How can we think about the body and its movement? This is the question that choreographer João dos Santos Martins aims to answer with his new creation “Vida e Obra”. Constança Entrudo designs the costumes for this unique dance show, which tries to bend time forwards and backwards and will be presented at Culturgest on the 16th, 17th and 18th of May.

João dos Santos Martins works from and through dance, and its history, the relationship between practice and discourse and the contradictions inherent to the activity of dancing.

The artist began studying at the Escola Superior de Dança, in Lisbon, and at P.A.R.T.S., in Brussels, and completed his studies between e.x.er.c.e, in Montpellier, and the Institute for Applied Theater Studies, in Giessen. Since 2008, he has articulated his practice between creating pieces and collaborating as a dancer with other authors such as Ana Rita Teodoro, Eszter Salamon, Moriah Evans and Xavier Le Roy.

In his new work “Life and Work” there is an attempt to bend time forwards and backwards, as a process of memory and simultaneous becoming. “The world is constantly escaping us. The present is a place of dispute between the lived past and the future to come. How to think of the body and its movement as a trace and at the same time a projection? Inhabit a spiral temporality in which the body vibrates in deep listening, against linearity and spatial separatism. Disarm the categories of subject and object to be moved by something beyond oneself. An effort to coexist languages between movement and voice that resonate and make the body overflow with texture, sensuality and sensation”, explains the artist.

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