Category: Mediterranea

November 8th – 10th, 2024 National Performing Arts Center, Taipei
November 15th – 16th, 2024 Rohm Theatre Kyoto, Kyoto
November 20th, 2024 The Museum of Art Kochi, Kochi
December 10th, 2024 Theater im Pfalzbau, Ludwigshafen
December 18th – 19th, 2024 Auditorio de Tenerife, Santa Cruz de Tenerife
January 25th, 2025 Teatro Municipal da Covilhã, Covilhã
Feburary 7th – 9th, 2025 Perth Festival, Perth
75 minutes

A rising Portuguese Choreographer to Follow

Collective identities are sources of belonging and inclusion but when they become mainstream, they can turn the other way around. I can recognise this issue in dance.

Marco da Silva Ferreira Interviewed by Springback Magazine

In CARCAÇA,  a very diverse cast of ten dancers, including Marco da Silva Ferreira, and two musicians form an unconventional and joyful corps de ballet. The dancers perform intricate footwork that merges standardized folk dances with contemporary urban dance styles that mainly appear in groups that were or are considered minorities (for example LGBTQIA+ communities or communities from ex-colonies). In this choreography, Marco da Silva Ferreira uses dance as a tool to investigate communities, the construction of collective identity, memory and cultural crystallization. In other words: what if folk dances had not crystallized, had continued to redefine themselves and had incorporated the present at every moment?

The cast explores their collective identity in a physical, intuitive and unpretentious flow of the body, dance and cultural construction. They start from familiar footwork, coming from clubbing, balls, cypher battles and the studio and they use the physical vocabulary of the contemporary, social, urban context as a lexicon of identity (house, kuduro, Top Rock, hardStyle, etc.). Through a slow and structured construction process they connect these styles with the heritage and memory of dances from the past. These standardized and unchanging folk dances have remained stagnant and have not been able to integrate new definitions of bodies, groups and communities, which were considered inferior. For these groups it was necessary to break with the authoritarian, totalitarian and paternalistic past.

In CARCAÇA  an exercise is proposed that integrates the past and the present. The performance makes you think: How do you decide what to forget and what to remember? What is the role of individual identities in the construction of a community? What is the driving force of an identity? What world does the individual and collective body traverse? Or, better put, what bodies traverse the world?