MEMóRIA Silenciosa

Medium-length film; Choreographer and co-director; Commissioned by Cia SESC de Dança MG and shot in Brazil in 2017.

She has the meaningless word. She, that no one listens to. Her word has no past and has no power over the future. Wrapped in feelings, the wind engulfs her, embracing everything. Who are they? Why would they listen to her? A suspicion, distinctive features, a spirit ready to swallow all surprises and all strangers.

Directed by Andre Semenza and Fernanda Lippi, produced by Maverick Motion

WE HAVE BLED

Short Film; Choreographer & Dancer

We Have Bled takes us deep into private emotional battlegrounds. Three people, caught in the turbulence of relationships: moments of delicate intimacy, riven by impulsive ferocity. 

Directed by Marcus Waterloo.

World Premiere took place at Frame Film Festival 

SEA WITHOUT SHORE

ASHES OF GOD (AS CINZAS DE DEUS)

First feature dance film, '73 - Choreographer and Movement Director

Inspired by Ovid's Metamorphoses, Ashes Of God (As Cinzas de Deus) is a visual poem that merges the languages of dance and cinema, featuring a cast of award-winning Brazilian dancers. Post-produced at Pinewood Studios with a haunting soundtrack mixed by Kid Loco. The film was shot in cinema-scope by award-winning British director of photography Marcus Waterloo and features a sound design supervised by Academy-Award® and multiple BAFTA winner Glenn Freemantle (‘Gravity’). Directed by Andre Semenza and Fernanda Lippi, founders of critically acclaimed Anglo-Brazilian physical theatre company Zikzira, makers of ‘Ashes of God’. Produced and distributed by Maverick Motion Ltd

As Cinzas de Deus is a visual poem in a universe of realities. Set in the ruins of an abandoned, once grandiose 19th century city in Brazil, the film follows a woman returning to a world of memory and feeling, where characters - perhaps ‘trapped souls’ – are living and re-living moments from an unspecified past. In search for answers and completion she penetrates their dream-like reality, absorbs them, challenges them, releases them. Their memory bank gradually erased, they disappear into the ether. In a climactic finale she confronts her own personal nemesis. She survives the life-and-death confrontation, and, left behind, she dances alone, immersed in dust and eternity.

ASHES OF GOD (AS CINZAS DE DEUS) IS AVAILABLE FOR PURCHASE AT AMAZON

Fliessgleichgewicht

Short film, 15' - Choreographer & Co-director

In a derelict factory space, characters move to impulses, memory loops, fragments of feeling. Isolated in their own dense, stagnated realities, they communicate imperceptibly with each other in a ritual of anticipation and release, confined by the laws of the ‘steady state’, the dynamic stasis. 

Inspired by the choreography of Urbe, but stripped of its socio-political and sensorial contexts, the performers interact with space and time without narrative substructure and interpersonal reference: bodies without foothold, in a state of suspension and release, in illusory congruence and stability. Through their bodies surge eloquent yet inscrutable impulses, building to a crescendo; but the impulses subside, yielding to the Fliessgleichgewicht.

Produced By Maverick Motion Ltd.

UNFAIR GAME

Music Video, 4', completed - Choreographer

Fernanda is reunited with Kid Loco after almost 25 years. They originally worked together on ‘Ashes Of God’. The music also features Olga Kouklaki.

Unfair Game is a music video for Kid Loco’s single from his long-waited album ‘Rare Birds’. The music video launched in September prior to the album.

The music video directed by Andre Semenza, produced by Maverick Motion LTD. Featuring Fernanda Lippi, Cecile Sinclair and Sarita Piotrowski.

Winner "Best Music Video 2020" Switzerland International Film Festival

OUTRO EM SI

Stage, 80', Cast of 12 - Commissioned by Cia SESC de Dança MG

Winner of two Brazilian SinparC Performing Arts AwardS - Best Show 2017 & Best Dancer 2017

- Nominated: Best Choreography, Best Sound Design, Best Costume Design

THE SMOOTH WAX OF INGENUOUS SOULS

Live Performance, 40-minute solo - Choreographer

“We have an interval and then our place knows us no more” - Walter Pater, The Renaissance

A woman carrying a burden yields to memory, unfolding the space, with a desire to fall. Her wistful yearning for home, ruptured from it, as the shadows of evening deepen. Body parts and spiral streams as passages to self-possession. 

“And in her tears shed in such absences there seemed always to be some soul-subduing foretaste of what her last tears might be. A system of visible symbolism interweaves itself through all our thoughts and passions; and irresistibly, little shapes, voices, accidents–the angle at which the sun in the morning fell on the pillow–become parts of the great chain wherewith we are bound.” - Walter Pater, The Child In The House

THE LAST WORD IS THE PENULTIMATE (A ULTIMA PALAVRA E A PENULTIMA) 

Theatrical production, 50', devised theatre - Choreographer

A última palavra é a penúltima’ (‘The last word is the penultimate’) looks at what transcends when all options have been explored, every path has been walked and each possible combination tried. A state drained of solutions that paradoxically gives rise to the inception of something new, something uncharted. 

A última palavra é a penúltima (The last word is the penultimate), a site-specific urban intervention project co-directed by Teatro da Vertigem (Brazil), Zikzira Physical Theatre and Lot (Peru), took place in a disused underpass in the rundown heart of São Paulo, next to the Teatro Municipal. 

Based on Gilles Deleuze's visionary text L'épuisé (a study of Samuel Beckett's piece 'Quad'), A última palavra explores urban sub-rhythms, voyeurism and exposure, and the depletion of options.  In a reversal of voyeurism, the audience witnessed the actions from inside the shopping windows. Passers-by, monks and homeless children and adults were integrated in the passage’s ‘flux’.  

With a cast of 13 and a soundtrack by The Hafler Trio (Brahma/Antartica).

I SET YOU FREE (EU VOS LIBERTO)

Devised theatre/opera, 90-minute Performance, cast of 4 - Choreographer

“Eu vos liberto” (‘I set you free’) is based on Euripides’ play ‘Hippolytus’ – considered humanity’s first sex tragedy, which examines sexual taboo, fear of the female and misogynistic contempt. 

Seemingly polar opposites, the play’s characters are aspects of the same, fatally linked through hubris and illusory power. 

Aphrodite punishes the celibate prince Hippolytus, a devout worshipper of Artemis, bringing about his death through the very sex that he has scorned, by casting a spell on Queen Phaedra to fall in love with him, her stepson. 

The nurse, nameless but all pervasive, learns her secret and brings it to Hippolytus, who reacts with savage misogynistic ferocity.

VERISSIMILITUDE

URBE

30’, cast of 2, urban performance/Installation, Rio de Janeiro - Choreographer

Waste, perishable matter. Urbe explores the transitory quality of the body: the relentless cycles of birth, decay and death - and through this molecular disintegration reach a non-verbal ‘existential essence’. The objectified body’s and its ritual cadence, in the face of urban abstraction and compartmentalization.

Urbe, an installation occupying an entire street - a landscape of food waste and two performers - was created in the decaying centre of Rio de Janeiro. Urbe reflects on a city’s vast amounts of still-edible discarded food, where humans themselves are perishable waste, and on Brazil’s lack of cultural memory.

The street’s inhabitants – all of them squatters - were integrated in the project as crew (set construction, lighting). On the soundtrack: ‘Miserere’, a classical piece of music from Brazilian colonial times, composed by an anonymous, forgotten composer.