I´m the girl of the horses
I’m a beautiful horse
I’m the queen of the horses
What is it that unravels when reason falls asleep and the instincts command us irresistibly?
I look and I see just silence replacing the people
in that moment when all my deep feelings ...
I open my legs and sit on the horse riding
The Foxes is part of the remake of the performance The Hunting. The intersection of The Hunting and the present performance explores the question of the past and its continuation in time, as a body that never stopped, but that shaped itself until the year 2018. Starting from the premise of exploring the body as a matter that shapes and is shaped throughout space and time, the succession of the various sculptures through the body impels us to its fragility, which is exhibited and becomes the crucial element of the whole performance. The performance, therefore, divides itself into 3 acts. The 1st act DAD – body against matter; the 2nd act MOM – the body adapts to matter and transcends it; and the 3rd act Daughter – a new body.Alice Joana Gonçalves, performance and visual artist. Alice was born in Coimbra but raised in Serra da Estrela, the highest mountain range in Portugal; though she made her name in the big city, she remains a proud child of the provinces.Alice Joana Gonçalves is a performance and visual artist.
>She works at the inclusion of human being in the space /landscape/arquithecture /universe exercises long duration performances. Envolving a deep research (philosophically) of human essence, as a criminal lawyer graduated understood the feelings and thoughs of criminals and after, as a inclusive dance/performance teacher worked with disable people and marginalized people and now as a artist she can do it with pure freedom trough the performances, videos , drawings and installations arts.
Alice’s work is primarily concerned with that which makes us fragile and vulnerable, and reflects her overlapping interests between law and art. A law graduate, with master in Criminal Law, and post graduated Public Administrative Law, and Advanced Judicial Studies, she has always been curious about the hidden desires, the needs and daydreams that make us human - our slumbering rationality. As an advocate defending the accused - where her clients included murderers, fraudsters, drug-dealers and pimps - she had a fascinating realisation of the fine line that exists between good and bad and how these notions are not absolute.
When reading Fyodor Dostoevsky’s Crime and Punishment, Alice was struck by how close we can feel to Raskolnikov, the novel’s protagonist, even though he perpetrates several serious crimes. Art allows her to play with these elements, of vulnerability and fragility, of feeling, which she could not explore in her profession as a lawyer. And so she abandoned the law, both to dedicate herself to the art of performance, and to be completely herself.
Between 1999 and 2004 Alice studied dance at the Rainha Santa School, and at the same time she studied ballet at the Gil Vicente Theater, under the tutelage of dancers from the Bolshoi Ballet. Following her time here, she was keen to discover a contemporary language of dance, and so she took part in the contemporary experimental group. She then went on to the Ballet Summer School in Dresden, Germany, completing her formal training by working as a dancer at Vortice Dance Company in 2011.
Alice then turned her mind to making her own work, and to exploring questions of the body through visual art. Her first live performance piece was “Apocalipse”, which won the Portuguese Performance Prize; she then won this same award two years later, with “The Hunting”. In 2012, she won the Frame Research Festival award for “Minus”, a filmed performance of hers, and in 2014 she was invited to New York by the Arte Institute to represent Portugal; where, at the Alvin Ailey American Dance Theater, she performed “The Hunting”. During that same visit, “Welcome to the Machine” (a video performance of hers, was exhibited at the International Society for Performing Arts Congress. In 2015, she won the Prémios Novos, the national prize for Emerging Artists in the Visual Art category.
More recently, she has staged a solo exhibition, “Adagio to One Wolf”, at the Fernando Santos Gallery in Porto. She has collaborated with Julião Sarmento, the visual artist, to make “Five Easy Pieces” and “Notre Dame”. She has also performed “La Chienne” at the exhibition of Julião’s Sarmento’s private collection in Lisbon’s Museu da Eletricidade, alongside the works of Gerhard Richter, Bruce Nauman, Nan Goldin and Marina Abramovic. Foxes is her new work, she performed at Teatro Ibérico, Lisbon and it gonna be at Malta Festival (Poznan, Poland) curated by Nástio Mosquito. Really recently she did the Marina Abramovic´s workshop “Cleaning the House (Greece, Marina Abramovic Institute).
Meet Alice Joana Gonçalves: