JOÃO DOS SANTOS MARTINSAlarve

_{© José Carlos Duarte}

João dos Santos Martins’ work explores the relationships between dance, language and transmission. For this performance, the dancer and choreographer takes the body as a field of negotiation between nature and construction. The work dialogues with his personal experience of migration from the countryside to the urban scape, and the idea of adaptation — of the body and the subject — in a continuous process, often violente, of adjustment of gestures and relationships.

Dance is approached as a practice of unlearning and reinvention: an exercise of acknowledging of the social and bodily layers accumulated in the attempt to adequate habits seen as strange, rough or wild. More than representative of an identity, the work presents a field of friction between nature, rurality and culture. The body becomes matter in process, in which inside and outside dialogue proposing ways of listening. 

João dos Santos Martins (Santarém, 1989) is an artist and dancer whose work encompasses choreography, exhibition and publication. His practice articulates collaborative modes of working around questions of transmission, language and labor. Along with Ana Bigotte Vieira, he has created a device to collectively map the history of dancing in Portugal, Para Timeline a Haver (2016–), which manifests in many iterations. In 2019, he founded the semestral publication Coreia, dedicated to artist texts in portuguese. He is co-director of Parasita, a co-opperative and artists space based in Lisbon.