show under the eye of the public for three days and nights.

This summer, Simon leaves for a period to Japan, birthplace of Butoh, to exchange and work with the artist collective MuDA of choreographer QUICK ∀ Takahiko Fukui and artist Haruki Akiyama.

Under the wings of DansBrabant, Simon will work from 2024 on Three Men (working title), among other things, a piece in which he brings together a member of his first breakdance crew with two recently graduated dancers.

Simon is a bizarre, extraordinary dancer, with a movement language all his own – open and always looking to exchange with other creators and other methods of working. DansBrabant, also not averse to pushing the beaten path with a little agility, is enormously pleased with the world of knowledge and interests Simon brings with him.