ABOUT SIMON
Simon Ellis is a New Zealand-born independent artist and choreographer, whose work has included site-specific investigations, screen dance, installation, webart and traditional theatre performances. He studied at the Victorian College of the Arts in Melbourne and has a practice-led PhD in choreography from Melbourne University.  His projects focus on dance and performance environments that provoke and contextualise human psychology with particular interest in the effects of human memory.  Simon is also currently the practice-led research fellow at the University of Northampton. 

ABOUT THE WORK
Gertrud is an imagined conversation between choreographer Gertrud Bodenwieser (who died in 1959) and Simon, a solo performer.  The piece challenges today's "culture of forgetting" by bringing a personality from the past, voiced in Austrian and in English by two women who danced with Bodenwieser in the 1930s and 40s, to vivid life.  To read Simon's blogs about his process and progress on Gertrud, click here. 

WHERE YOU'VE SEEN HIM
Simon's dance films then/now and Inert were screened at moves08 in Manchester this April.  Most recently seen at Australian Performing Arts Market in February of this year, Inert received two Dance Magazine Critics Awards - for 'Best New Work' and 'Most Outstanding Choreography'.

WHERE YOU CAN SEE HIM NEXT
Simon will perform with Kirstie Simson, Christian Burns and others at Canal Danse in Paris on 21 June and in Syros, Greece on 29 June.  His film then/now will be screened at the American Dance Festival's Dancing for the Camera: International Fesitval of Film and Video Dance in Durham, North Carolina on 11 July.