LOWCURA
For the dancer, sound is a consequence of movement; for the musician, the purpose of movement is to create sound.
It was in this sharing of different points of view on the same action that we met to begin this choreographic research with musical consequences.
LOWCURA, in an outburst, investigates weight and gravity in both their symbolic and physical dimensions.
Concept, Dramaturgy, Choreography, Direction and Performance by
Sofia Sarmento
In collaboration with
Tiago Matos Correia - Performance
Miguel F Miguel - Video projection
Zé Ferreira - Sound design
Maurícia Barreira Neves - External look and dramaturgical support
André Correia - Costumes
Coproduction Theatro Gil Vicente
2023
An exercise of Belonging
Work - in - Progress
Multidisciplinary Performance (video, installation, dance, poetry) presented and created at 'La Deviation' in Marseille (France) in October 2021, at the context of an artistic residency - an iniciative by Rumo do Fumo and supported by Direcção Geral das Artes (Portugal).
Concept, video editing, text and performance - Sofia Sarmento
Duration - 20 min.
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e M O T I O N s
A performance that understands the body as a space of contradiction, where the own inner dialogue develops in choreographic material. Which is the relation between the fluidity of our emotions, the speed in which we think and the density with which we move?
It's an exercise of decomposition/fragmentation of what is moving on us, of what makes us move. We move the body to move what is not the body. We search for the physical limits of ourselves. We meet the other to understand the borders of our subjectivity, to claim and challenge our identity.
Concept| Choreography| Performance - Sofia Sarmento
Musical Composition | Performance - Jonas Marx
Video Mapping | Light Design - Leonel Vieira Coelho
Costumes - Ângela da Costa Leite
Duration - 45 min.
A reading exercise
online-performance | Part of Embracing the Shadow - An Immersive Art Experience
October/November 2020
With the desire to share my poems with you, I wrote them on my skin and I gave the decision to you of how to drive through my poems while driving through my body to another person. I allow myself to be surprised.
It's a poetry recital and im the text and the reader, traveling with you through this nonlinear narrative - jumping words, going forward to back - on this way the text there I used to be familiar with is being recreated, again and again as a loop. I find out the coeur of it through the repeticion.
The body got the stilness of a book, the choreography its made by the relation of the movement of the camera and the movement of the sound on the room.
Being a performance artist I got as my main tool of work - presence. The pandemy challenged my artistic practice in a way that my main materials of work - presence|distance, intimacy, touch, to belong to - totally gained new dimensions and context. Questions about intimacy flouting on the space. What kind of intimacy it's possible to create through the internet with a non physical presence? And the feeling of to be part of - how it works with this media? Playing with the voyeuristic side of internet, sharing fragility.
Concept| Poetry| Performer - Sofia Sarmento
Video| Performer| Handwriting - Flupsi
With the technical support of Dominik Sigmann
Special thanks to Valencia Selestina and Navya Sah
Undressing#1
body politics
in dialogue with the urban space
The customs of body behavior are designed by and with the architectural space that we live in.
This performative action is borne from the friction of the relations of power between the materiality of the architecture and the movement of the naked body: skin against stone, bone meeting iron, solids and fluids.
How naked bodies are criminalized, marginalized, shamed, objectified, pathologized?
The body actively questions the urban space, the architecture that everyday acts on us, by suspending that relation of power, inverting the dynamics. How does architecture act on me? How can I actively relate with it? We question it through movement. Letting the codes of that structure become visible, touching the limits of each definition. It’s skin against stone. Motion against stillness, structure and flow, eternal|ephemeral.
Nakedness arrives to us as an vulnerable interesting uniform that allows us to re-think personal freedom at public spaces, and in the role of freedom in the dynamics relations in general. In the context of a pandemie nowadays these bodies in relation they are linked by presence and motion, not touch. They relate using the space of tension created by the safety distance, and mouth and nose covered. A naked body with a covered face. A New reconfiguration of experience of identity has been allowed to us.
This Happening will be shifted to different urban places with the aim to have a big range of contexts. By experimenting with the same structure
in different urban landscapes
Since last year, we - Sabrina Huth, Flupsi Upsi and Sofia Sarmento - are researching embodied memory and encounters between naked bodies in a studio, looking for relations that are not symbolical. For example, we usually think of memories as stories, but physically they are actually tensions and constellations in the body tissues. Engaging with this physicality, we find a different language, not structured by patriarchy.
HolyCow
a Solo Dance Piece
The starting point was the desire to research gender performativity having my own body and my own identity as the tool, myself as a non-binary person with gender fluidity. I dive into my personal experiences to reflect about questions like: How does a masculine body move? What is a feminine movement? What is my body allowed to do if I perceive myself as a man? What is not? What is allowed to do if I perceive myself as a woman? What are the prejudices associated with this body? What are the privileges?
I found myselve interested on the figure of the Cowboy as a personification of virility for the hetero and also for the gay community. The symbol of western masculine sensuality. The process of embodiment of that icon into my bodies has been an empowering exercise, going into the physicality of gender performativity, questioning the limits of each definition.
