ABOUT
​​Quando alguma coisa é alguma coisa,
deixa logo de ser as outras todas, e isso é uma pena.
O que é preciso é ser tudo ao mesmo tempo.
(Agostinho da Silva)


​THE PATH OF SOUND, THE VOICE OF GESTURE

​After the study of formal communication, through specializing in foreign languages and literatures, I began focusing on the expression of gesture, in silence and sound, as a broader means of communication and connection with myself and others. That became the thread of my artistic career, started in 1991 with Flamenco and Spanish Classical Ballet at the Célia Neves School (Lisbon).

Not long after I started studying dance in Portugal, Spain and Italy, I began questioning the conventional dance teaching methods. Getting into contact with contemporary dance and meeting the methodolgy of Yumma Mudra, founder of the Danza Duende International School, not long after, supported even further this growing need to deconstruct and research deeper into the artistic expression. In this context I started exploring movement improvisation and choreographic, rhythmic and musical composition, as well as voice and sound in the body and the body in voice and sound with several teachers of the Centro em Movimento and Fórum Dança (Lisbon).  Among these practices, I got in touch with Feldendrais, Hands-on and Body-Mind-Centering, as well as Chi-Kung,  Tai Chi, Kung-Fu, Theater Nô and Butô. I also began studying Yoga and was introduced to the Buddhist meditation practice. 

This was a very rich cultural period in Portugal, a time where many non-European arrived to the country. Int this context, I had the opportunity to get in touch with Middle-Eastern dance and percussion (darbuka, the riqq and the daff), and I deeply devoted myself to these studies for a while. I already played the castanets and further added the study of 'the cajón', as well as many other percussion instruments from different countries to my baggage. I had done early studies of piano, guitar and singing as a child and a young adult, but rhythm and percussion were a pending old love. 

These were the early 2000's and that is also when I met Yumma Mudra, an encounter wich was decisive in my artistic career. Yumma brought the skill, the knowledge and the technique of the Russian Ballets, along with the authentic non-apologetic expression of the Romani dances. She was creating the foundations of the Danza Duende International Network, a training which I followed since its very beginnings. We might describe Danza Duende as the art of creating "fields of wisdom", in which life, dance and art are envisioned and lived in a conscious interdependence: life is seen as our greatest work of art. 
Celia Neves, my first dance teacher​
Gipsy Duende is a branch of the Danza Duende network. It is inspired by traditional Romani dances as the art of transforming suffering by surrendering to the present moment. It is about discovering the spontaneous joy of our authentic movement and about recovering the freshness and sincerity of our gesture within a group synergy. In this context, I specialized in dance, music and rhythms of the Romani culture of several European countries (read more about my journey with Flamenco and Romani Dance here). 
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In 2015 and 2017 I facilitated the Dragon Retreat: a 7 day training retreat in nature, developed as one of the most important basic platforms of the Danza Duende school.  The Dragon Retreat is a preparation for the Cycle of the Dragon, the 1st of the 3 Cycles that constitute the University of Choreosophy (which brings together Danza Duende tools with those of Michel Raji's choreosophic breath work).

​Michel Raji's work is a quest in which the act of dancing becomes a path of knowledge (Choreosophy). The dancer becomes his/her own laboratory, plunging deeply into the time of the body through the rhythm of the breath, the conscious precision of which opens internal and external spaces, micro and macro cosmic ones. This journey is one of opening ourselves to ‘listening’ to ourselves, so that we become that which we already are and thus manifesting, spontaneously, the symbolic dimension of our human nature. 

Along with my dance career, I have been working as a translator and conference interpreter for over twenty-five years.