Biography
Maria Ferreira Silva started her artistic journey at the age of six performing at the local auditorium of her hometown in the suburbs of Lisbon. She holds a dance degree from the National Conservatory of Lisbon and P.A.R.T.S. in Brussels. She has worked as a dancer, choreographer, teacher, researcher, mentor, and costume designer and remains curious for other roles that may seduce her in the dance field.
As a dancer she works with Willi Dorner, Daniel Linehan, Georgia Vardarou, Radouan Mriziga, Marco Torrice, Anneleen Keppens, Renan Martins de Oliveira, Maud le Pladec, Benjamin Vandewalle and Trajal Harrell, for whom she is currently also working as rehearsal director at Schauspielhaus Zurich. In her teaching practice she works with institutions such as the Royal Conservatory of Antwerp, Stockholm University of the arts, Charleroi danse and AORCA summer lab.
Maria is a dance artist and defines her artistic practice as a vibrant ecosystem where different practices, roles, and contexts, nurture and feed-forward her engagement with the art field.
In residentie Wild Explosion of Radical Softness
01.06.2024 – 01.06.2024
Wild Explosion of Radical Softness is a performative practice that uses galleries and outdoor spaces as dance studios and co-working environments. It treats the body as a craft material and a fabric as its partner to explore through movement, concepts of formation, transformation, explosion, and non-linear time. It borrows its methodology from visual arts to create ephemeral movement sketches that resonate in space and activate a living archive through the body. This work-sessions are a dance or a collection of dances emerging from a movingthinking practice and a movement research methodology in itself. Dances that wish to displace the center and acknowledge periphery, allowing the body to transcend and be anchored in no less than the power of the erotic, existing in its full force between “chaos and the power of our deepest feelings” (Audrey Lorde).
In her choreographic practice, Maria researches the notion of plasticity to unfold relations between beings and things, inviting movement around and through them. She understands plasticity not only as the capacity to simultaneous give and receive form, but also as a form of expression, and a quality from which to attend relations. This work draws influences and support from neuroscience, gender and queer studies, and posthumanist theory using them as fertilizers for cells, fluids, muscles and bones. Wild Explosion of Radical Softness situates itself retro-actively and navigates through memory and citation engaging the viewer in multiple temporalities. It plays with scale, perspective, the visible and the invisible to investigate the notion of singular (not of individual) and collective as means of affirming their interdependency. It brings forward the entanglement of matter in Anthropocentric times and wishes to challenge the collective understanding of spacetimematter.