This performance, created and performed by seven degree students in Dance for their Performance Project III module and built through a collaborative process over four months, is based on the exhibition ‘Paula Rego and Adriana Varejão. Between your teeth’, which shows the work of the artists Paula Rego and Adriana Varejão. Started in February, with weekly rehearsals and using the exhibition space as an extension of the classroom, this creation started to take shape drawing inspiration from the artists’ works.

How do you dance an exhibition? How do you give shape and body to the way the works on display resonate within us? How many ways are there of experiencing an exhibition? These were the questions answered through movement, venturing to compose and daring to create and dance in a space where we usually only observe.

The performance is part of the ongoing project ‘Dançar Arte’ [Dancing Art], a co-creation by CAM’s Education, Mediation and Participation department (Fábrica de Projetos / [Project Factory]) and Lisbon School of Dance (part of Lisbon Polytechnic Institute).

Project coordinators Andreia Dias and Ângelo Neto Cid explained their approach and process as follows: ‘Between our bodies there is a space that tears open in the friction of encounter. An inside that is inside-out. Between our bodies there is a grinding of bones. Where the skeleton breaks on the floor and balance eludes us. Between our bodies there are many other bodies, male, female, non-binary. Between our bodies is you. Push me, pull me, wink at me… Between our bodies we are more than two, more than seven, more than a crowd. We keep adding to one another. Because between our bodies we cease to be, and start to re-exist.’