© Nellie de Boer / “The Ruin is a Tail”, de Sancha Meca Castro
An archive is not as sterile as it seems. We wake before dawn to move from the memory of the very first cell. We discover that what disappeared from the old body still echoes within the new one. Ruin is a tail. In an archive of gestures, only movement can speak both of what has been lost and of what has been preserved as a fossil. We embodied this archive, but its forms took us by surprise. We tried to repeat its movements, yet in attempting to translate these fossilised gestures, we accidentally created something new. The objects taught us how to become sculpture, how to freeze movement. We destroyed them.
Sancha is a choreographer, performer and transdisciplinary artist. She works with improvisation scores through speculative practices centred on the nature of objects, archives and gestures. Her movement practice explores tangible matter alongside invisible materialities such as fictions, value creation, ruins, collapse and other forms of memory. Using the body as a point of departure, she develops performances for a range of spatial contexts, negotiating a shared performativity with the objects she activates on stage. She studied Sculpture at FBAUP, Dance at BDI in Berlin, and Choreography at SNDO in the Netherlands. Her work has been presented in Portugal, the Netherlands, England, Croatia, Bulgaria, Chile, Argentina and Uruguay.
Dance – 40 min
gesture – archive – movement
Oct 2 and 3 / Café Teatro at Teatro Campo Alegre
Concept, Choreography and Stage Design: Sancha Meca Castro
Movement Research and Performance: Dora Brkarić, Hannah Badura, Nara Gonçalves, Thalia Livingstone, Sancha Meca Castro
Sound Design: Inês Malheiro
Lighting Design: Gabriela Clavería
Artistic Advisers: Carly Rose Bedford and Marta Lopes Santos
Production Manager: Marta Lopes Santos
Co-production: Instável – Centro Coreográfico and Teatro Municipal do Porto*
* As part of the Palcos Instáveis cycle