Telma João Santos
MENOS POR MENOS É MAIS/ MINUS TIMES MINUS IS PLUS
PERFORMANCE
Synopsis
It starts in the fingertip. A feeling propagating itself for the rest of the body that makes me back off. I could also go forward, but I back off. I run to the next stop. I pause. Go back to the sensation. This time, the ear tip. I don’t know how it propagates itself, but I am itchy. I go forward. No, I have to back off. How is it done? It is always less than expected. I am willing to explain. To stop and use words. But language is too peculiar to be shared and I will not speak. I will not move much. If it weren’t for this feeling, I would be stopped. Immobile. The silence. The pain of silence, the sound of silence, the narrative of silence. Yes, that is more.
“Our situation is, in the middle of avalanches, to try landscaping." Vasco Gato (free translation)
Artistic Team
Creation and Performance: Telma João Santos
Costume creation and execution: Carmen Alves/Teia Trama
Co-production: balleteatro | Corpo+Cidade (Festival DDD)
Funding/Support: Fundação Calouste Gulbenkian
Artistic Residencies: Companhia Olga Roriz, Casa da Dança.
Project Description
“Minus times Minus is Plus” is a solo piece/walk, with several stops where direction and orientation are reformulated from a new “less for less is more” proposal. It could be a slogan, a pedagogical project, it could be an arrogance. It is, however, a solo piece/walk where I pass through several circumstances of my body to attain stop-places, those that attribute silence that I search for, together with solitude. It could be a manifest of a woman, mathematician, artist, researcher, free, cook, old and with no fear, but maybe it transforms itself into a manifest on how my several body shakings are part of a movement language around the silence of pain.
This solo project is developed in collaboration with Carmen Alves/Teia Trama, costume designer and artist, that will help me to configure these shakings and pains as places of visibility through costumes that will also be scenic objects. Colors, asymmetries, natural inks, fabrics rescued from out-of-date normativities.
In this piece I define a geometry returning my mask-clothes to the public space. I return all my representative possibilities to the public space that determined them. I ally myself to a place of resistance, to the impudence of not being an ally, to not be compatible, to not belong. How to leave visible marks of invisibility contexts? How to find a poetics of salvation through the purge of a walk? Each stop functions as an attractor characterized by a word to be inhabited. It is a choreographic piece from the place of denudation, liberation of aesthetical, personal, relational load. To configure the possibility of giving up, to just offering a walk where less for less is more, where I multiply negatives to obtain positives and continue without restrictions. To inhabit public space as an absent body of a clear dissident presence as if he could not be presence, configured to belong just to itself, to not be of trust in productive logics. To inhabit public space, offering the product of institutional castration, the artistic multidimensionality of not belonging.
MENOS POR MENOS É MAIS
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MINUS TIMES MINUS IS PLUS
Chronology
July 2023 – August 2023: documental videos commenting several concepts, ideas, images that traverse my imaginary within this piece’s creation process.
September 2023 – November 2023: videos with challenges “Less for less is more” as an encyclopedia of choreographic possibilities.
4-8 & 11-15 December 2023: artistic residency at Olga Roriz Company’s space (Lisbon, Portugal), where I will be with Carmen Alves testing choreographic and set design possibilities, experimenting fabrics, costumes and structures.
14-16 February 2024: artistic residency at House of Dance (Almada, Portugal), to test choreographic scores and costumes.
Abril 2024: public presentation/première at “Corpo + Cidade”, in the context of festival DDD (Porto, Portugal).