About Zufit Simon

Zufit Simon
© Oliver Look

Zufit Simon

Performer and choreographer

The Israeli-German dancer and choreographer Zufit Simon has lived in Germany for 25 years and has been presenting her choreographies in the independent scene for 20 years. Many of her choreographies have received awards. She has been represented several times at Tanzplattform Deutschland and tours internationally, including tours in cooperation with the Goethe Institute.

Born in Israel (Kfar Sirkin), she graduated from high school with a degree in dance and studied contemporary dance at the University of Music and Performing Arts (HfMDK) in Frankfurt am Main. She works in Berlin, Munich, and Braunschweig, where she rehearses, performs, and raises funds.

Zufit Simon’s first professional appearance as a dancer was in “Tower of Babel”, a production by the CobosMika company at Munich’s Muffathalle in 2002.
She participated in productions by Munich-based choreographers Micha Purucker, Stephan Herwig and Sabine Glenz before presenting her own choreographies, frequently at the Schwere Reiter venue.

“...all roads in my life lead to Munich – where there have been and continue to be so many encounters with many different artists...”

She presented her first solo choreographic works in Berlin, followed by invitations to national and international festivals in countries such as Italy, Austria, Tanzania, Czechia, Poland, Russia, Bulgaria, and France. Her first solo piece, “fleischlos” (meatless), presented at the euro-scene Leipzig festival in 2005, won third prize.

In 2012, Zufit Simon was selected for the German Dance Platform pitching in Dresden with the solo “Wild Thing”. At the German Dance Platform 2014 at Kampnagel, Hamburg, she presented the choreographic concert “I LIKE TO MOVE IT”.
The production was presented at Tanzwerkstatt Europa and revived at schwere reiter in February 2018. It has had more than 30 guest performances.

“ADOM MODULATIONS” has likewise been performed more than 30 times since its premiere in 2008.
“A choreography of creatures and signs, of graceful limbs seemingly heavy with sleep, in which the movements of two dancers effortlessly synchronize or their two bodies become entangled, head to head or knee to knee, until an unknown third arises (...) Between creature and culture, so much fluid precision, witty seriousness and beautiful melancholy!” (Sabine Leucht)

From 2016 to 2019, she worked on the trilogy “un-emotional” about the connections between body language, facial expressions, and gestures. Together with director Moritz Schönecker, she opened the 2015 season at Theaterhaus Jena with the productions “Die Zofen” (Genet) and “Judith” (Hebbel). In the 2017/2018 season, she curated the dance series there. Zufit Simon has been a member of Tanztendenz München e.V. since 2016; from 2018 to 2022, she was part of the artistic direction of the artblau Tanzwerkstatt.

Zufit Simon has repeatedly shown her work at Rodeo München, the festival for the independent theatre and dance scene: “piece of something” in 2014, SCHÄUME and “fleischlos” in 2020, and “Radical Cheerleading” in 2024. The last-mentioned piece was nominated for the German Faust Prize in 2023 and produced largely through Munich funding. It is now touring successfully and has been performed approximately 30 times to date.

In addition to her choreographic and dance work, Zufit Simon regularly teaches workshops. Most recently, she was invited to give an insight into her working method for “Radical Cheerleading” as part of the Munich DANCE Festival for young adults at the Haus der Kunst.

Zufit Simon’s formal, visually powerful style, which is always rooted in physicality, makes her a major figure in Munich’s dance scene. She appears as a performer in all her pieces, whether solo, duet, trio or quintet, because it is important to her to expose herself to what she demands of her dancers.
Her ensemble is diverse in the best sense of the word. Long-standing partners are Dietrich Oberländer (production/stage/lighting) and Fredrik Olofsson (music/video).

She is currently exploring corporeal forms of protest. Her focus is always on the body in its physical materiality. The human organism can appear quite alien upon closer inspection. And although every individual body is equipped with more or less the same organs, each body is fundamentally unique and different from all others.

In 2025, she receives the Munich Dance Prize in recognition of her lifetime achievement.

The emphasis and goal of my work is to question the self-evident, create confusion – first in me, then in the audience – in order to confront ourselves with our own perception and things we take for granted. I portray this, with the help of the body, as part of a bigger picture.

Zufit Simon

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