Contemporary Dance 26/27

Contemporary Dance classes for adults

With Josefa Pereira & Bárbara Faustino

Tuesday & Wednesday | 7:30 pm – 9:30

“The Contemporary Dance classes at Forum Dança will be conducted in the 2025/26 academic year through a multifaceted experience proposed by Josefa Pereira, Bárbara Faustino, and guests. The aim of our classes is to create a space for encounter and collectivity, where the alternation between artists encourages the sharing and crossing of different bodily practices, exploring both what they have in common and the particularities that each work proposal will allow them to experience.

Based on this exchange between teachers/artists and students/artists, the aim is to provide a context for experimentation that activates in each participant the availability and readiness necessary for a journey through practices that seek to provide the experience of creative tools through dance and the body in movement.

In our classes, different techniques and training methods are used to achieve a more powerful and self-aware body. Little by little, we cultivate a sensitive, more accessible, and porous body, with better vitality and energy circulation, more resilient and malleable with itself and in relation to its surroundings. Finally, we seek to mobilize a more inventive body that is constantly updating its ways of being and existing.

The classes on Tuesdays and Thursdays are open to anyone interested in dance and movement practices. Therefore, not only dance artists and beginners are welcome, but also people who have no previous experience in physical practices. Curiosity and availability are the only requirements to join us.”

[Josefa Pereira and Bárbara Faustino]

As part of the annual scholarships offered by Forum Dança, we would like to extend an invitation to black, trans, non-binary, and/or immigrant individuals who are unable to afford the classes. If you fall into any of these categories and are interested in joining us, please contact us by email at: forumdança@forumdanca.pt

(the two scholarships available will be awarded in order of application)

Biographies

Josefa Pereira (BR/PT) is a choreographer and performer. She lives in Portugal and collaborates in São Paulo, the city where she grew up and trained artistically. She completed her master’s degree at DAS Choreography – AHK (NL) with a scholarship from the Gulbenkian Foundation. She participated in PACAP and graduated in Dance and Performance at PUC-SP (BR) as a PROUNI program scholarship recipient.

With a strong focus on practice and research, her artistic approach involves engaging with available and readily accessible materials that can emerge as fabulous, enchanted, or monstrous. Her attention focuses on a field of listening and sensitivity in which doing through different frictions becomes capable of enabling other potentials of poetic and aesthetic agency, generating transformations and mutations of forms, states, and perceptions. In this dynamic relationship between materials/collaborators or between human and more-than-human entities, collaborative thinking, cooperative agency, and coexistence implied in each choreographic gesture are prioritized.

In addition to her authorial work and collaborations as a performer and in the field of dramaturgy, she is dedicated to teaching activities, which include classes and workshops.

More about Josefa Pereira here.

Bárbara Faustino (BR/PT) dedicates herself to creation and teaching in the fields of contemporary dance and performance. She researches the body as a territory of study where expressive possibilities are infinite and investigates the fertile dialogue between teaching and creation. She graduated from the Escola Municipal de Bailado do Teatro Municipal de São Paulo and also holds a Degree in Dance and Movement from the Universidade Anhembi Morumbi. She completed the course for Pre-Primary and Primary teachers at the Royal Academy of Dance of London. Based in Portugal since 2014, she worked as a dancer, teacher, and cultural manager at Musibéria – International Center for Music and Dance of the Iberian World, in Serpa (Alentejo), where she deepened her autographic research in the fields of dance creation and teaching. She currently resides in Lisbon, where she develops work as a dance teacher in different educational, artistic, and intergenerational contexts, balancing pedagogical practice with her artistic research. Her work lies at the intersection of teaching, creation, and community practices. She worked with Jérôme Bel in THE SHOW MUST GO ON, founded HIDRA Cia. de dança in partnership with dancer Janice Iandritsky, and is also part of Mosaicollective. She recently received the New Creations Grant from Pédexumbo with the project ‘ATRAVESSAR – a invenção de um percurso dançado pelo Bairro Celeiros’.

More about Bárbara Faustino here.

Note: the first four classes of the year will be taught by Catarina Vieira.

Catarina Vieira, 1983, Aveiro, Portugal. Multidisciplinary artist and performer. Holds a degree in Actor and Director Training from ESTC (Lisbon, 2007). Master’s degree from DAS Theatre (Amsterdam, 2018), with a grant from the Calouste Gulbenkian Foundation.

Created and directed: Chego sempre atrasada aos funerais importantes (Teatro Maria Matos, 2018); Matéria, an open studio for sharing performing practices; As canções que cantamos contra os muros que limpamos (2022), a participatory project in collaboration with Aixa Figini and Josefa Pereira; Lugar X (2023-2024), an artistic research project on ecological regeneration in context, which resulted in a performance and an audiobook.

Interested in creating encounters as hybrid performing situations that question and expand the modalities of being together. This practice often invites participation in order to generate reflection on collective gestures, agency, autonomy, shared responsibility, conflict, and dissent.
She has been part of the Cooperativa Dramatúrgica since 2023.
Together with Raquel André and Sara de Castro, she founded the MUDA project – Harassment in the Arts in Portugal.

More about Catarina Vieira here.

Pre-registration process