Guintche
Marlene Monteiro Freitas
Running time 60’
The performance act becomes a spectacle of transformism and pantomime in this work by the Cape Verdean artist Marlene Monteiro Freitas, one of the most distinctive and significant figures of the international performing arts scene. Inspired by the word guintche, which in her mother tongue can refer to a type of bird, a prostitute or an incoherent approach to doing things, Freitas embodies multiple creatures, in a succession of snapshots which see a boxer, a puppet, an acrobat, a clown materialize and alternate on stage. Swaying clumsily and contracting her face in a crescendo of grotesque expressions, the artist electrifies the stage with an extraordinary performance of sweat and muscular effort, in which the body becomes the battlefield for different creatures at war with each other.
Marlene Monteiro Freitas, born in Cape Verde, in 1979, worked with choreographers such as Loïc Touzé, Emmanuelle Huynh, Tânia Carvalho and Boris Charmatz. Among others, her creations include RI-TE (2022; with Israel Galván), the performance Bacchae- Prelude to a purge and Idiota and the exibition X AND (2022; around the painting of Alex Silva), Canine Jaunâtre 3 (2018; for Batsheva), (M)imosa (2011; with Trajal Harrell, François Chaignaud and Cecilia Bengolea). In 2015, in Lisbon, she co-founded, P.OR.K, the structure that since then has been producing her work. In 2018, she was awarded a Silver Lion by the Venice Biennale.