Palcos Instáveis

L’Après-midi d’une faune (Afternoon of a Female Faun) is a solo piece for dancer Mandi Tiukkanen by choreographer Dinis Machado with an original score by Godill.
In this dance piece, one analyses and questions a butch femininity that in the body of Machado would only be read as a masculine expression. They get lost in this choreographic and intimate labyrinth, where looking for the feminine is also to realise the intangible nature of its definition.
This dance takes place with Mandi lending her body to materialise Machado’s trans-feminine subjectivity, while Machado in turn creates a space for Mandi’s body whose feminine nature has rarely been imagined and materialised in the history and on the stages of erudite dancing.
Therefore, L’Après-midi d’une faune is about a femininity that goes beyond individual bodies, about a collective and social gender experience that occurs between bodies and in the places where they intersect and meet, in the way they mutually question and enhance each other. It is about how we can become the place where others are able to be closer to what they imagine themselves like.
Godill’s music neither leads nor follows this faun, but rather accompanies her as she daydreams like a sister or a spell into the walk of this dance of a winged pedestrianism.
L’Après-midi d’une faune is also about the intimate nature of the feminine diversity of the three bodies that created it. It is about her subjectivity, drift, sexuality and autonomy taking over the space of this bucolic afternoon. It is about taking up “a room just for herself”.
L’Après-midi d’une faune is about a trans experience that is as tangible as spiritual.


Dinis Machado was born in Porto in 1987, lived in Lisbon from 2005 to 2012, and then moved to Stockholm. She has an education in dance and the visual arts, and her work is based on the crossing of these two fields: the concrete gesture of visually building objects, spaces and bodies is retrieved and worked upon as choreographic material. She works as a theatre and dance performer since 1994. In May of 2014, she completed a master’s degree in choreography directed by Jefta Van Dinther and Frédéric Gies at the School of Dance and Circus in Stockholm.