“After that day I was empty. Emptied. Either I would vanish (and I didn’t only because I didn’t know how) or I would fill this body with something. And that’s what I did. I filled it with myself.”

— João Fiadeiro, Autobiography. Jornal de Letras, setembro 2007

As part of the dance not dance programme, Este Corpo que me Ocupa [This Body That Occupies Me] is presented on the same day as Enfreakment, by Diana Niepce, followed by a talk with both artists and Paula Caspão, moderated by Carlos Manuel Oliveira.

The body, usually understood as the primary medium of dance, is also, and for that reason, the domain of the social forces that animate it. João Fiadeiro and Diana Niepce, though belonging to different artistic generations and disparate aesthetic worlds, share a common questioning of the body as matter and vehicle, proposing with their work the experimentation of its power and the reinvention of its possibilities.  

Fiadeiro empties the body of the subject, opening its meaning to its relationship with the world – the stage, the scene, the living room of  any house – broadening the perception of what bodies and things are capable of doing. Through the acknowledgement of the body as thing, their work questions the political, human and non-human subjectivity of the body, ascribing other materialities and modes of existence to it, while also reimagining the reality from which their dances emerge.

Image © Patrícia Almeida

dance not dance

This event is included in the (re)performances, films and talks series which constitutes the first part of dance not dance – archaeologies of the new dance in Portugal. More info.