Biography
"No one is just purely good or completely bad, we are all human and ambivalent, we have values in us that can be simultaneously opposed, such as love and hate, which so often overlap", says Ana Isabel Castro, a choreographer from Porto.
A graduate of the Lisbon High School of Dance in 2015, her track record of accomplishments has been truly dynamic: a year at MUK-Music and Arts Private University of Vienna (2014), where she worked with choreographers like Esther Balfe, Saju Hari and Georg Blaschke; joined FAICC-advanced training in performance and choreographic creation at the Companhia Instável in Porto in 2017; NUIT with Compagnie 7273 and her first creation Marengo at the municipal theater of Campo Alegre.
Ana Isabel Castro’s dance is informed by stories and her memory and imagination. We do not know if the events she relates are real or belong to someone else’s story, since they fall between myth and reality, between lies and truth. Marengo, Napoleon Bonaparte’s famous horse, is a baroque allegory of her elegant private world. The performance mixed classic and baroque, lyrical and contemporary, visible and invisible, ingenuity and provocation, history and memory and a variety of interpretations.
Her second creation "Iceberg" is one of the biggest events of the DDD - Dias da Dança, the annual festival in Porto. Based on biblical mythology, it takes us "to a cold and unforgiving place, a place where you can kill". It is a chain of three solos and a duet with Aline Lopes and Liliana Oliveira. In two different tempos, a waltz of post-rock apocalyptic and Alice Coltrane's jazz cosmology it combines funk, tango, hip-hop with ballet.
Ana Isabel Castro’s dance is informed by stories and her memory and imagination. We do not know if the events she relates are real or belong to someone else’s story, since they fall between myth and reality, between lies and truth. Marengo, Napoleon Bonaparte’s famous horse, is a baroque allegory of her elegant private world. The performance mixed classic and baroque, lyrical and contemporary, visible and invisible, ingenuity and provocation, history and memory and a variety of interpretations.
Her second creation "Iceberg" is one of the biggest events of the DDD - Dias da Dança, the annual festival in Porto. Based on biblical mythology, it takes us "to a cold and unforgiving place, a place where you can kill". It is a chain of three solos and a duet with Aline Lopes and Liliana Oliveira. In two different tempos, a waltz of post-rock apocalyptic and Alice Coltrane's jazz cosmology it combines funk, tango, hip-hop with ballet.