Anke Zijlstra

Anke Zijlstra’s career started as a classically trained ballerina at the Royal Ballet School.
She worked as a ballerina for the Royal Ballet of Flanders for many years.
Later she went on to work as a freelance performing artist for many different companies, such as Troubleyn (Jan fabre), Franco Dragone, Jan Ruts before going on to generate her own choreographic practice.

After her career with the Royal Ballet of Flanders she went on to study audio-visual arts and play writing whilst still working as a freelance dancer in an international context.

She created multiple short dance pieces and show cases for various artistic purposes and multidisciplinairy projects in a national and an international envirnoment.

She independently made 2 dance theatre pieces for early years that have since toured extensively in Belgium: “Wint Wind?” and “Droomkoorts”.
That’s when De Spiegel noticed her as an upcoming choreograph and asked her to work together. Since then she danced in the public research formats De Spiegel is known for (Caban and Labotanik) before going on to develop her own production ImpulZ under the umbrella of De Spiegel.