Michelle Moura

Eyes wide open. Eyes shut. Eyes rolled back. The stare turned inwards. Michelle Moura has taken up a formidable challenge: to write a score for the essentially involuntary movements of eyelids. By paying attention to some-thing as tiny, evanescent and instinctive as a blink. By building up in a magisterial way a study of its hold on faces and bodies. The choreographer is thus standing up for an exploratory, generative approach: creating practices that induce transformations in physical and psychic states. Expressive sensations, postures and movements construct emotional experiences. The challenge is to remain as close as possible to the body, that factory of emotions. Introducing disturbance into a stare. Cultivating phenomena of resonance. With female saints in rapture, shamans, acidic characters from manga, carnivorous plants: the figures embodied by Michelle Moura and Clara Saito swerve between the ecstatic and grotesque. This meteorology of affects both eludes us and draws us into its powerful presence.

Born in Brazil, Michelle Moura lives and works in Berlin. She took the Essais training course at the CNDC in Anger (2010) and Das Choreography in Amsterdam (2015) before participating in the foundation of Cauliflower Miniglobal Artistic Community (2012) with seven other Brazilian artists. She has created CAVALO (2010), FOLE (2013), BLINK (2015), Coreografia estudio # (2016) and Enquanto Somos Humanos (2019). Her pieces have been put on at a large number of South American and European festivals, including Panorama in Brazil, the Venice Biennale, Santarcangelo and ImPulsTanz.