AboutSimona

What interests me is the moment all the pieces of a thing land in place and, suddenly, you feel it before you understand it. It can be a choreography, a frame, a studio, a six-week program, or the way someone is greeted the first time they walk into a dance school.

I started dancing at thirteen and, for a long time, that was the simplest part of the story. I didn't have to find any special meaning in it. I liked it. I repeated. Something that wouldn't come out yesterday started coming out. I repeated some more.

At twenty-one I opened Dance Prestige. Looking back, it seems almost comic how normal it felt to do that at the time. I couldn't read a P&L, I didn't know what retention was, and I probably couldn't have explained the difference between cash flow and profit if my life depended on it. But I knew very clearly how I wanted a room to feel when you walked into it. I knew what kind of teachers made me want to learn. I knew what atmosphere made me grow. And I knew a few things I didn't want to repeat from the world I'd grown up in. That was enough to start. Not enough to make it easy.

And maybe the Dance Prestige story makes more sense if we remember what dance looked like in Romania back then. In 2012–2013, if you said you were a dancer, you sometimes had to add a sentence to explain what that meant. “Street dancer” could produce very creative images in people's minds: neighbourhood kids in baggy clothes, someone dancing in a park, or the inevitable “so… stripping?”. There wasn't a widespread sense that we were talking about an industry. There was none of the professional path younger generations can now see on Instagram in a few minutes: teacher, performer, choreographer, commercial dancer, creator, international workshops, campaigns, tours, content, brand collaborations.

And, to be fair, we didn't always behave like an industry either.

We rehearsed wherever we could. Sometimes in good spaces, sometimes simply in whatever space was free. The conditions were… creative. Teacher pay had none of the structure we're trying to build today. A great deal ran on friendships, improvisation and an almost heroic amount of passion that had to make up for the lack of money, of infrastructure and, sometimes, of professionalism.

And there was a very strong idea about teacher and student that I see differently today. A student could, in a way, “belong” to someone. “She's my student.” “She grew up with me.” “I made her.” If the person got very good, their success became the mentor's success too. Which is natural up to a point. But sometimes it felt like you acquired a small symbolic stake in their life.

Like: my student ended up dancing with Jason Derulo and yet she doesn't send me flowers every week? EXCUSE ME? I was her mentor.

I'm joking. But not entirely.

Because I grew up in a culture where mentorship could slide fairly easily into ownership, and where loyalty to a teacher could be measured by how rarely you went to learn from anyone else. And the important part is that I'm not saying this as though I stood somewhere above that era, perfectly enlightened, with the 2026 philosophy already in my pocket.

I was a product of it. I had my pride. I sometimes confused involvement with control. I held ideas about what makes a good teacher that I wouldn't defend today. I had things to unlearn. I think that counts for more than pretending I always had the right answer.

Today, if someone who learned from me goes on to learn from ten people better than me, I think that's extraordinary. If they leave for another country, change their style, discover another teacher, land a project I could never have taken them to, or become something it never even occurred to me to be, then I haven't lost them.

Then the system worked. A teacher shouldn't be the destination. A teacher should be one of the doors you pass through.

Maybe that's why walking into Dance Prestige now moves me more than I admit. Because I remember where we started.

Today we're in the centre of Bucharest, in a space my twenty-one-year-old self would probably have photographed from every angle before believing it was ours. We have big studios, light, a reception, infrastructure, programs built for different levels, systems, and teachers for whom teaching can be a real job, not just something they do in the evening after work.

And yes, I care a great deal about how it looks. Not because a beautiful mirror makes you a better dancer. But because spaces say something about the value we assign to the things that happen inside them. For a long time dance settled for “this will do”. A free room. A speaker. A floor, more or less. We'll manage. I don't want to build out of “we'll manage” any more. Not because Dance Prestige has to be luxurious for the sake of luxury, or because a nicer sofa changes anyone's life. But because it seems normal to me that someone investing money, time, emotion and their own body into an experience should walk into a place that treats that experience with care.

In a way, the status of dance grew alongside us. Today movement is everywhere: in pop culture, fashion, campaigns, music videos, concerts, social media. Dancers have platforms, audiences, careers, businesses. A kid can see a choreography in Bucharest in the morning and by evening find the original teacher in Jamaica, Los Angeles or Paris.

