Five dance pieces and an iconographic imaginary in convulsion: making the most of these ingredients, Alexandra Balona engages with the work of Cabo Verdean choreographer and dancer Marlene Monteiro Freitas.
On stage, the choreographies create hybrid spaces of strangeness and contradiction; bodies and materials in diaspora are transformed through the search for meanings that resonate across multiple imaginaries. Love and fury coexist, opening up space for parody and pleasure to confront the brutality of present and past history. Bodies move before us, addressing the spectator, handling objects, reshaping forms, reorganizing meanings, images, and ideas. Dance is a powerful transformer of space, and Monteiro Freitas—awarded the Silver Lion at the Venice Biennale in 2018, the Chanel Next Prize in 2021, and the Evens Art Prize in the same year—expands the very limits of that experience.
This book offers a lens onto the dazzling oeuvre of a choreographer whose boldness shakes the foundations of every theater she enters. It centers on five emblematic works: Guintche (2010), Paradise—Private Collection (2012), Jaguar (2015), Bacchae—Prelude to a Purge (2017), and Mal—Embriaguez Divina (2020). It follows Monteiro Freitas's creative methodology, weaving references from her personal archive together with works from art history, navigating between ideas and possibilities in the manner of an atlas bearing the weight of the world. From wonder emerges a mode of attentive reading; one capable of observing and, out of fragments, revealing the methods, processes, and mechanisms of art. The texts in this book are "small critical machines for reading the unreadable."
Troubling the Stage: The Choreographic Work of Marlene Monteiro Freitas is both a study and an encounter; a powerful crossing of choreography with critical thought. It invites readers, scholars, and audiences alike to experience the intensity, violence, joy, and humanity of one of today's most uncompromising choreographic voices.
Alexandra Balona is a Lecturer, researcher and independent curator based in Porto.
Born in Cape Verde in 1979, Marlene Monteiro Freitas studied dance at P.A.R.T.S. in Brussels and at the ESD and the Fundação Calouste Gulbenkian in Lisbon, before co-founding the Compass dance company in her home country. She has worked with many choreographers including
Emmanuelle Huynh, Loic Touzé, Tânia Carvalho,
Boris Charmatz, François Chaignaud and Trajal Harell. In 2015 she co-founded P.OR.K, a Lisbon-based production company. Her numerous choreographic works have earned her international recognition. She received the Silver Lion at the Venice Biennale in 2018, the Chanel Next Prize, and the Evens Art Prize in 2021.
