Darktraces: on ghosts and spectral dances Joana Castro

“To be haunted by a ghost is to remember something you’ve never lived through, to have the memory of what has essentially never

been present.” - Jacques Derrida

A dance in the disappearance of its own trace. No belonging. What it was and what no longer is materializes in bodies which give rise to their multiple existences, ghosts of itself – already extinct or yet to come – which belong both to substance and to memory, to imagination and to perceived reality, to the visible and to the occult. They share an existential loneliness between life and death.

Joana Castro develops her work between dance, performance and sound, presenting her works in Portugal, Belgium, France, Germany and Brazil. Among her works Perto... tanto quanto possível (2014), PARADISUM (2015), SU8MARINO (2017), RITE OF DECAY (2019/20), Darktraces (2021) and STILL we MOVE (2021) em colaboração com Maurícia | Neves. She began her studies in the dance course at Balleteatro Escola Profissional in 2003, she attended the PEPCC (Study, Research and Choreographic Creation Program) course at Fórum Dança in 2008, she received a scholarship from the NEC in 2009, in 2013 she participated in the DanceWeb Schoolarship Program of Impulstanz Festival, in Vienna, and in 2016/17 she attended the postgraduate course in performance at the Faculty of Fine Arts of Porto. As a performer, she collaborated with Carlota Lagido, Né Barros, Joclécio Azevedo, Victor Hugo Pontes, Ana Borralho and João Galante, Bruno Alexandre, among others.