PERSONA is an interdisciplinary practice rooted in movement. Founded in 2019, it emerged from a shared interest in the moving body as a site where experiences and memories formed, transformed and performed.
Today, PERSONA is artistically led by Pieter Desmet and Steffi Mennen. Their complementary practices bring together choreography, performance, education, artistic research and dance movement therapy. Movement functions as their common ground: not only as artistic material, but as a way of knowing, learning, relating and caring.
Through long-term research lines and individual projects, PERSONA creates spaces in which artistic, pedagogical and therapeutic perspectives can meet without losing their specificity.
artistic direction
steffi mennen
Steffi is a dancer, choreographer, educator and dance movement therapist. Her practice brings artistic and therapeutic approaches to movement into dialogue, with particular attention to embodied experience, emotional processes and the conditions needed for people to explore movement safely. Within PERSONA, Steffi works across creation, research, education and care, contributing both artistic and therapeutic expertise.
pieter desmet
Pieter is a dancer, choreographer, educator and visual artist. His practice moves between performance, movement research and education, with recurring interests in identity, grief, memory and collective experience. Alongside his work as a performer and maker, he teaches contemporary dance, improvisation and embodied artistic awareness. Within PERSONA, Pieter develops artistic research and creation while connecting choreographic practice to pedagogical and participatory contexts.
practice
PERSONA approaches movement from four interconnected practices: research, creation, education and care. These are not separate departments or fixed methods. They overlap, challenge and inform one another. A question may begin in artistic research, become a performance, enter an educational context and generate new knowledge for a caring practice — or move in the opposite direction.
Movement as a way of discovering
research
We use artistic and embodied research to stay with questions before searching for answers. Through movement, observation, conversation, experimentation and reflection, we investigate experiences that are often difficult to grasp through language alone. Research can exist independently, but also forms the ground from which creations, educational practices and care trajectories develop.
care
Movement as a space for support
We work with movement within therapeutic and caring contexts, drawing on dance movement therapy and embodied approaches to well-being. Care within PERSONA can take the form of therapeutic trajectories or can inform the conditions in which artistic and research processes take place. We distinguish clearly between artistic work that is care-informed and work that is explicitly therapeutic.
create
Movement as artistic material
We create performances, choreographic works, publications and interdisciplinary forms in which movement can carry, transform and complicate experience. Creation is not simply an outcome of research: making generates questions of its own. Depending on the project, movement enters into dialogue with image, sound, text, objects, space and participation.
Movement as a way of exchanging knowledge
educate
We develop classes, workshops, learning trajectories and professional exchanges in which embodied practice is central. Rather than treating the learner as a passive receiver, we create conditions for observation, experimentation, reflection and agency. Our educational practice grows from our work as artists and feeds back into our research.