WORKSHOPS FORUM x PARASITA

Throughout 2025 and 2026, Parasita and Forum Dança are joining forces to organise workshops. This project aims to broaden access to contemporary dance practices through engagement with leading figures from the national and international scene, providing an in-depth learning experience for the artistic community in Portugal.

Workshops 2026

Assemble, disassemble, reassemble with Marcela Levi and Lucía Russo

May 27 to 29  | 18h00 – 21h00
May 30 and 31 | 10h00 – 13h00 + 14h00 – 17h00
Forum Dança, Espaço da Penha, Lisboa
Registration here

A few years ago, Improvável Produções, founded by choreographers Marcela Levi and Lucía Russo, set out with a series of questions that call for work to be done: how to embody, that is, materialize, in conversation with the poet Édouard Glissant, the desire for “a world of many worlds”? What strategies are needed to disrupt the frontal architecture and unidirectional visuality of an Italian stage? How can we bridge distances without crushing the gaps, that is, how can we coexist with differences in a non-separatist way? What strategies are needed to sustain the continuity of collective research work, that is, how can we gain time?

Loaded with these questions, in a gesture that seeks crossovers, we will share some fundamental aspects of the artistic issues that (dis)orient our research.

In the first part of this workshop, aimed at professionals and students of the performing arts, we will practice the multifaceted nature of the body through the multidirectional conduction of bone masses (skull, pelvis, ribs, shoulder blades, calcaneus, and metatarsus), activated by the force of thrust and the pull of magnetization forces.
In a second moment, we will dedicate ourselves to searching for and fabricating connections between subjects distant in time and space. Recognizing resonances and echoes, in the search for commonalities between distinct visible and invisible subjects, will help us weave this field of forces in tension. Assemble, disassemble, reassemble, disassemble, reassemble…

Marcela Levi e Lucía Russo

In 2010, choreographers Marcela Levi (Rio de Janeiro, Brazil) and Lucía Russo (Patagonia, Argentina), who have been active in the field of dance research in Brazil and abroad for over 30 years, founded Improvável Produções in Rio de Janeiro, a platform for training, research, and creation. Levi & Russo are committed to a polyphonic direction in which different inventive positions intersect in a process that welcomes deviant lines, dissent, and internal differences as a constructive critical force, rather than as mutually exclusive polarities.

With a repertoire that crosses dances, music, voices, and thoughts from different times and places, Improvável affirms contemporary dance as an expanded field of coexistence and critical thinking. Among its creations, c h ãO, 3 contra 2: Psico Trópicos, Fora de Quadro, and o que é o coro. coro stand out, the latter commissioned for the 32 dancers of the Balé da Cidade de São Paulo.

More information: https://improvavelproducoes.com/

We will soon share more information about new workshops in 2026.

Workshops 2025

Oracular Bodies: channelling movement and energy with Meg Stuart

5 to 8 May, 2025 | 2pm – 6pm
EVC | Estúdios Victor Córdon
Registration closed

In this immersive workshop, you are invited to step into the liminal space where the body is an oracle, and movement a conduit for unseen forces. Drawing from somatic practices, improvisation, energy work, and divinatory traditions, Oracular Bodies explores how we can receive, interpret, and embody transpersonal messages beyond language.

Through guided improvisations, trance states, and collective lucid dreaming participants will playfully engage with movement as divination-channeling impulses from within and with each other. We will experiment with energetic transmissions, vocal resonance, and spontaneous composition, using the body as a site of revelation.

Meg Stuart

Choreographer, director, and dancer who lives and works in Berlin and Brussels. With her company, Damaged Goods, founded in 1994, she has created over thirty productions, ranging from solos and duets to group pieces, video works, site-specific creations and improvisation projects. Stuart’s work moves freely between the genres of dance, theater and visual arts, driven by an ongoing dialogue with artists from different disciplines.
Through fictions and shifting narrative layers, she explores dance as a source of healing and a way to transform the social fabric. Improvisation is an important part of Stuart’s practice, as a strategy to move from physical and emotional states or the memory of them. Meg Stuart has received many awards for her work, notably the Golden Lion for Lifetime Achievement at the Biennale di Venezia in 2018, and she was a recipient of a Guggenheim Fellowship in 2023.

Dancing as Political Healing with Keith Hennessy

28 to 30 May, 2025 | 6pm – 9pm
31 maio a 1 de junho de 2025 | 10am — 1pm + 2pm – 5pm
Forum Dança, Espaço da Penha, Lisbon
Registration here

Favouring improvisation and collaboration, Keith Hennessy plays with the possibilities of healing, politics and dancing together, considering the curiosities and concerns of the participants. Calling on his prophetic forebears Gustav Landauer and Octavia Butler to renew dance, Hennessy poses the questions: what inspires or prevents you from dancing more freely, especially with other bodies? What activates or impedes your healing potential? How is your body responding to the new wars, precariousness and bodily traumas? How can dance be activated as an anti-capitalist strategy, as a new ethics of relationship, pleasure and shared power?

Keith Hennessy

A frolicker, imperfectionist, and witch working in the fields of contemporary dance, queer performance, affordable housing, sexual and political healing. Raised in Canada, he has lived in Yelamu/San Francisco since 1982. Hennessy’s work is interdisciplinary and experimental, motivated by anti-racist, queer-feminist, and anarchist movements. With a focus on the politics of relationship, Keith’s performance collaborators include Ishmael Houston-Jones, Sarah Crowell, Meg Stuart, Peaches, Nathaniel Moore, Jassem Hindi, and jose abad. Keith’s 2024-25 teaching includes Lviv Ukraine, Cornell Univ, La Manzana de Paxton, ImPulsTanz, The Field Center.

⌂ TECHNICAL INFO