Rita Marcalo
Involuntary Dances is a project looking at conceptual and physical interfaces between dance, movement and epilepsy, and it investigates the scientific and artistic currency of creating an artefact that places itself simultaneously in the fields of artistic and scientific research.
The research by artist Rita Marcalo has been hosted by Yorkshire Dance in association with GlaxoSmithKline, Essex Dance and York St John University.
Choreographer and performer Rita says: ‘I often think of how – before the tendency for a fragmentation of knowledge into tiny little pockets of specialism –people such as da Vinci would simultaneously use their creativity in creating artistic artefacts and scientific artefacts. They would not understand themselves as artist or scientist, but both.
‘This is one of the things I am interested in: to understand the world not by sticking to one point of view (artistic discourses), but by placing artistic and scientific discourses side by side, and by asking questions about where they converge and/or diverge. Hence my previous research work that sought to link the philosophy of science and the practice of choreography.’
Rita Marcalo is an award-winning choreographer and performer. After training at the professional school of Lisbon Dance Company she toured for 13 years in Portugal, Spain, Belgium, the USA and the UK with various companies (Aveiro Dance Company, Lisbon Dance Company, Emilyn Claid, Carol Brown Dances, and IOU Theatre).
She settled in the UK and founded Instant Dissidence in 2002. She has won various choreographic commissions since. White Out Conditions is Instant Dissidence’s second full-length production, touring the UK in 2007/2008. In 2008 Marcalo was awarded the prestigious Essexdance/Arts Council Interact Award, and a Creative Futures Award.