© Nellie de Boer / “The Ruin is a Tail”, de Sancha Meca Castro
An archive isn’t as sterile as one might think. We wake up at dawn to move from the memory of the very first cell. We find that what is gone from the old body still echoes in the new one.
The ruin is a tail.
In an archive of gestures, only movement can speak for both what was lost and what was preserved as the fossil. We embodied this archive but were surprised by its ways. We attempted to repeat its movements, but in trying to translate those fossilized gestures we accidentally made something new. The objects taught us how to become sculptures, how to freeze movement. We broke them open.
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 Stone, Leonor Mendes, Sancha Meca Castro
Sound Design: Inês Malheiro
Lighting Design: Gabriela Clavería
Artistic Advisers: Carly Rose Bedford and Marta Lopes Santos
External eye: Luísa Saraiva
Production Manager: Marta Lopes Santos
Co-production: Instável – Centro Coreográfico and Teatro Municipal do Porto*
* As part of the Palcos Instáveis cycle