As the result of a long collaborative research, this exhibition is curated through a process of gathering various archival materials (audiovisual records, photographs, posters, publications, ephemera, scores…), framed within a comprehensive view of social and cultural shifts and discussions regarding what constitutes dance.

Dance not dance – archaeologies of new dance in Portugal is the 7th iteration of the project For a Timeline to Be – genealogies of dance as an artistic practice in Portugal, initiated in 2016, which seeks to investigate the New Portuguese Dance and map the dance histories that remain absent from the narratives of art history and cultural history in Portugal. If, as André Lepecki says, the New Dance of the late 1980s and early 1990s is a moment in which there is an emergence of “dancing bodies reflecting the nervousness of history,” this exhibition takes it as a starting point to interrogate this nervousness through experiences that alter what is understood as dance and destabilize notions of the body (and its representations) in society.

In the seven rooms comprising the gallery, we catch glimpses of dances that, on one hand, circumscribe a wish to create a dance culture and, on the other hand, express a desire for renewal. In both cases, they account for the historical moments in which their embodied experience participates, often exposing their contradictions. Interrogating the transmission of history and the transmission of dance, the exhibition extends into a book and a programme of revisitations and new choreographic works. As a whole, dance not dance materializes different modes of investigation — of works, desires, contexts, and conditions of possibility — to traverse the nervousness of history through multiple dances and the sensitive attention they imply.

Image: Permanent Prints, by Angela Guerreiro, 1999 © Wolfgang Unger