About

Juanjo Arqués is a Spanish choreographer based between Lisbon and Amsterdam. Before moving to the Netherlands, he danced with Ballet Victor Ullate and with English National Ballet.

Arqués joined Dutch National Ballet in 2004 under the direction of Ted Brandsen, and three years later he was promoted to Soloist. He performed works by notable choreographers including William Forsythe, Christopher Wheeldon, Alexei Ratmansky, David Dawson and Hans van Manen. In 2012 he decided to stop his dancing career to focus exclusively on choreography. Four years later he was appointed as Young Creative Associate by Het National Ballet.

Arqués has created the majority of his works for Dutch National Ballet and its Junior ensemble but also has produce creations for international ballet companies and festivals such as the Birmingham Royal Ballet, Theatre Ballet Moscow, Compañia Nacional de Danza, NRW Junior Ballet Dortmund, Acosta Danza, Deutsche Ballet & Oper am Rhein, National Moravian-Silesian Theater, New York Choreographic Institute, Origen Cultural Festival, Whim W’him, and Continuum Contemporary Ballet. He has been named ‘Promising Talent Of Year 2017’ by Tanz Magazine for his work ‘Homo Ludens’. In 2014 he was nominated for the Dutch Dans Awards Prize, in 2016 for the prestigious Golden Mask Awards in Moscow for best choreographer and best classical production for ‘Minos’ and this season he was nominated for the Benois de la Danse 2019 as best choreographer for his latest creation ‘Ignite’

Mr. Arqués is a versatile choreographer who works within the dance field but also in opera, theatre, films, fashion, and performing arts. In 2014 he collaborated in staging the theatre production ‘Vaslav’ based on Arthur Japin's novel Vaslav Nijinsky and ‘Performing Gender’, a European dance project on the research themes for identity and sexual orientation at the Mambo Museum in Bologna. In 2016 film directors Saskia Boddeke and Peter Greenaway commissioned Mr. Arqués to choreograph a poetic multi-screen-video installation inspired by Matisse’s paintings ‘La Danse’ and ‘La Musique’ at the Louis Vuitton Foundation in Paris. The following season, Arques was invited to New York University as a guest artist to research his choreographic vision in dance.

In 2019 he was invited to choreograph ‘Biomimicry’ a dance film in collaboration with Dutch fashion designer Iris van Herpen and Dutch National Ballet.

Besides re-staging some of his latest works with some international ballet companies, Arques’s upcoming new creations are the famous opera La Traviata with Semperoper Dresden, the musical Cabaret in Schauspiel Stuttgart, Rusalka with Dutch National Opera, and Full Frontal for Dutch National Ballet.

“I believe my work can be witnessed as a dynamic painting of movement that allows for a number of individual interpretations, all different but heading in the same direction”