Sedrig Verwoert

Sedrig Verwoert was born in Suriname and moved at the age of three to Amsterdam, where he later took the Urban Contemporary dance course at Amsterdam University of the Arts. In 2013, he won first prize at the prestigious Eurovision Young Dancers Competition. He then received a scholarship from the Van den Ende Foundation to continue his training with Igal Perry, artistic director of the American Peridance Contemporary Dance Company. One year later, Verwoert joined this company in New York, transferring to the Kibbutz Contemporary Dance Company in Israel in 2015.

In 2017, he returned to the Netherlands, where he received a contract as a dancer with ICK Amsterdam. Since 2019, Verwoert has been a freelance dancer and has performed works by Emio Greco and Pieter C. Scholten, Nacera Belaza, Vincent Colomes, Amos Ben-Tal, Emanuel Gat, Rami Be’er, Igal Perry, Maurice Causey and Troels Primdahl.

Verwoert has also been active as a choreographer for some years now. As a guest choreographer with Dutch National Ballet, he presented the solo The hard rocks will seem soft to us in 2019 and the group work L’Autre Côté in September 2020. He has been a Young Creative Associate with the company since the beginning of 2021. In this position, he created the dance film I Feel It Too, as a part of the programme Young Creatives. Verwoert drew inspiration for this film from life during the corona pandemic. Do All Dogs Go To Heaven? which premiered in 2022 in Made in Amsterdam is a work by Sedrig Verwoert on today's world, in which themes such as virtual reality and identity are extremely relevant. He has also worked as a choreographer and dancer on Beyoncé’s visual album Black is King, and he was artist in residence with De Appel Art Centre, one of the most important centres of contemporary art in Amsterdam. In October 2021 Verwoert was curator of the Black Achievement Month programme Celebrating Diversity, during which his solo Renaissance premiered.

For their creation They/Them, Verwoert and his fellow choreographer and dancer Christian Yav were nominated for a ‘Zwaan’ award for Most Impressive Dance Achievement in 2020. In 2019, he won both the BNG Bank Dance Award and the Leo Spreksel Award, named after the former artistic director of Korzo Theater, in The Hague. Alongside his work as a dancer and choreographer, Verwoert also works as a movement coach.

In 2022, Verwoert collaboreated with light artist Nick Verstand and others on the audiovisual live show Within Without II, which opened that year's Amsterdam Dance Event. He also contributed a piece to the exhibition Spirituele Urgentie, which was on view at the Stedelijk Museum Schiedam in 2023.

In March 2023, his The Ritual premiered as part of ICK Fest at Theater Bellevue in Amsterdam. He also collaborated with Buro Stedelijk at Stedelijk Museum Amsterdam and the National Maritime Museum. The premiere that followed was Slightly Damp In A Misty Street, a new work created for Dutch National Ballet dancer Davi Ramos, during the Dutch National Opera & Ballet's International Young Patrons Gala. In October 2023, Verwoert collaborated with designer Bart Hess on Wave, a psychedelic, immersive dance film that premiered during the Dutch Design Week. That same fall, his Movement Studies in the Living Room | Variation II premiered: a new work in collaboration with Random International and Nxt Museum for their exhibition ‘Life in a Different Resolution’.