RASA takes you on a physical journey through hypersensitivity, emotions, and the traces left behind by generations
Yasmin Diktaş
Location: Nowhere, Black Studio
- GENRE: Dance, Performance Art, Theatre
- THEME: Connection, Crossing cultures, IdentiWho?, Speaking Bodies
- LANGUAGE: Language No Problem
- ACCESSIBILITY: Assistance dogs welcome, Genderneutral toilets, Toilet for wheelchair users, Wheelchair accessible
info
With RASA, Yasmin Diktaş explores how a highly sensitive body translates ancestral memories and everyday impressions into dance. The title refers to the Javanese concept of rasa: feeling as embodied, emotional, and sensory knowledge. Her high sensitivity plays a central role in this work: she intensely perceives the feelings and energies of others, creating a continuous movement between self and other.
This openness forms both vulnerability and artistic strength. Within Javanese dance philosophy, she moves between Alus (refinement and stillness) and Kasar (raw expression), exploring how this tension is expressed through the body. From her Kurdish-Indonesian background, she works with the idea that emotions, experiences, and trauma are passed down through generations and become embedded in the body. The urgency of the work lies in revealing her inner world as a highly sensitive woman and carrier of a migration history.
Biography
Yasmin Diktaş is a Netherlands-based dancer and choreographer of Kurdish and Indonesian heritage. Her work explores trauma, liberation, healing, and the resilience of the human spirit. Driven by a strong social vision and her lived experience as a highly sensitive person (HSP), she creates a physical language that transforms emotional states, environmental influences, and inherited histories into movement.
Her choreography is characterized by a raw and expressive movement vocabulary, investigating how the body absorbs, carries, and transforms experience. Drawing inspiration from Kurdish and Indonesian histories, she connects personal and collective narratives, with themes of diaspora, oppression, generational trauma, and resilience running throughout her work. Yasmin creates spaces where vulnerability becomes strength and where the body can express what words cannot.
Yasmin graduated from the Academy of Theatre and Dance in Amsterdam in 2024. That same year, she received the Henny Kamerman Dancers’ Award, followed by the Victoriefonds Culture Prize in 2026. Since 2023, she has been developing her own choreographic practice, with her performance Azadî currently touring across the Netherlands. Alongside her work as a maker and performer, she teaches at the preparatory program of the Amsterdam University of the Arts.