Margarida Constantino
Margarida Constantino is een Portugese kunstenaar, performer en dans-theatermaker. Haar werk kenmerkt zich door het samenbrengen van verschillende kunstdisciplines via dans en spoken word. Ze is afgestudeerd aan ArtEZ en werkte eerder met Nicole Beutler, Ulrike Quade en Companhia Instável (PT).
In haar residentie onderzoekt Margarida de historische onderdrukking van vrouwen door de lens van hysterie – een pseudowetenschappelijke diagnose die eeuwenlang werd gebruikt om vrouwen te controleren en te marginaliseren. Samen met performer Rebecca Lillich Krüger en muzikanten Maas van Gogh en Vincent Bal legt ze door dans, muziek en beweging de traumatische geschiedenis bloot van medische mythes rondom het vrouwelijk lichaam. De performance presenteert een confronterende metafoor van lijden en veerkracht, waarbij een symbolische figuur tegelijkertijd kwetsbaar en sterk is – een representatie van intergenerationeel vrouwelijk trauma en overleven.
About Margarida
Margarida Constantino is an artist, performer and dance theater maker based in the Netherlands. Dedicated to fostering collaboration between different practices and performance vocabularies, she uses dance and spoken text as her main vehicles for storytelling.
Originally from Portugal, Constantino has been based in the Netherlands since 2017, where she studied at ArtEZ University of the Arts. She worked with Nicole Beutler Projects(NL) and Companhia Instável(PT). From 2021 to 2023, she was a dancer for LeineRoebana(NL). In 2023, Constantino performed for Henry Rodriguez, Christina Mastori, LeineRoebana, and Carine Grizzo for PluggedLiveShows. She also choreographed and performed for the film Almost Like Home by Dilan and Behzad Safari, and premiered two performances: Sagração de quem Era and SELF-HELP: How to Make Babies, Have a Career and Eat Organic.
This year she worked as performer for The Circle of Truth: Part II and for Lea Ellemann in a residency by Ulrike Quade Company and Event Robotics. She is currently dancing for We Are Earth By Nicole Beutler co production with Opera Ballet Vlaanderen. In 2024 she created work for various events and festivals among them Bluest Monday Festival, Movies that Matter Festival, Delft Fringe, Amsterdam Fringe, Museumnacht.
About her residency
The project addresses the historical and symbolic oppression of women, through the lens of the pseudoscientific diagnosis of female hysteria. Dance theater maker Margarida Constantino together with performer Rebecca Lillich Krüger and musicians Maas van Gogh and Vincent Bal will enter a research of this history of Otherness and Abjection through music, dance and movement, creating social portraits that dissect human behavior while framing these in abstract contexts.
Hysteria has been used as a tool of control for centuries. This concept, rooted in myths about the female body, resulted in dehumanizing and traumatic experiments that reflect broader patterns of societal oppression.
This made up disorder -no longer recognized as an actual illness since 1980- became an embodiment of oppression against women. Amongst the belief that the uterus was a creature that wandered the body, and that the ‘female semen’ turned poisonous once the male spouse dies, it brought along a series of horrifying experiments executed on women that date back to ancient times. Within this topic of pseudoscience of oppressive precedence, we dissect human behavior, and while framing those depictions out of context to demonstrate how easy it is to unconsciously participate in the wrong side of history.
Imagine a human lab rat experiment with a strong physical and symbolic component. Slightly grotesque and submissive, Jane Doe celebrates life like a child yet embodies pain like the inter-generational traumatized women in all of us. A reflection upon the role that fear and misinformation play in shaping the course of unjustified science, confronted by this image of struggle and disembodiment.
