Diana Niepce

Diana Niepce is a dancer, choreographer and writer. She graduated from the Escola Superior de Dança, did an Erasmus at Teatterikorkeakoulun (in Helsinki), and a Masters in Art and Communication at the Universidade Nova de Lisboa. She is an associate artist at Espaço do Tempo and the creator of the pieces “Forgotten Fog” (2015), “Raw a nude” (2019), “12 979 Dias” (2019), “Dueto” (2020), “T4” (2020), “Anda, Diana” (SPA Prize, 2021), “O outro lado da dança” (2022), “Enfreakment” (2024), “Utopia” (2024) and “N̶o̶r̶m̶” (2023). Curator of the Political Bodies Cycle of conferences and performances (2024, Culturgest). As a dancer and performer, she has collaborated with national and international artists. She is the curator and trainer of the Introduction to the Performing Arts for Artists with Disabilities (2020), Fora da Norma (2023, Biblioteca de Marvila) and Norma (2023, TNDMII). Her most recent publications are the article “Experimenting with the body” in the newspaper Coreia, the book “Anda, Diana” (ed. Sistema Solar) and the story “Broken and stinky, they are the pebbles.” for the Rota Memorial do Convento

Duet

Duration: 25min

Description: Dance performance that adjust in site specifics and propose a reduce number of audience

Extra information: We exist with each other, in a conflict that brings love and death closer together. There is a struggle that involves the relationship with the other, and only then can we live a truth in intimacy. The possibility of experiencing this truth on our horizon can never be done without the willingness to go through the crudeness of mutation that disfigures the very notion of the utopian body. This metamorphosis only happens together and against the body of the other, and in it lies the hidden violence of a subversion of roles.

Here, the body exposes itself in the crudeness of arising from nothing, and thus becoming everything. It is lost in the transparent incomprehension of its fragility and subverts this meaning in the perverted provocation of difference. A dance that emerges from the intimate deformation of the state of the observed body. We will never be more than what we are naked.

Duet is a dance piece by Diana Niepce, which premiered in December 2020 at CCB, Lisbon.

Condictions and riders: contact asniepces@gmail.com

People on road: 2, plus 1 access assistant

Freight: necessary

Freight details: 1 suitcase

Anda, Diana

Duration: 55min

Extra information: I want to talk about what we hide. I didn’t exist almost my entire life because of the guilt of having to exist in a body that wasn’t mine. I will stop excusing the policing of the norm, which destroys everything that differs from itself. I am not incomplete. I want to stop this violation of my privacy and no one will tell me how to be. I stopped looking for my body in the other’s body and found myself with the other. In the secret treatment that makes my body a storyteller, I found the meaning of its intimate and real state. (Diana Niepce)

In Anda, Diana, the dancer and acrobat Diana Niepce portrays the reconstruction of her self, after a fall (to which she was left with a spinal cord injury), in an honest dialogue between body and mind, between logic and chaos, until she built the dancing body. In this piece, she proposes to question what the norm is, challenging prejudices and ideas that society has regarding the aesthetics of bodies. Here, the disability, although present, does not take the place of the victim of the system. Rather, this non-standard body is positioned as a revolutionary.

Anda, Diana premiered in April 2020 at TBA - Teatro do Bairro Alto and has won the SPA2021 award, also has an autobiography edited by Sistema Solar. An inner narrative developed from cruelly real facts, contaminated by the author’s artistic perspective.

Condictions and riders: contact asniepces@gmail.com

People on road: 7

Freight: necessary

Freight details: it depends of the Theater conditions

The Other Side of Dance

Extra information: I am interested in observing the dance archive and understanding the hierarchy that organizes the body. Approaching the other side of the dance, and understanding the secret of movement. The body has not always been excluded and how the body finds its place. Looking at history and understanding in an experimental way, in the dance genre, the chronology of this other side of dance and through it challenging my body. Body that here represents matter, and presents the mapping of the representation of the invisible in the history of dance.

The work is structured around the study and deep analysis of the physics and movement of artists outside the norm, appropriating and transforming the language into an identity of its own. It is artists such as Artur Zmijewski, Bill Shannon, Claire Cunningham, David Toole, Neil Marcus, Michael Turinsky, Lisa Bufano, Raimund Hoghe who give voice and allow the emergence of this new body.

