Born in Belgium, Stina Quagebeur trained at the Royal Ballet School from age eleven. She went onto English National Ballet School before joining English National Ballet. Stina has been a First Artist with ENB since 2004 and was made Associate Choreographer in 2019 after creating numerous works throughout her career.
As a dancer she created roles in works by Russell Maliphant, Annabelle Lopez Ochoa and Itzik Galili her career highlight has been working with Akram Khan. First in Dust, following on she created the role of Myrtha in Akram Khan’s award winning Giselle and most recently the Doctor in Khan’s Creature.
As a choreographer Stina has created a total of 18 works for English National Ballet, English National Ballet School and the Youth Company. Some of her most recent works are Catching Colour (2022), part of an artistic collaboration with artist Rana Begum and designer Roksanda Ilinčić, Take Five Blues (2021), Hollow (2020) and Nora (2019). She has also created a work for the Royal Ballet’s principal dancer Lauren Cuthbertson at the Joyce Theatre, New York and has worked as a choreographer and movement director for Sam Brown’s opera production of La Clemenza Di Tito at Theatre An Der Wien, Vienna.
Stina’s first major work, Nora, was commissioned for the main stage at Sadler’s Wells in 2019. Nora was based on Henrik Ibsen’s play A Doll’s House. She was nominated for Best Classical Choreography and won the award for Emerging Artist at the National Dance Awards 2020.
In 2020 Stina created a contemporary duet Hollow based on a couple who contend with depression, and the confusion and displacement it causes between them. Originally created for the Emerging Dancer Competition it is now part of English National Ballet’s repertoire. The work was also selected to be performed on the BBC Dancing Nation programme featuring world-class dance from leading companies.
Most recently Stina created Take Five Blues, a piece set to Nigel Kennedy’s jazz album Recital. Created especially for film as part of ENB’s Digital Season, it was nominated at the National Dance Awards 2021 for Best Digital Choreography. Stina will be extending Take Five Blues to a full one act production for Sadler’s Wells in November 2022.
Header image taken by George Liang.