The world has changed enormously. Fortunately, so have we.

In fourteen years, Dance Prestige has been through enough versions that sometimes I look at old photos and feel like I'm seeing someone else's lives. There were other spaces, other generations, other trends, other teams, and plenty of moments when I was completely convinced I'd found the perfect formula, only to discover a little later that I hadn't found it at all.

Fortunately.

I think the school still exists precisely because I never loved the idea of being right forever quite enough. I changed programs. I changed the way I teach. I gave up things I believed in. I built others. And I learned one of the least sexy and most important lessons of my professional life: you can have an extraordinary class inside a bad system, but in the long run the system wins.

That's why my role today is hard to compress into one word. I'm an owner, a creative director and an instructor. Sometimes that means thinking about where we want Dance Prestige to be in five years. Sometimes it means discussing the curriculum of an absolute beginners group, looking at how an instructor is presented, asking myself questions about retention, changing the check-in experience, or cleaning the toilet because the cleaner has a health problem and everyone else is on holiday.

I believe very strongly in standards. Probably more strongly than the people who work with me would sometimes like. I believe in technique, repetition, discipline and cultural context. I believe that if you teach dancehall you have to know where dancehall comes from, not just which combination you saved yesterday. I believe in teachers who keep being students long after someone started calling them “teacher”. And I believe “good enough”, repeated often enough, becomes mediocrity. But I don't believe you have to make someone feel small in order to help them get better.

If I had to compress the Dance Prestige philosophy into one sentence, it would probably be this: high standards, without making people small.

When I started, I thought I wanted to build a dance school. Today I think I'm trying to build a place where there are several correct ways to have dance in your life. Maybe you're sixteen and you want the stage, the music videos, the industry, the tours, absolutely all of it. Maybe you're thirty-five and you decided on some ordinary Tuesday that you've spent enough time watching other people dance. Maybe you want to get very good. Maybe you don't want to “become” anything. Maybe you just want an hour and a half where you're not thinking about emails, relationships, invoices and everything else waiting outside.

All of those are valid reasons.

I don't think a good school should force you to choose between “serious” and “just for fun”. You can take dance very seriously without wanting it to be your profession. You can be ambitious without turning every class into an audition. And you can come for the fun of it and then, six months later, discover that you actually want more.

A school should be able to grow with you.

That's where the things we're building today come from: very clear programs for people starting from zero, classes with more freedom in them, intensives, workshops, experiences and, I hope, things we haven't invented yet. I don't want Dance Prestige to tell you who you have to become. I want it to have a next step ready for when you start looking for one.

And no, I don't want us to become “a family” either. Families are complicated enough without also becoming relatives because we do dancehall together on Thursdays.

I want something less spectacular and more real. That you can walk in alone and, after a while, know people. That the teacher knows who you are. That someone notices you haven't been around. That there's competition without cruelty and admiration without idolatry. That teachers understand they're not just stepping into a room to deliver a choreography and then disappear, because what we build together is bigger than any one person's class. We don't have to be best friends. But we do have to care. To me, that's roughly what community means.

Alongside Dance Prestige, I kept dancing, teaching, choreographing and working in creative direction. There were also the moments the thirteen-year-old would probably have considered the final answer to every question.

Together with my teammates at the time, I became one of the first Romanians to qualify for Juste Debout in France. I won Dancehall Queen in Romania. I taught in America, had international projects and tours, and worked for artists, stages and brands like Adidas, Nike, HBO, Red Bull and Haddaway. And for a long time I wanted exactly what almost every very ambitious dancer wants when they grow up with music videos in their head.

I wanted Beyoncé. I wanted Chris Brown. I wanted the big stage.

In a way, I still love that world. It's just that, as I got to know it better, I discovered a feeling I hadn't anticipated. The lights come up. You walk on. The music starts. You have a few minutes where everything feels enormous. Then it ends. You come off stage. And sometimes something that had looked huge from a distance felt surprisingly small afterwards.

I'm not saying this with the superiority of someone who has “outgrown” the stage. I still love performing. I still understand its adrenaline and its magic perfectly. It's just that, at some point, I understood I didn't want to organise my whole life around those few minutes. I chose to invest in Dance Prestige. It was a less glamorous choice and, looking back, probably one of the most important choices I've made.

