www.vimeo.com/48669042 (trailer)
In 2002 I moved to Berlin. I spent 14 years in transit in Europe, between Berlin, Lisbon, London and Rome. In that time, I moved away from that inner place that some people call country, others roots or even family. I got lost, but I met a lot of women who helped me rediscover myself as someone who's not exactly me. From this process was born the performance Here & There [or Somewhere Inbetween] that brings the story of seven immigrant women in Portugal, filtered by the body of two other women, also immigrants: I, who wrote the texts and directed the performance, and anca huma, who danced these stories.
Here and There began with a series of interviews with immigrant women. Despite the socio-cultural differences of each of them, a similar basic structure was surprisingly seen in each of its paths: the inevitability of "travel" and the closure in the body itself as protection against others and the outside world. Of these seven interviews, seven stories were written in text form and filtered from all spatial and time details. The result was a mosaic of seven fragments of stories that together make sense as a whole. The choreography reflects these same basic principles: an endless game between dualities such as inside and outside, center and surface, male and female, circular and linear, me and non-me, back and forth...
The main question that arises in this work is whether there is a common structure, a kind of nucleus, for the Feminine? If all layers of social, cultural, racial, geographical and ripening traits were systematically plucked from women, would their various naked seeds have any similarity?
video-performance, Berlim 2011
radialsystem, berlim, 2011 | studio K77, berlin, 2012 | Boddinale, Loophole Berlin, 2013 | Festival Dança em Foco, Rio de Janeiro, 2016
direção/conceito/texto: cristina elias
performance: anca huma
video: virgis puodziunas
set design: annisa jabour