Alarve

João dos Santos Martins’s work explores relationships between dance, language, and transmission. For this performance, presented within the exhibition Place of Being: The Burle Marx Legacy, the dancer and choreographer takes the body as a field of negotiation between nature and construction. The work enters into dialogue with his personal experience of migrating from a rural to an urban environment, and with the idea of adaptation—of both body and subject. Just as the Brazilian landscape designer understood the garden as an “adaptation of the ecological environment to the demands of civilisation,” migration reveals an ongoing process of adjusting gestures.

Dance is approached as a practice of unlearning and reinvention: an exercise in recognising the social and bodily layers that accumulate in the attempt to adapt habits seen as strange, rough, or wild. Rather than representing an identity, the work presents a field of friction between nature, rurality and culture. The body becomes matter in process, where inside and outside enter into dialogue and propose forms of listening.

By and featuring João dos Santos Martins
Costume Darius Dolatyari-Dolatdoust
Music Ladainha, Franz Schubert
Production Maria Monteiro | Associação Parasita, Association Mi-Maï
Co-production Associação Parasita, MAC/CCB – Museum of Contemporary Art and Architecture Centre, Festival Silvestre, Sismógrafo
Residencies Espaço Parasita, Lamia Santolino

Open Museum programme.