Because a show ends. A person you changed something in goes on. A culture you helped grow goes on. A teacher you created better conditions for will teach hundreds of other people. A space can become part of a city's life. I think what started to interest me more and more was what remains after the lights go out.

And around that same time, for slightly less poetic reasons, my body started asking for attention. Health problems appeared and I became interested in therapy, in somatic work and, more generally, in the question that seems simple until you start taking it seriously: what actually happens inside a person's body?

It was an important shift for the way I started looking at dance, too. I became less and less interested in the steps alone and more in what they say. You can have a technically impeccable choreography that says absolutely nothing. And you can have an almost banal movement that, placed in the right spot, changes the whole picture.

That's what interests me today as a creative director. Why is the person standing there? Why are they looking in that direction? What does the audience know about them before they say a word? What should you feel when you see them? What can we take away instead of adding one more thing?

Choreography is one of the languages I speak. I no longer think it's the whole conversation.

Teaching, on the other hand, stayed. And I think I'd run Dance Prestige very differently if I stopped walking into the studio every week. Because in a spreadsheet people are very well behaved. They have retention, frequency, conversion, packages and percentages. In the room they have fear, pride, bad days, tired bodies, enthusiasm, no enthusiasm at all, and moments when something they've been trying for three weeks suddenly lands and they look in the mirror as though they've just discovered electricity.

That's where I remember why we do the rest.

I became very interested in how the body learns. How we build coordination. How groove appears. How you unlock a body that has spent thirty years trying to move as little wrong as possible. How you get from “tell me what to do with my hand” to the moment someone stops negotiating every gesture with themselves before making it.

And if you stay in a dance studio long enough, you inevitably start seeing things that have little to do with dance. Perfectionism. Control. Comparison. Shame. The need for validation. The fear of taking up too much space.

I don't think dance heals all of that. I'm actually a little suspicious when absolutely every experience has to be turned into a story about healing and transformation. Sometimes dance is just very good music and two hours where you love being in your own body. That already seems like enough to me.

But the body has an interesting quirk: it has a much harder time lying with the same elegance as the mind. It shows you where you stop. Where you rush. Where you make yourself small. Where you want to be perfect before you accept being seen. And sometimes, if you give it enough time, it also shows you what happens once you stop doing that.

Maybe that's why I still teach after more than twenty years. It still surprises me.

And maybe that's also why I don't know whether I built the school I imagined at twenty-one. I hope not. That version of me knew a few things very well and a great many things not at all.

Today Dance Prestige is bigger, more complex and far more carefully built. I'm more demanding about certain things and much less impressed by others. I've learned that not everything has to be kept just because it's part of the story.

At the beginning of a business — and maybe of a person too — maturity seems to mean adding. More experience. More things. More titles. More proof that you deserve to be there. Then, at some point, a different kind of maturity shows up. You have to be sure enough of yourself to take things out. An idea that no longer represents you. A habit. A piece of pride. An old version of success. Even a dream you've held so long that you almost forgot to check whether you still want it.

I don't want to build the monument of one successful version of Dance Prestige and then spend the next twenty years protecting it. I want it to stay alive. I want us to be able to say “we did that brilliantly” without assuming we have to do it the same way forever. And to be able to say “this doesn't work any more” without reading change as failure.

Let there always be a teacher I haven't met yet, a twenty-year-old dancer who sees something I no longer see, a style I haven't understood well enough, a tool we don't yet know how to use, or an idea that forces us to look again at something that seemed obvious yesterday.

I think that's actually the thread between everything I do. For a long time I thought it was dance. I don't think it is any more. I think it's curiosity.

Dance was simply the first place where I learned what happens when you stay close enough to something for long enough that the first answer stops being enough.

I'm thirty-five now. Dance Prestige is fourteen. We've both grown enough to look back and see versions of ourselves that make us smile, a few that make us wonder what the fuck was that, and plenty of things we'd still keep exactly as they are.

I don't know which version comes next. That doesn't frighten me the way it used to.

After more than twenty years of dancing, fourteen years of building a school and quite enough occasions where I thought I'd understood something before discovering I'd only just begun to understand it, it still feels to me like there's something left to find out.

And honestly, that seems like very good news.