This Cowboy is menstruating, this Cowboy doesn't have a horse, he has a Cow. I'm the Cow and the Boy,
the blood and the skin, holy and profane, the inside and the outside, the shit and the flies.
This project seeks to create a save space where we can share, reflect, question and create new perspectives on the perception of gender.
There are no words but I still wanna talk
Video - Dance
What's left when eveything has been said?
How can i move driven by the same desire with which i speack?
The words are worn but the desire to continue communicating remains.
This Video is the result of an improvisation inspired by these questions.
Concept, Performance and editing Sofia Sarmento
Videography and grading Flupsi Upsi
CORPUS
The Limitation of Movement as a Dance Performance
This show was presented in the context of a small performance festival organized by the Stage Design class of the Universität der Künste at the Acker Stadt Palast in Berlin.
Concept, Stage & Costume Design and Performance - Madalena Wallenstein de Castro and Paula Meuthen
With André Correia and Bianca dos Santos
Sound Design - Hector Boudot
Choreography - Sofia Sarmento
Film: Camera and editing - Arev Lalayan
It's Not A Gift, It's A Spell
The collaboration with the Noise Artist and Sound Designer Zachariah von Bamberger It's Not A Gift, is firstly a negative affirmation. To understand through the exclusion. It is not an offering, rather, an act of scenic faith. It arises from the personal encounter between the intentional manifestation of sound and movement.
It's a noisy Opera where the manipulation through movement of amplified quotidian objects make the music of hybrid scenes, oscillating between the format of a concert, a dance and/or an informal existencial dialogue between two friends.
The body is the rite; the audience, the witness.
Zachariah von Bamberger (Concept/Sound Design/Performer/Production/Video);
Sofia Sarmento (Concept/Choreography/Performer/Costumes/Video)
EX-posição
A Lonely Exercise
To Exist is to be in contradiction. A body may want one thing and at the same time want its exact opposite.
The movements are witnesses to the words. Dancing with words and explaining with movements.
'EX-posição' it is a schizophrenic dance solo where the body appears as the space for all contradictions. The lack of linearity in the organicity of thought serves as the choreographic structure. A body that runs over itself, interceded by a multiplicity of actions that are contradicted and underlined.
Colectivo Enfarte
ENFARTE ✭ collective of artistic intervention ✭
Colectivo Enfarte was a multidisciplinary group of artists who privilege the spontaneous, self-managed and informal character of independent artistic intervention as a means of expressing feelings, emotions and political positions of their existence / habitat.
Rejecting conceptual or aesthetic obligations, they naturally depart from the rigid format imposed by some of the established social and artistic circuits.
Collaborators, friends and longtime anti-bodies, crossed paths in several projects of artistic creation, organization of events, political activism or musical projects.
They were born in early 2011 in the city of Barcelos (Portugal) with the aim of bringing the open publication 'Enfarte - zine d’artes e letras' to life. They quickly realized that the purposes as a collective went beyond the publication of the zine, assuming themselves as a creative group in the various aspects of the visual and performing arts.
Founding Members: Mário Jerónimo Negrão, Miguel F, Andreia Ruivo, Sofia Sarmento, João Sineiro, Ibernise Morais, Vasco Santos, Susi Campinho, Leonel Coel and Tiago Rosendo
Manipulier Mich
Created in collaboration with the Plastic Artist, João Sineiro it started out as part of multidisciplinary 'Enfarte room for lowcost little lives', a creation of Colectivo Enfarte for Imaginarius - International Festival of Arts and Street Theater, 'Manipulier Mich' is a performance that starts from the intersection and interaction / manipulation between digital drawing and the body / movement of the performer, having acquired during the creative process a political approach focused on the draconian character of the current economic and social model and the vulnerable position of ordinary people in this addictive game.
Following the logic of work-in-progress carried out by the collective Enfarte, in addition to dance and drawing on the developement of the project comes video components, live sound design and more performers are added.
Andreia Ruivo (performer), João Sineiro (concept / drawing), Leonel Coel (sound design), Miguel Ferreira (video / production), Sofia Sarmento (concept /choreography / performer), Suse Campinho (performer), Tiago Rosendo (sound design), Vasco Santos (performer), Ibernise Morais (production)
Filminho Festival [GOIÁN - Spain - 2011]
Quermesse - showcase d’artes [BARCELOS - PORTUGAL - 2011]
Imaginarius Festival [SANTA MARIA DA FEIRA - PORTUGAL - 2011]
EM mau ESTADO
Having as soundtrack the Christmas speech of the President of the Republic to the Portuguese Nation, 'EM mau ESTADO' ('IN bad CONDITIONS') is a short solo performance that was born as a reaction to the Christmas season in a non-practicing Catholic but full-practice Capitalist society, putting the (female) body in the place of the tree - the ornament object. A body that repels and attracts, that displays and hides, seeks and escapes.
