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Juanjo Arqués is a Spanish choreographer and movement director currently based between Amsterdam and Lisbon. Before moving to The Netherlands, he danced with Ballet Victor Ullate and with English National Ballet. Juanjo joined Dutch National Ballet in 2004 under the direction of Ted Brandsen, and three years later he was promoted to Soloist. He performed works by notable choreographers including William Forsythe, Christopher Wheeldon, Alexei Ratmansky, David Dawson, and Hans van Manen. In 2012 he decided to stop his dancing career to focus exclusively on choreography. Four years later he was appointed as Young Creative Associate by Het National Ballet.

Juanjo has created the majority of his works for Dutch National Ballet and its Junior ensemble but also has produced creations for international ballet companies, operas, and festivals such as the Birmingham Royal Ballet, Theatre Ballet Moscow, Compañia Nacional de Danza, NRW Junior Ballet Dortmund, Acosta Danza, New York Choreographic Institute, Origen Cultural Festival, Whim W’him, and Continuum Contemporary Ballet. 

He has been named ‘Promising Talent Of the Year 2017’ by Tanz Magazine for his work ‘Homo Ludens’. In 2014 he was nominated for the Dutch Dans Awards Prize, and in 2016 for the prestigious Golden Mask Awards in Moscow for best choreographer and best classical production for ‘Minos’ and this season he was nominated for the Benois de la Danse 2019 as best choreographer for his latest creation ‘Ignite’.

Juanjo is a versatile choreographer who works within the dance field but also in theatre, films, fashion, and performing arts. In 2014 he collaborated staging the theatre production ‘Vaslav’ based on Arthur Japin's novel Vaslav Nijinsky and ‘Performing Gender’, a European dance project on the research themes for identity and sexual orientation at the Mambo Museum in Bologna. In 2016 film directors Saskia Boddeke and Peter Greenaway commissioned Juanjo to choreograph a poetic multi-screen-video installation inspired by Matisse’s paintings ‘La Danse’ and ‘La Musique’ at the Louis Vuitton Foundation in Paris. He was invited to New York University as a guest artist to research his choreographic vision in dance.

His new dance projects for the current season include Schauspiel Stuttgart,  Nationale Opera & Ballet, and Junior Company Amsterdam.

More information: juanjoarques.com

Altin Kaftira (born 1972 in Albania) is a former dancer with the Dutch National Ballet in Amsterdam, Netherlands. He danced with the Ballet from 1995 on, and from 2000 to 2007 was the Ballet's principal dancer (working with choreographers such as Hans Van Manen, Rudi van Danzig, Jerome Robbins, Alexei Ratmansky, Christopher Wheeldon and Ted Brandsen), and has danced in almost a dozen George Balanchine ballets. In 2007, he left to pursue a career as a filmmaker. One of his first film assignments was the production and direction of the 75th anniversary gala for Hans van Manen.

In 2002 the then-president of Albania, Rexhep Meidani, awarded Kaftira with the title of Art Ambassador of the Nation. In an interview with Kaftira just before his retirement, Dutch critic and writer Herman Stevens, in an article in the Dutch magazine HP / De Tijd, called him a favorite audience, a star possessing the most charisma of any dancer at the National Ballet.

Source: Wikipédia