Artist statement
I am a choreographer, dancer, and singer from Portugal.
I started by studying music at the age of 15 with well-known musicians from the jazz scene in Portugal in Hot Clube Jazz School and singing with the lyric singer Lúcia Lemos. Later, I trained contemporary dance with several well-known dance makers like Vera Mantero, João Fiadeiro, Meg Stuart, Xavier Le Roy, Marten Spangberg, Emmanuelle Huynh, Trisha Brown Dance Company, Frey Faust, to mention some, and took a university degree in Dance – Performance. I started working as a dancer around the year 2000, I worked regularly with Tiago Guedes from 2000 to 2009 and for the last 6 years with Aldara Bizarro.
As a choreographer, I created group and solo pieces. Many were around cinema subjects (moving-image theories), looking at the discipline from the point of view of the movement. The last creations are around the visibility / non-visibility / overexposure of nowadays. All the creations have closely collaborated with musicians and some with live music.
Parallelly I developed small music projects where I sang and was co-responsible for the musical arrangements. I collaborated on music records with Jorge Moniz and I-Wolf (Wolfgang Schloegel from Sofa Surfers).
From 2013 on, I also started to develop community artwork in a small village in Alentejo in the south of Portugal (Santa Clara-a-Velha is a small village with 300 inhabitants – Census 2001- mostly with elderly people). I was, and I am, deeply interested in how to make the artwork more consequent, more socially rewarding, and how can it add to people’s lives in a more consistent way. I created art projects with elderly people in this village, through workshops and performances, that are still ongoing. In 2005 I created Zut!, a production company based in Lisbon, to support artistic work, but in 2013 I moved it to Santa Clara-a-Velha to start this community work.
I was awarded twice with Young Artists – Dance (Clube Português de Artes e Ideias) for my dance work and I have 3 awards in cinema festivals New Wave Film Festival 2021, Cairo Indie Short Festival 2021, Tagore International Film Festival 2021 for cinema-dance work. I represented Portugal in the III Biennale of Young Artists of CPLP, Biennale of Young Artists of Macedonia, and in the International Dance Festival of Macau. So, I presented my choreographic work abroad very briefly between 2006 and 2009 in those contexts. Besides those contests-presentations, my work tour as many as 3 – 4 dates for each creation including my country, Portugal.