ABOUT HÉLÈNE
Hélène Simoneau is a French-Canadian choreographer exploring themes of intimacy, agency, identity, sexuality, and power. Rooted in form, her movement is created in reverence to its lineage yet subverts traditional ways of being within dance by proposing new ones.
Hélène is a self-proclaimed
“late-bloomer” in the dance field.
One of nine children, she grew up in rural, French-speaking Québec. Her family appreciated the arts, but a young Hélène had never envisioned dance as a potential career path.
This changed at 17, when she began pursuing her BFA in a competitive conservatory program. Hélène had minimal prior dance training and was attending school in English for the first time. She found a sense of grounding in making dances — a way to communicate more wholly and explore more deeply what dance had to offer.
As such, Hélène’s choreographic pursuits blossomed in parallel with her more formal technical training and performance experience. Hers is not a linear path from performer to choreographer, and she makes work without a pronounced partiality between contemporary and ballet.
Hélène continues to hone her artistic voice nationally and internationally.
BIO
Hélène Simoneau is a French-Canadian choreographer exploring themes of intimacy, agency, identity, sexuality, and power. Her choreography has been commissioned by Oregon Ballet Theatre, The Juilliard School, Charlotte Ballet, PARA.MAR Dance Theatre, Vitacca Ballet, Amy Seiwert’s Imagery, BalletX, the Ailey School, Dimensions Dance Theatre, and the American Dance Festival. She was recently a Choreography Fellow at New York City Center and received a 2021 Guggenheim Fellowship. She has also been a resident artist at Baryshnikov Arts Center, NYU/Tisch, NCCAkron, and a fellow of The NYU Center for Ballet and the Arts, Ailey’s New Directions Choreography Lab, the Bogliasco Foundation, and the Swiss International Coaching Project for Choreographers (SiWiC) in Zurich. Simoneau was awarded first place for Choreography at the 13th Internationales Solo-Tanz-Theater Festival in Stuttgart, Germany, for her solo “the gentleness was in her hands.” Originally from Luceville, a small village near Rimouski, in Eastern Québec, Simoneau now divides her time between Montréal and NYC.
Photos: Whitney Browne, Todd Turner
