Margarida Bettencourt

2 November 2023, at 18h30
Camões Library – Lisbon
Approximate duration: 2 hours

Free entry, subject to registration.

Margarida Bettencourt was born in 1962 in Johannesburg, South Africa, where she started dance classes as a child while also taking part in sporting activities such as swimming, gymnastics and tennis. She moved with her family to Portugal in 1973. She is a dancer-choreographer and dance teacher who is considered one of the pioneers of Portuguese New Dance.

She attended the Calouste Gulbenkian Foundation’s dance training courses and then joined the company where she danced from 1980 to 1993. She soon began working independently, solo and in collaboration with other artists, namely the dancer and choreographer João Natividade with whom she formed the group Aparte. She maintained a close creative relationship with composers Carlos Zíngaro and Constança Capdeville, with works commissioned by the Calouste Gulbenkian Foundation’s Acarte Service, Culturgest, Forum Dança and the Danças na Cidade Festival.

Her solo work is characterised by an emphasis on the body as a potential for expression and communication – in 2009 the adaptation of ‘At Once’ by American choreographer Deborah Hay, in collaboration with artist João Tabarra, was another stage in this research.

From 1997 to 2012 she taught at various dance teaching institutions, namely the Escola de Dança do Conservatório Nacional, Escola Superior de Dança, Forum Dança, and was a member of various reflection groups on dance teaching in Portugal.

In 2006 she was a tutor on the Choreography Course organised by the Calouste Gulbenkian Foundation.

In 2007, she completed her training as a therapeutic chi kung instructor at the Escola Superior de Medicina Tradicional Chinesa – where she now regularly teaches this discipline in various contexts.
She has continued her research into the development of a relationship with the body as a potential transformative, therapeutic and inspiring force – exploring the integration of her personal history and experience as a dancer, training and practice with anatomy, the physiology of the body, processes and rituals of creation.

After accompanying her father during his last year of life, she trained as a volunteer to accompany people at the end of their lives – with AMARA, an association whose mission is dignity in life and death. All these experiences have fuelled the way she develops and shares her practice with passion and devotion for the body and movement as a vital force.

Photo © António Rebolo