About us

The Team

Lavinia Urcan
Founding member

Lavinia Urcan is a graduate of the Faculty of International Relations and European Cultural Studies at the University of Bucharest and has a Master in project Management within SNSPA Bucharest. In 2015 he graduated Bachelor of Arts in Dance Studies (Choreography) at Middlesex University in London. She is currently choreographer, artistic director, and project manager of the Unfold Motion Dance Company. She continued her professional development by taking part in international workshops and residences of contemporary dance.

Lavinia is the manager of Unfold Motion and the president of the association with the same name, the co-ordinator of the dance productions within the company (both its own and its commissions), as choreographer, dance teacher and director. The choreographer organizes and contributes to the organization of local contemporary dance events.

Outside the company, Lavinia choreographed for theater performances: “Bizzare scenes after Urmuz”, directed by Mihaela Panainte at the Western Theater Reșița; “Belvedere”, directed by Marius Lupoian, in an independant frame, at Maria Theresia Baston in Timișoara.

Lavinia also collaborates with Moveo Dance Company from Malta as a tour manager.

In 2020, she is the manager and choreographer of "the Dance Moving Forward" project – a project that involves the production and distribution of the dance show "Connecting Pleasures" in Timișoara, Arad, Deva, Reșița and Bucharest.

As primary artistic direction, Lavinia is interested in the intelligence of the moving body, a thinking body, in methods of finding and thinking the movement, in seeking rather from inside to the outside to find the movement and give it meaning, to find the esthetic in the process. The direction in which she guides her work is focused on the self, emotions, feelings, and expressiveness. Another aspect that is of interest to her in the present is the use of improvisation as a tool to find movement material and to manipulate it. Personally, improvisation attracts her because she feels it's the best way to handle the movement. She thinks improvisation is the creative process to the choreographic act; it is an organic and authentic way to create movement.

Abigail Gibson
Founding member

Her belief is that multidisciplinary arts is the future, interconnecting disciplines and bringing a variety of skilled students and professionals in collaboration with each-other to develop and innovate together is vital to the creative industries and beyond. She has been developing her own method of fusion Choreography, Science, Technology, Philosophy and educational design.

Timișoara has a very special place in her heart and is the city where she found her true self as an artist, a hidden creative gem in Europe. Choreographing for the ”Light up your city” community flashmob for the European Capital of Culture 2021 project was a fantastic experience. She also loved being involved with the ”Triple Bill” creative cultural exchange event, it was a wonderful show of talent from three different nations, a truly beautiful collaboration.

Her current focus is to develop practices, works and teaching methods to champion creative identity, benefit the professional and student dance population as well as to assist the general population in solving current issues. Her educational background consists of an FD in Dance performance from Plymouth University and two years of vocational performance training in Cardiff. She also has a BA in Dance Studies (Choreography) from Middlesex University London and she is currently studying a two year MFA in Dance Science at Trinity Laban conservatoire of Music and Dance London.

She has worked mainly for dance companies in the UK teaching dance, programming and managing community projects and elite training. She has also developed her own teaching methodology for elite youth dancers implementing Psychology, Physiology and Biomechanics into the training. This allows the dancers to gain a deep understanding at a younger age, of how to independently enhance and develop their wellbeing and practice.

”It Is an honour to be involved with Unfold Motion’s development, the work created here is fresh and innovative, the team is such a delight to work alongside and I am so excited to watch the company continue to grow.”

Cristina Daju
Founding member

Cristina Daju is a bachelor and master graduate of the Fine Arts Program of the Faculty of Arts and Design at the West University of Timisoara. As a visual artist, she considers that the act of art involves an active element with the force to communicate, interact and involve the audience.

The meaning is made up by various environments, using painting, artistic installation, video, performance. This makes the process more important than the result, and the artistic action is found in the new space created between static showpiece and performance.

Within Unfold Motion, Cristina initiated the Project ”Thermal Point” in collaboration with Association Timișoara European Capital of Culture 2021 and with the support of FITT Timisoara. The project built around the idea of recycling some technical spaces, called thermal power stations, by recovering and rehabilitating them, by changing their purpose and giving them the sense of becoming active cultural centers.

These spaces have been used as work platforms and support for artistic intervention, with the project providing for collaboration between local artists, diaspora artists, European and public artists. Thermal sites have become educational workshops, through workshops that have had artistic works as a result of collaboration between the artists and the community.

Beatrice Tudor
Associate

Since 2019 Beatrice has joined Unfold Motion as a dancer, choreographer and associated project manager.

Beatrice Tudor is a graduate of the Theater Faculty (UNATC Bucharest) in the Performing Arts (Choreography) and a graduate of the Masters program of “Choreography Creation” at the same university. She is choreographer and performer but also carries out her activity in the field of education through contemporary dance. As the main artistic direction, she focuses her attention on everyday reality as an active observer. Social space is an inexhaustible and dynamic source of inspiration.

She wishes to draw attention to both the various daily rhythms (behaviors, junctures, situations) and to contemporary dance as a useful art form in focusing attention on contemporary reality and highlighting aspects of community interest. She believes in the relationship between art and the social sphere and supports the fact that art is directly influenced by the social space that it influences. In order to stay connected with the international choreographic scene, she is constantly attending dance workshops at home and abroad.

To become familiar with the field of cultural management, Beatrice has been following various programs and training courses in the field since 2018, such as: Lern Platform conferences and the Linked Culture conferences (2019) and the Summer School –Art in the house (2nd edition 2018).

In 2019, Beatrice Tudor was the manager of the project ”StartDans”- a cultural intervention project in Giurgiu, Buftea, Târgoviște and Slobozia, where during a week, a multidisciplinary team of artists held various cultural activities through contemporary dance.

Lorena Dumitrașcu
Associate

She is loving people, photography and dance. She always sought the way to the interior of the person, to connect and to catch at least some of who is that person.

The most beautiful feeling is when she takes pictures on film. ‘The film captivates you, it is real, imperfect and turns everything into a true experience’. She often leaves herself guided by intuition and manages to guide it well, to that place where few know how to look, or to look inwards.

Always in search of natural light, she finds her inspiration in people, with their stories, the masks they put on them, the fears they have; in books, films, mysticism and in Hans Zimmer's music. She has been photographing for 10 years with the same passion and curiosity, and meanwhile she created a project for life - Light Stories, which encompasses all the sights, emotions, connections and understandings she has had on her way through this world.

It’s a lifetime of dance. She explored some forms of it until she met with contemporary dance. Then she wanted to explore its shapes. ‘It is normal that any action that shouts ‘freedom’ will wrap me up in a safety I no longer want to leave.‘ Lorena is a dance teacher for the group of 50+ adults. The idea of the dance class came when we assessed the situation in Romania of people dancing only to a certain age and from the thought that we would not want to live in a world where we cannot dance because we are too ‘old’.

Unfold Motion is the first local landmark in terms of contemporary dance in Timișoara and the western part of the country and was born on the initiative of choreographer Lavinia Urcan.

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The Team