In March, Josefa Pereira and Veza Fernández are working towards their Master Presentations at DAS Graduate School.

Josefa Pereira – Pink Bestiary

Running towards the conclusion of my research period at DAS Choreography, I will activate Pink Bestiary in a first try-out. This creation, that I sometimes call trilogy, journey, field, or knot, is composed of three different acts for a body anatomically dissected along different axes.  

Through "Hidebehind" (front x back), "Glimpse" (left x right), "Yet Untitled" (up x down), I have been developing situations that investigate the conditions of appearance and disappearance in a staged situation, thinking through problems around skin, surface and image, color and light, affect and effect. In this investigation, I enter into a dichotomic machinery that is still defining human and nonhuman relations, to ask how it could be tricked, cracked from inside the perception, and also through flesh and matter. How to fabulate and act towards the envisioning of an otherwise? How to enter the vertiginous gaps that keep conditioning what is targeted as the other?

By insisting while fleeing, and staying while escaping as part of my strategies, I've been investigating how polarities like life/death, human/monstrous (or otherness), and known/unknown could be bent, twisted and inverted, and could allow for contrasts to turn into liminal spaces for existing in the cut, in the margins and the blind spots, in which one and other could be simultaneous, superposed, acknowledged or even disappeared.

#1

Hidebehind is the monster that inhabits the dark forests without ever being seen. It has never been described and it is known for causing the disappearance of those who it captures. It has the incredible ability of always hiding behind those who dare to walk through dark forests or just behind the finest of trunks.

With insistent strides starts a twirl in a journey backwards. By evoking a potential of continuum, and being moved through the dangerous soil that emerges, the performance tensions through seemingly opposite forces - front and back, inside and outside, beginning and end, presence and absence, reality and fiction.

#2

“Glimpse” is a brief and partial view, or a slight and momentary appearance of something. An image escaping.

In this investigation, I invent a dispositive that creates a tension between the right and left side of the body that it activates. From this contrasted and rhythmic machinery, polarities are generated and agitated: continuity and interruption, mobility and stillness, visibility and invisibility, verticality and horizontality, as a space for friction, and for deviation through the gaps and cracks.

#3

"Yet Untitled"(up x down) will for now be a gesture to evoke the piece to come.
 

A tiny lecture and a movement for dissolving and vanishing. 

Credits

Hidebehind

Concept and Performance Josefa Pereira | Light Josefa Pereira with Aline Santini and collaboration Daniel de Worm | Thanks to help and support from Núcleo de Garagem - Camila Venturelli, Isabel Reis, Peti Costa, Julia Salem e Luciana Arcuri - Roberto Pereira, Fátima Pereira, Marilda Pereira, Sherwood Chen e Vitor George. Collaborators Daniel Luhman, Natália Mendonça, Patrícia Bergantin. And to my friends Zé Renato, Martina Sarantopoulos, Carolina Borelli, Danielli Mendes, Marina Mateus, Manuela Alvim, Adelita Ahmad, Thiane Nascimento, Paloma Mecozzi, Isabel Wolfenson, Suiá Burger Ferlauto, Mariana Molinos, Felipe Teixeira, Ana Elisa Carramaschi, Micaela Wernicke. And thanks for the conversations withJoão Fiadeiro, Miguel Boneville, Christiano Mere, Maura Grimaldi and Alex Cassal.

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Glimpse

Concept and performance Josefa Pereira | Light collaboration Luis Moreira and Vinny Jones | Light props and support Harco Haagsma and Udo Akemann | Sound Agatha Cigarra |  Collaborators Daniel Lühman, Maura Grimaldi, Natália Mendonça, Patrícia Bergantin, Taygoara Schiavinoto Moura Ramos | Photographers Aline Belfort, Bruno Claro | and thanks to  Vitor George, Lucas Camargo de Barros and Mafalda Jacinto | Residency EM TRÂNSITO -Temps d'Images, Estúdios Vitor Córdon (Lisboa-PT); Musibéria (Serpa-PT); Casa da Dança (Almada-PT).

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"Yet Untitled"

Concept and performance Josefa Pereira and Pink | Sound Agatha Cigarra | Voiceover guidance and support Bruna Castro | Collaborators Maura Grimaldi, Patrícia Black and Natália Mendonça | Special script collaboration Maíra Mesquita | Thanks to Alina Folini, Carolina Bianchi, Vânia Doutel Vaz | Residencies Casa da Dança (Almada-PT); Forum Dança (Lisboa-PT) and co-production residency O Espaço do Tempo (Montemor-PT)

Vinny Jones
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Special thanks to Annick Kleizen and tutors Jeroen Fabius, Konstantina Georgelou and Alice Chauchat and my DAS Choreography peers.

Research mentor Elisabete Finger

This master research is supported by the grant scholarship from Gulbenkian Foundation (PT).

photo: Aline Belfort