“Ver is a strong, at times mesmerizing performer”
-Rita Felciano, San Francisco Bay Guardian
Ronja Ver is a dancer, dance maker, teacher, parent, and organizer. A perpetual student of performance as a way of participating in community and a tool for social change, they are deeply inspired by physical, social and mass movement, and its capacity to create meaningful impact on a personal and global scale. A native of Finland, Ver has worked and performed throughout Europe and in the United States, including with Nancy Stark Smith and Mike Vargas in Seattle and New York City; NAKA Dance Theater, Avy K Productions, Sara Shelton Mann, Piñata Dance Collective, Scott Wells and Dancers and Risa Jaroslow & Dancers in the San Francisco Bay Area. Previous posts include the National Theater of Finland and Riitta Vainio Dance Company, and Ver is proud to be featured spinning underwater in Steve Paxton’s DVD Material For The Spine.
Ronja Ver is continually inspired by the art and practice of Contact Improvisation, which provides a place for play and magic in their life. They are faculty at Moving On Center School for Participatory Arts and Somatic Practices, and adjunct faculty at St Mary’s College LEAP program. Ver is a graduate of Moving On Center, and holds an MFA in dance from Hollins University.
ARTIST STATEMENT
My work is quiet but loud.
I ask to gently strip away your skin and touch you underneath. I insert myself like a needle, or maybe a thorn from a flower.
What do you feel?
Please tell me.
These dances come to existence from a necessity to speak, to question, to participate. The form that they take is the form that offers itself for me to find a way in. I am looking for a way in, into your mind, your body. The work is created in our meeting. It does not exist without you.
I make work in attempt to understand the world around me, to make sense of what may have none. I dance to map what otherwise is not yet comprehensible to me. I invite you to experience the world through a poetics of the body, which is to feel and to be felt.
My work asks what matters. What do we care about? What were the choices that brought us here? These are questions I ask of myself, and I try to lie less every time I answer. I lean towards discomfort, because it is a mobilizing force. I move in a guise of confusion, of embarrassment and not knowing: places where our shared edges of humanity rub against each other and create friction, make contact, meet.