I am Bert Roman, a London based dance-theatre artist, performer and movement facilitator whose practice brings together choreography, performance, care and lived experience.
Rooted in the body and in the ways we move through the world
—individually, collectively and politically—
My work explores the relationship between movement, identity, health and human connection.
I trained as a nurse and worked in the NHS. This experience profoundly shaped my understanding of care, vulnerability and the systems that hold our bodies.
MANIFESTO:
Choreography exist far beyond the stage.
It lives in the way we greet one another.
In the way we lift, listen, wait and witness.
The smallest gesture can change a life.
The body remembers what words cannot.
I believe in bodies that refuse to behave.
Bodies that desire differently.
Bodies that take up space, change shape, change their minds and refuse to fit neatly into the spaces made for them.
Queerness is a practice of possibility.
A questioning of what we have been told is normal.
A permission to imagine different ways of living, loving, relating and caring.
The theatre is not a place to escape the world.
It is a place to rehearse another one.
Audiences are not consumers.
They are participants.
I make spaces where vulnerability meets humour.
Where discomfort opens the door to curiosity.
Where difference is not something to overcome, but something to encounter.
I believe care can be radical.
That pleasure can be political.
That connection can be transformative.
And that joy is an act of activism.
WHAT MAKES ME CREATE?
I create because I am curious about what happens when we move closer—to ourselves, to one another, and to the questions we often avoid.
I am interested in the body as a place where personal experience, politics, desire and memory meet. I make work that creates encounters: between performer and audience, between vulnerability and humour, between tenderness and discomfort, and between the intimate and the political.
My practice sits at the intersection of contemporary dance, theatre, participation and lived experience. I am drawn to what happens when the boundaries between performer and audience become less fixed, and theatre becomes a space for being together rather than simply watching.
My queerness is an important part of how I see and make sense of the world. It has taught me to question what is presented as normal, to remain curious about different ways of living and relating, and to make space for bodies, desires and relationships that do not always fit neatly into existing structures. I am interested in what becomes possible when we allow ourselves to imagine otherwise.
I trained as a dancer at the Royal Conservatoire in Antwerp and have spent more than two decades creating and performing work across Europe. Alongside my artistic career, I worked as an NHS nurse, caring for people living with cancer and supporting patients and families through moments of profound vulnerability. Those years transformed my understanding of care—and my understanding of choreography.
I began to recognise care as a choreography in itself: a series of gestures, rhythms, repetitions and relationships. The way we lift, touch, wait, listen, witness and hold one another. I became fascinated by the invisible acts of attention that sustain our lives, and by the question of why some forms of care are valued while others remain unseen.
I make work using movement, spoken word, live singing, humour, clowning and participation. I am interested in creating spaces that can hold contradiction: where tenderness can sit alongside absurdity, where laughter can exist beside grief, and where difficult questions can be encountered through the body rather than reduced to an answer.
I create because no one else is asking me to. It is the one thing I do entirely for myself—the one place where I feel free, fully alive, and completely present.
Who Cares?
Who Cares? is a queer dance-theatre performance inspired by Bert Roman's lived experience as an NHS nurse and union organiser.