Carcaça

In Carcaça, Marco da Silva Ferreira uses dance as a tool to research about community, construction of collective identity, memory and cultural crystallization. The choreography, which initially starts with jumping footwork as an agitator and accelerator, progressively draws a vibrant, rebellious and carnivalesque body.

A cast of 10 performers form a collective that researches their collective identity in a physical, intuitive and unpretentious flow of the body, dance and cultural construction. They start from familiar footwork, coming from clubbing, ball’s, cypher battles and the studio to approach standardized and immutable folk dances related to their memory/heritage.

These dances from the past crystallized and were not able to integrate new definitions of bodies, groups and communities that were considered minor. It was necessary to break with the authoritarian, totalitarian and paternalistic past. In Carcaça, an exercise that integrates the past and the present is proposed.

Thinking about: How do you decide to forget and make memory? What is the role of individual identities in building a community? What is the driving force of an identity? What world is the individual and collective body going through? Or, rather, what bodies are crossing the world?

The steps, complex but made with simple sneakers, will bring not only the sound to the stage, but also the exchanges between kinetic, thermal and light energy. The physical sounds are accompanied by drums played by João Pais Filipe and electronic music by Luis Pestana. These elements, performed live, constitute an accelerated soundtrack that interconnects references from traditional music (for example, fanfares and marches), postmodern music and clubbing music (Techno trance/dub).

In 2020 the creation of Corpos de baile for Companhia Nacional de Bailado was the beginning of this research on collective, identity and footwork, which inspired the creation of Carcaça.