Tess Voelker’s
Sand
anD their
castles
“It's about something's life—not its moment”
Tess Voelker
Originally created for Ballet d’Jèrri in 2024, Sand and Their Castles in its second life has evolved with its creator, with the dancers who embody it—and hopefully with you, its audience. Its exploration of memory, identity, and the passage of time might resonate now with a bit more nuance, and its tone might feel familiar but, upon close inspection, more textured.
During the original creative process, Voelker described the work as “a chase backwards,” a return to the purity of feeling that precedes self-consciousness. What began as a meditation on childhood memory and the bridge of adolescence to adulthood has become a wider reflection on the cycles of growing, forgetting, and remembering again—the fragile architecture of who we are.
Through Voelker’s distinct movement language—fluid, grounded, deceptively simple and impulsively human—the dancers inhabit a world where nostalgia and discovery coexist. There’s strength in the softness, weight in the play, and always a sense that each fleeting moment might wash away and rebuild anew.
Sand and Their Castles reminds us that identity is not something we hold still, but something we keep dancing towards.
About the creator
Tess Voelker is both a dancer and choreographer, born in San Francisco. She grew up between Chicago and the east coast of the USA. She began with competitive jazz dance , then trained in ballet from the age of 11 with the Rock School for Dance Education and Barbara Sandonato School of Ballet in Philadelphia. After graduating high school in 2015 from Walnut Hill School for the Arts in Boston, she trained at Joffrey Ballet Chicago while spending her weekends studying improvisation methods with a small contemporary dance company founded by Ronn Stewart. While training, she has gone on to win awards from both the YoungArts Foundation and Youth American Grand Prix. Her professional career started when she moved to Germany to join Ballett Dortmund for a year before joining Nederlands Dans Theater II, and then the main company NDT I. That same year, Aurélie Dupont recognized Tess for her own improvisation style and commissioned her, thus becoming one of the youngest choreographers to create for the Paris Opera Ballet at 23 years old.
Since 2023, Tess has become her own solo artist; resulting in choreographing original work for Ballet d'Jerri , Eisenhower Dance Detroit , as well as performing as an improvisational artist at places like Théâtre de Chaillot, La Gaîté Lyrique in Paris and with MacKay Productions.
In her own practice , Tess steers away from focusing on strict physical language. Instead , she aims to tap into a source more equivalent to her own “inner child” through the ethereal and confronting vehicle of music. To her it's about exploring and witnessing so as to understand her own improvisation as an active reflection of self. Through this approach , she honors how creativity emerges through a radical practice of open-mindedness and non-judgement; whether that be on the music, the performance, or—most importantly—on herself.
Quite similarly, Tess's choreographic work focuses on the individuation a dancer inevitably brings to a role. Tess strives to hybrid the physical language of "dancing" and "acting", stripping away the dancer's need to prove ability or expression through an extreme format. One of her many morals as a choreographer speaks to this; it's not so much that less is more , but rather about how to get the most out of the least.
