Ezequiel Santos
19th February 2025, at 16:30
Portuguese Dance as an Appeal to the Drive for Destiny – A Psychoanalytic Reading
As part of PACAP 8/‘Mystery School’, Ezequiel Santos gives a lecture that proposes a unique approach to dance in Portugal, exploring it as a territory where myth, history and the body intertwine. Through a reading inspired by psychoanalysis, this reflection invites us to think about dance beyond its chronologies and facts, highlighting it as a space of timeless resonances and cultural fictions that manifest themselves in dancing bodies.
As this is the inaugural lecture of the ‘Mystery School’, I propose a descent below the visible plane of facts and chronologies and revisit Portuguese dance through the mythology configured in the very history that the Portuguese have lived. This is a reading inspired by psychoanalysis, which calls for the recovery of the drive for destiny, the understanding of timeless resonances, the description of a mission that has been fulfilled through the spirit, materialised in active cultural fictions that are installed in dancing bodies. Bodies that, under the appearance of the present, carry antiquity within them. | Ezequiel Santos
This lecture will be conducted in English.
Ezequiel Santos

Psychologist, psychotherapist, university lecturer in Social Sciences and Humanities, and researcher at INET-md (FMH). He has a PhD in Contemporary Art (CAUC) and has participated in research projects linking the performing arts, social sciences and digital technologies.
He completed CMD II at Forum Dança in 1992 and worked as a performer with choreographers Madalena Victorino, Rui Nunes and Francisco Camacho. Between 1996 and 2006 he was director of Forum Dança’s Choreographic Support Centre, with intense collaboration in international networks of artists and producers.
His interests span several disciplines, predominantly in the thematic areas of dance history, the phenomenology of aesthetic experience, Art Based Research and ecotopias.
General information
Date
19th February 2025, 16:30
Venue
Forum Dança – Espaço da Penha
Travessa do Calado, 26B, 1170-070 Lisboa
Free entry, subject to capacity.
Top photo © Ricardo Bastos
PACAP 8 / Mystery School lectures
Support and Partnerships
Co-Production PACAP 8: Culturgest | Teatro do Bairro Alto | Anda & Fala | Walk e Talk | Goethe-Institut Portugal, in the scope of Kulturfest festival.
Co-producer in Residency PACAP 8: O Espaço do Tempo
Support PACAP 8: Alkantara | Casa da Dança – Almada | Fundação GDA | Kees Eijrond Foundation | OPART, E.P.E/Estúdios Victor Córdon | O Rumo do Fumo | Piscina
