ONIRONAUTA

Tânia Carvalho belongs to the most dazzling representatives of the current Portuguese dance scene. In her newly found expressionism, which overcomes the boundaries between cultures and epochs, she has long since become a permanent fixture in Europe. But while, until now, an almost strict mathematical order dominated her pieces, in ONIRONAUTA an almost giddy feeling of freedom breaks through. Oneironauts are people who have control of their dreams. The seven nightly jugglers seem as though Pieter Bruegel the Elder personally connected them to Carvalho’s dreams. Or are they nightmares? While the whimsical ghosts smirk through a night ballet lesson or rehearsal for a piece and fall into all roles of dance history with pleasure, the choreographer – who is also educated in music, singing and drawing – plays an effervescent reworking of Chopin’s Revolutionary Étude (Opus 10 No. 12) with André Santos on piano. And while the Portuguese navigates through her own bizarre/baroque dream worlds as a pianist and vocalist, she stages herself as the master of ceremonies who increasingly loses control of the ghosts she herself has conjured up. Only very few artists – those, who are so grounded that they know exactly where they stand – can suddenly appear with a work that is so carried by self-irony. Carvalho clearly has fun with this palace revolution as a harlequinade. And she invites us to join her on her journey between dreams and reality.