Maria Ramos
Choreographer and dancer, she currently lives in Lisbon.
Between 1996 and 2009, she lived in the Netherlands where she studied and developed her professional career as a dancer, having worked with various choreographers in the Netherlands, Germany, Great Britain, and the USA, among whom choreographer/director Angus Balbernie stands out.
She received her formal dance training at the Hogeschool voor de kunsten/ArtEZ (1996-2000) and her Master's in Choreography, ArtEZ Master of Choreography (MoC, 2006-2008), at the ArtEZ Institute of the Arts in Arnhem.
Upon returning to Portugal, she completed the five-month Research and Creation course at Forum Dança, in Lisbon, in the context of which she created her first solo work, 7pm/Rumour, a piece that initiated the cycle of works A Certain Degree of Immobility, supported by DGArtes and the Gulbenkian Foundation, which also includes the pieces Nerves Like Nylon and Something Still Uncaptured, presented in the Netherlands, Portugal, and Argentina.
Within the scope of these works, she published the article Detecting, choreographing, sculpting – how does an action create the germ of a narrative?, based on her master's thesis of the same title, in the publication Danswetenschap in Nederland, Dutch Society for Dance Research, and the article Like a Dance – Walking for Thinking, in the publication Inventing Futures, published by ArtEZ Press.
In 2016, she began a new cycle of works with Árida, a project supported by DGArtes, which is currently touring.
Parallel to her creative work, she teaches regularly at Forum Dança, the Escola Superior de Artes e Design das Caldas da Rainha, and the Lisbon Dance School (Escola Superior de Dança).
"When I am asked what dance technique I teach, I always end up having to talk about my journey and dance practices. In my classes, I take my own approach based on release techniques (which I learned when I started studying dance with Amélia Bentes and Sofia Neuparth, and later during my Dance degree in the Netherlands with teachers Eva Karczag, Mary Fulkerson, Gil Clarke, and João da Silva); contact improvisation (Karen Nelson, Steve Paxton); movement research; partner work; fall and recovery; floor work; vertical movement and movement through space; improvisation and composition. Developed throughout my dance career with teachers and choreographers of the so-called new Portuguese dance, Sofia Neuparth, Amélia Bentes, Peter Michael Dietz, Clara Andermatt, and Francisco Camacho, the latter more intensely in the context of the five-month Choreographic Research and Creation Course at Forum Dança; in the Netherlands and England, with creators and teachers, some of them founders of the Judson Dance Theater movement, Steve Paxton, Deborah Hay, Yvonne Rainer (from whom I learned the solo Trio A), and Karen Nelson/Lisa Nelson, with dancers and teachers from the Trisha Brown and Siobhan Davies companies, Eva Karczag (who conveyed to me the notions of ‘full-bodied dancing and the practice of being in the moment’ and with whom I also practiced the martial art T’ai Chi Ch’uan, which E.K., in turn, learned from teacher Gerda Geddes), Lisa Kraus, and Gil Clarke.
Also pedagogically significant for me was the training with the Goat Island Performance Group collective, Matthew Goulish and Lin Hixson, and with choreographer/director Angus Balbernie, with whom I collaborated regularly as a dancer between 2000 and 2009."
Fotografia © David Costa