Biography
Born in Cape Verde in 1979, Marlene Monteiro Freitas studied dance at P.A.R.T.S. in Brussels and at the ESD and the Fundação Calouste Gulbenkian in Lisbon, before co-founding the Compass dance company in her home country. She has worked with many choreographers including Emmanuelle Huynh, Loic Touzé, Tânia Carvalho, Boris Charmatz, François Chaignaud and Trajal Harell. In 2015 she co-founded P.OR.K, a Lisbon-based production company. Notable among her most recent pieces is Les Bacchantes, subtitled Prélude pour une purge, created in 2017 after Euripides’ eponymous work; this piece earned her the best performance award at the Prémis de la Critica d’Arts Escèniques in Barcelona. In 2018 she created a piece for Batsheva Dance entitled Canine Jaunâtre 3. In the same year, she received the Silver Lion at the Venice Biennale. Since 2020, she has also been co-programmer for (un)common ground, a project about how territory and art are inscribed in the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.
In 2021 in Lyon, she presented Mal – Embriaguez Divina (2020, co-production by the Biennale de la danse and the European Creative Hub), a piece that seeks to investigate all the meanings of the word mal. In the same year she collaborated with orchestra conductor Ingo Metzmacher to stage Pierrot Lunaire, which won her the Chanel Next Prize and the Evens Arts Prize. She created her latest solo, Idiota, in 2022. That same year, she created ÔSS with inclusive dance company Dançando com a Diferença and RI TE with Israel Gálvan.