Tânia Carvalho

There are seven of them, like the days of the Creation. Seven dancers or physical incarnations of controlled oneirism. They rise up, moving between a sour limbo of waking and sleep, trance-like and conditioned. That of their demiurge is also on stage, Tania Carvalho, at the piano. Light is ‘day’ and shadow is ‘night’. This piece is called ‘Oneironaut’, the name used by travellers able to control their dreams and change the outcomes, devising a world of images that makes sense to them alone. Tânia Carvalho is one of them. A creator who invites us to witness her lucid journey. A clairvoyant. Spectators of dream fragments at times dark as those of a choreographer who has long sought to evict the outcomes of her nightmares. Strangling them out of the darkness. Letting loose the tricks that play on her mind. Tânia Carvalho creates moving, chilling paintings, which jolt you like disturbing dreams, from which you wake up groggy and trembling. But always inspired. Awakened. Quentin Dusser, translated by Maria de Lurdes Guerra


TÂNIA CARVALHO moves frequently from the field of choreography to that of musical composition, presenting herself as an artist whose urge to express herself is not limited to one single language. Her creations wander through the shadows, the vivification of painting, expressionism and the memory of cinema. Hence the artist constructs her mysterious cosmogony, a set of codes that transcend the very art of movement—be it in the linguistic and semantic care with which she titles her works, or in the frequent crossing of territories more distanced from that of choreography, like drawing. Over the course of nearly two decades, Tânia Carvalho has been paving her way in a thoughtful and ever more multidisciplinary way.