Youri Peters was born in The Netherlands. He started dancing at the age of 15, learning various dance styles like house, hip-hop, jazz, contemporary, and ballet. He graduated from Amsterdam School of Arts as a contemporary dancer in 2014, after finishing his Internship at the Kibbutz Contemporary Dance Company, Israel.
Youri worked for Johannes Wieland at Staatstheater Kassel, Germany, and danced pieces of Liat Waysbort, Krisztina de Chatel, Sharon Fridman, and Jasper Van Luijk. He has volunteered to teach dance for the Chance to Dance Foundation and he danced in several pieces from De Dansers, based in The Netherlands. Recently he has started working for Katja Heitman’s Motus Mori movement archive and for Dalton Jansen.
Marie Khatib-Shahidi was born in France. She started dancing Latin, Oriental and African dances before graduating in jazz and ballet at Choreia, in Paris. After that, she developed her interest for contemporary dance, participating in varied international projects and workshops. She worked for Karine Saporta’s and Arketip’s dance companies in France and Companhia Instavel in Portugal. She has performed in works by Sharon Fridman, Livia Marquez, Anna Mickailova, among others, in different european countries, and has as well joined social projects with dance. She’s now in several pieces from De Dansers, based in The Netherlands.
Youri and Marie have been collaborating since 2015.
After their first creative encounter in a music and dance collective in Paris, they decide to continue research together and move to Amsterdam.
Thus, besides their work as dancers they start their own collective with which they teach to amateur and professional dancers and choreograph. For their pieces and improvisation performances, they already collaborated with live music, choirs and professional dance academies. As makers, they believe in the importance of the arts in the opening of the imagination and empathy. Therefore they aim to make the theater accessible for a broad audience by performing in unexpected locations a work that strongly communicates. The stage is for them a place to dialogue with their audience.