ALARVE, 2026
The work of João dos Santos Martins explores the relationships between dance, language, and transmission. In this performance, the dancer and choreographer approaches the body as a site of negotiation between nature and construction.
The work engages with his personal experience of migrating from a rural to an urban context, and with the idea of adaptation — of both body and subject. Just as the Brazilian landscape architect Burle Marx understood the garden as an “adaptation of the ecological environment to the demands of civilization”, migration reveals a continuous, often violent, process of adjusting gestures and relationships.
Dance is approached as a practice of unlearning and reinvention: an exercise in recognizing the social and bodily layers that accumulate in the attempt to adapt habits perceived as strange, crude, or wild. Rather than representing an identity, the work presents a field of friction between notions of nature, rurality, and culture. The body becomes matter in process, where inside and outside enter into dialogue, opening onto other modes of attention and listening.
⌂ TECHNICAL INFO
by and with: João dos Santos MartinsCostume: Darius Dolatyari-Dolatdoust
Litany: Franz Schubert
Coproduction: Associação Parasita, MAC/CCB Museu de Arte Contemporânea