“Let us consider the universe: strange, fascinating and diverse. Let us consider its movements: imperceptible and interminable. Such harmony! Imagine the dancer executing gestures. After each movement, other movements, each one from the imaginary line of ephemeral movements. The dancer is joined by another dancer, and another, and another. It is no longer a detached image; it is an indescribable image space. The empty space decorates itself, (the house), with objects that are just objects. Thus, a fantasy.  Arithmetic, the first science, the first measure, comes from the word “rhythm”. Rhythm adjusts to the exact measure of things, objects, movements of the dancers that cyclically produce the party in the house. The party is always social, i.e. indefinable, undemonstrable, undelayable, infecting everything centripetally with its laws. Unknown?! Try it! The universe – that very thing – continues to expand infinitely.”

— António Pinto Ribeiro, from Clarice Lispector, Zoo&lógica, 1984

ZOO&lógica: Instalação a Habitar por Coreografias [ZOO&logic: Installation to be Inhabited by Choreographies], performed in 1984, was an artistic gesture precursor of the openness and experimentation that, years later, would characterise Nova Dança Portuguesa [New Portuguese Dance]. Under the driving force of choreographer Paula Massano, some of the participants at the time, and her accomplices, were Margarida Bettencourt, Ana Rita Palmeirim, Filipa Mayer and Gagik Ismailian (dancers of Ballet Gulbenkian), Nuno Carinhas (scenic space), Constança Capdeville and Carlos Zíngaro (music), Paulo Graça (light design) and António Pinto Ribeiro (text).

Performed at Os Cómicos gallery in Lisbon, ZOO&lógica was the result of a collaborative process profoundly based on improvisation, which updates, in Portugal, certain propositions from postmodern American dance. Interdisciplinarity was a fundamental part of the process and the introduction of multiple viewing angles ridded the performance of a single frontal relationship with the audience. Space becomes the work’s protagonist, in the manner that it embraces bodies and objects, music and voices, and dances and texts within no particular order of hierarchy. 

Almost forty years later, using scores, audio recordings and film footage, choreographers Margarida Bettencourt and Ana Rita Palmeirim return to ZOO&lógica together with Nuno Carinhas, Paulo Graça and Carlos Zíngaro. Performed by the final year students of the Escola Superior de Dança [Portuguese Higher School of Dance], the piece will reactivate the ideas proposed by the original work. 

The performance is followed by a talk with the artists, moderated by Maria José Fazenda.

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.