Åsa is a Choreographer, a dancer and a teacher.
She is now working as the head of Dance Health and Community dance at Ballet academy in Stockholm, Sweden. She is organizing Dance for Parkinsons network in Sweden. Teaching Dance for Parkinsons both live and digital, Dance for people suffering from stroke, cultural integration and community dance at the Balettakademien in Stockhom.
Åsa N. Åström is a former dancer with an extensive career within contemporary dance in Sweden, France and Germany. She has been working with big dance companies as well as freelancing with different choreographers. Often in the field of contemporary, show, African and flamenco-inspired dancestyles.
Åsa have been choreographing and producing dance performances since 2000, in the field of community dance and with collaborations with different kind of artists. She has been organizing, producing, choreographing and collaborate with local artists, to set up dance performances at unusual places, like on a river, in old factories, in forests and in refugees-camp.
She is living in Stockholm and after having three children she started to think about her knowledge and what in dance she found is the most important elements. She started to look for new challenges and wanted to dance with elderly people. After four years as a dance coach working with elderly at an elderly facility, Åsa went to introduction and got educated in Dance for PD with David Leventhal. She started Dance for Parkinson in Stockholm at Balettakademien, a dance school who is the leading education of professional dancers in Sweden. At Balettakademien she is organizing and teaching Dance for Parkinsons. Together with a teacher college and the dancers, they have been created “Dancecompany Parkinsons”, who is performing and working together with different art expressions. They have been performing at the Contemporary art museum in Stockholm, at the Parkinson congress in Sweden, in Copenhagen at Tivoli, and in Finland. Åsa is one founder of the Swedish network of Dance for Parkinson, a network between five cities and organizations in Sweden. She is now the head of Dance for Health at Balettakademien in Stockholm. Åsa is currently involved in a number of projects in the field of health and dance, which is breaking new grounds in the healthcare world as in the dance world. She is a member of the Dance for Health committee at IADMS.
Our collaboration with Balettakademien
The Ballet Academy in Stockholm was founded in 1957 and has become one of the leading dance schools in the Nordic countries. Many of Sweden’s most successful dancers, musical artists, and choreographers have been educated at the Ballet Academy. For nearly 10 years, they have been hosting BA Dance Health, where research and practice go hand in hand in the field of Dance and Health. Here, there are classes in various areas such as Dance for Parkinson’s, Neurodance, and Dance Health for those aged 60 and above.
”Dance for Health provides holistic, evidence-based alternatives for the individual to manage and adapt to physical, mental and social health challenges. In Dance for Health sessions, trained teaching artists engage people as dancers, rather than patients, in joyful, interactive, artistic activity.” I-IADMS Definition 2021