Kinesis Dance somatheatro is based in Vancouver, Canada. The company’s mandate is to contribute to the development of the art of modern dance through workshops and performances both in Canada and abroad. The company seeks to explore the human condition through contemporary dance and physical theatre.

Greek-Canadian Paraskevas Terezakis founded Kinesis Dance in 1986. Under his artistic direction, the company creates highly visual and emotional works which combine live performance with multimedia, text, design, and original musical composition. Terezakis’ choreography can be described as physical poetic theatre. The movements explore the contrast between the excitement of energy and the simple beauty of stillness. Often inspired by classical Greek theatre, Terezakis explores the visceral and emotional landscape of the human condition.

In 2023, Dancer & Choreographer Rachel Helten was appointed Associate Artistic Director, to help with the transition of the company as founder Paras Terezakis begins passing the reins, and mentoring her in becoming his eventual successor as Artistic Director. While honouring Paras’ legacy, Rachel is bringing a newer compassionate artistic voice to the organization.

Artistic Director/Choreographer

“Terezakis’ work is testimony to the restrictions and forced choices one makes in life. He choreographs people confined within themselves, showing the resulting change in attitude as one moves forward to internalize rules which Terezakis himself considers not representative of real needs and desires.”
– Avgi Newspaper, Athens

Paraskevas Terezakis began his professional training in his native Greece, where his professional career started in theatre and dance with Experimental Ballet Athens. After moving to Canada in 1979, he studied at Toronto Dance Theatre, York University, and Simon Fraser University in Vancouver. In 1986, he started Kinesis Dance somatheatro and since then the company has performed world-wide over forty original dance works for solo, duet, and groups.

A Dionysian choreographer, Terezakis’ multi-textured style is the culmination of a process that engages improvisation, self-expression, novelty, and blind inspiration in order to free the body from habitualness. It is an emergence of complex cascading events arising out of a multiplicity of minimalistic physical interactions.

His choreography is marked by heightened physicality of movement. Whether the lines are expansive and rhapsodic or clipped and telegraphic; it is choreography that uses emphasis to communicate emotion. The dance lines are created in a rough, manipulated style so as to connote rawness and energy.

Terezakis seeks to evoke rather than to describe in his work as his dance vocabulary signifies the state of the dancer’s soul. Hostile to plain meaning, gestural superficiality, and false sentimentality his choreography is clothed in the imagery and symbolism of occidental mythology intended to evoke idea and emotion. The dancer’s body becomes a perceptible surface to represent the esoteric affinity with the primordial Ideal.

“…the Greek-born choreographer sets a human impulse and watches its effects on different people…truly memorable. Terezakis makes much of his Greek heritage, employing techniques of classical Greek theatre and the raspy, urgent qualities of Greek music. He is one of a handful of Canadian choreographers invited to compete for the Seine-Saint-Denis Festival. Café Nocturne confirms the honour is well deserved.”
– The Vancouver Sun

We would like to acknowledge that we are gathered and are creating on the traditional, ancestral and unceded territory of the Coast Salish peoples–Sḵwx̱wú7mesh (Squamish), Stó:lō and Səl̓ílwətaʔ/Selilwitulh (Tsleil-Waututh) and xʷməθkʷəy̓əm (Musqueam) Nations.