Condictions and riders: contact asniepces@gmail.com

Enfreakment

Description: Enfreakment is a dance conference performance, adapted to different spaces

Extra information: Enfreakment is a talk-performance in the shape of a multidisciplinary and experimental device based on the national and international historiography of the non-normative body in the performance arts. The body voices a reflection on the genealogy of dance, according to a close gaze that exposes the violence and eugenics enacted upon these bodies.
It is urgent to understand the evolution of the body in history and to question the policies that foster exclusion. My body will always exist and, therefore, the body of the other. Creating a new body and making the invisible visible. Witnessing our place. Existing in a no normative body is to exist in a state of constant revolution. Thinking about dance from another place. Contravening the norm and the natural limits. (Diana Niepce)

“Diana Niepce uses the autonomy of her own body’s life to question the structures of power which are inherent to the subject in relation to itself, and to subjects in relation to one another. As part of the dance not dance programme, Enfreakment is presented after Este Corpo que me Ocupa [This Body That Occupies Me], by João Fiadeiro. Through the affirmation of a body-thing, their work questions the political, human and non-human subjectivity of the body, ascribing other materialities and modes of existence to it, while also reimagining the reality of where their dances emerge from. The body, usually understood as the primary medium of dance, is also, and for that reason, the domain of the social forces that animate it. João Fiadeiro and Diana Niepce, though belonging to different artistic generations and disparate aesthetic worlds, share a common questioning of the body as matter and vehicle, proposing with their work the experimentation of its power and the reinvention of its possibilities.”

Condictions and riders: contact asniepces@gmail.com

Utopia

Extra information: We inhabit a corrosive spiral of destruction. We look at the body in a simplistic way and run after the production of another body. This one is no good. We are contaminated by the prevailing norm that only exists in the place of oppression. This body is no good. We wallow such excluded figures in the corral because nothing is ever enough. In this imagined scenario, the iron tells its story in the body, hard and violent, but there is excrement everywhere and we live in paradise.

In Utopia, Diana Niepce honours bodies for what they are through their own history and knowledge. Through the fascination of reconstructing her own body, the choreographer analyses and recreates contradictory representations of the object that is the body. She is interested in using the body as a raw, violent and erotic language, as a mirror of the body’s representativeness in society, without being forced to normalise it. Utopia is a performance based on the transgression and oppression of physical limits.

Condictions and riders: contact asniepces@gmail.com

NORM

Description: Dance performance that adjust in site specifics

Extra information: NORM is a site-specific dance, circus and performance piece that is constantly under construction. The spectator is invited to be part of the work, and the body acts as a discourse of intersection between art and life. The body is observed as a unique experience, in the duality of a gravitational space and a space without gravity. Witnesses to a game of resistance and risk, where limits are relative, in that they will always be restricted, but not restrained. The work is inspired by Heinrich Von Kleist's text On Puppet Theatre and reflects on the context of Portuguese eugenics, in which the Mitra institution (extinct in 1960) responded to the institutionalization of people outside the norm. A creation that encourages us to look at history and reflect on the place of social violence that contributed to exclusionary practices and the marginalization of communities outside the norm.

Condictions and riders: contact asniepces@gmail.com

Pos Shows discussions

Facilitated by a local artist/producer. Duration 30 minutes.

Workshops

The workshops are based in the theme presented and performed. Participants will travel through the journey that the performers had in their research. Participants will develop their critical thinking through the moments of sharing and discuss during the workshop.

Participants: for people with or without disabilities, professional dancers.

Duration: 2 - 3 hours

Space required: warm and accessible to wheelchairs, preference with linoleum with soundsystem.

Number of participants: Maximum 20 people.

Artists Talk

What does is mean consciousness? Will? To compete? To go beyond the limits? What do you mean? What do we mean by saying “it’s not possible”, or “we can do it”? How can we teach a body to do something that it has already learned, and yet failed? This is the moment of sharing the process of recovery of the dancer and acrobat Diana Bastos Niepce, following an accident that left her quadriplegic.

Participants: General audience

Age: +12

Duration: 30 minutes

Space required: wheelchair accessible

Equipment: Data projector, screen or wall.

https://www.theguardian.com/stage/2024/oct/20/hofesh-shechter-company-theatre-of-dreams-sadlers-wells-review-diana-niepce-the-other-side-of-dance-umbrella-southbank