PERFORMANCES | PHOTO PERFORMANCES
Sound Interactive interdisciplinary Performance "Sang-Froid (Cold Blood)"
This demo shows 17 minutes from 3 hours of the long-duration performance, presented at La Centrale Powerhouse Gallery, on May 25, Montréal, Canada, 2023.
The performance Sang-froid (Cold Blood) by artist Marcella França is a healing intergenerational ritual dedicated to women who suffered under patriarchal domination throughout history, including her own ancestors.
Using frozen plant blood to evoke a human heart, França attempts to create a link between violence against women and violence against nature. She intends to dissolve the pain and fear of this violence to create a cathartic experience through ritual. With the heat of her moving, living, and dancing body, França will melt the 10 frozen plant blood myocardial as a tribute to all women. Through this symbolic act, the artist will dilute the fears, pains, and castrations that hinder women's actions and behaviors. The melting of the hearts by França's body heat represents the suffering of women and Mother Earth, caused by the abuses committed against nature in its predatory exploitation, impacting many Indigenous communities where women and girls are still the most affected individuals.
During her performance, the artist will melt hearts made of vegetable blood in a glass container, while capturing the sound of water using interactive software in real-time. The captured sound will be transformed into an ancestral folk song, providing rhythm to the healing ritual. Through the body, movement, and transmutation, Sang-froid is a call for healing and catharsis to break the cycle of intergenerational trauma caused by the violence of the patriarchal system.
Photo Performance "Zone de Confort", metro station Longueuil, QC, Canada, November 2023
"Zone de Confort" questions the concept of the "comfort zone," an inexplicable and contradictory human force with unpredictable outcomes. It explores a desire that limits, a conquest that both imprisons and deceives—a place that induces a comfortable discomfort, where the opposite movement would be a leap into the void, and where the fall can also be an act of survival.
Intervening in the public space, confined to a synthetic grass mat of 1 m x 1 m, I will attempt to remain comfortably within this restricted space in very uncomfortable positions. This invites the audience to reflect on the experience of loss and the pursuit of balance, oscillation, and adaptation to the norms and models imposed by society, especially for individuals of the feminine gender.
The perfectly green artificial grass mat is a simulacrum of the illusion of well-being and an increasingly artificial, healthy life, all while climate disasters advance at an accelerated pace. This completes the critical metaphor of the comfort zone in which society lives.
Performance "Washing away the Sorrows" - iT'S GONA BE NOIRE FESTIVAL, Montréal 2024
Musician Christian
Blind date Performance transmedia
“Dissolving a drop of ice and dancing, I wash away the sorrows, frozen feelings, pains, which freeze the heart to let life flow…”
"Zone de Confort" , presented at Agrégat gallery, Longueuil, QC, Canada, November 2023
The performance "Zone de Confort" questions the concept of the "comfort zone," an inexplicable and contradictory human force with unpredictable outcomes. It explores a desire that limits, a conquest that both imprisons and deceives—a place that induces a comfortable discomfort, where the opposite movement would be a leap into the void, and where the fall can also be an act of survival.
Intervening in the public space, confined to a synthetic grass mat of 1 m x 1 m, I will attempt to remain comfortably within this restricted space in very uncomfortable positions. This invites the audience to reflect on the experience of loss and the pursuit of balance, oscillation, and adaptation to the norms and models imposed by society, especially for individuals of the feminine gender.
The perfectly green artificial grass mat is a simulacrum of the illusion of well-being and an increasingly artificial, healthy life, all while climate disasters advance at an accelerated pace. This completes the critical metaphor of the comfort zone in which society lives.
The Face Of The Rain - Selected for SAT FEST 2021, Montreal
Performed and directed by Marcella França.
The Face of the Rain” is an fulldome immersive performance that talks about memory, the life cycle, and the concept of non-linear time through the realization that we are all born from water and become rain after our death. The artist Marcella França mixes contemporary dance and digital art, to offer a poetic experience about mourning. Her character tries to revive her father's presence interacting with the rain, and in this immersive emotional search, the artwork provokes the following questions:
- What is the face of the rain?
- Can the past and the present coexist in the same moment of life?
“Bloody Rain ” - Video Performance, 2020
The performance “Bloody Rain” was inspired by the phenomenon of the “dark rain” and the “blood moon,” which occur in Brazil during large-scale fires in the Amazon biome and the Pantanal.
The performance lasted 3 hours and was compiled into 4:14 minutes. During the action, I let a “blood rain” cover my female body with red drops, created from frozen fruits made of "vegetal blood" (an organic pigment I developed), which were installed on the branches of a tree in Montreal. As the fruits melted, they created a rain that fell upon my body.
Over time, “the rain” covered my body and dress with the traces of violence and abuses perpetrated against the Earth and feminine bodies, with their intersectionalities, that continue to be exploited by the patriarchy.
It’s a Long Way... - Video Dance, 2020
Video dance performance inspired in immigration and exile feelings on this COVID Age...
Music: It's a long way - Caetano Veloso
MATTER AND FLUID
Video performance, 2020
Dancers' bodies Interacting with virtual fluids and liquifying generative VFX, building a dialog between matter and fluid, Apollonian versus Dionysian, shape versus power. The meeting reveals the paradoxes of the body, liquefying the body inside out.
"Liquid Soul" - Interactive multimedia performance with holographic projections, 2019
"Liquid Soul" - Interactive multimedia performance with holographic projections.
Performance created and directed by Marcella França.
Dancers: Marcella França, Alyne Alonso, Paula Alonso and Renata Gonzales.
Interactive technology developed by Naoto Hieda.
VJ by Daniel Biléu.
Curator by Caroline Meneses.
Comissioned by "Mais Performance International Festival", Rio de Janeiro, Brazil, 2016 / 2019.
"Plongée", Video Performance (video art), 2016
"Plongée" video art, produced for the projections of my ALMA LÍQUIDA interactive multimedia performance show, shown at "Mais Performance Festival 2016", Oi Futuro Ipanema, RJ, Brazil.
Conception, direction and editing: Marcella França
Ballerinas: Renata Gonzalez, Paula Alonso, Alyne Alonso
Music: Pedro Bernardes
Camera: Daniel Biléu
Latent, 2017
An entity of the feminine, asleep, and immersed in an amniotic liquid, like a Goddess dressed in words that represent the equality of genres always latent in our society...
Creation and performance: Marcella França
Camera: Daniel Biléu
Comfort Zone, 2016
Videoarte performance exhibited at "Festival Mais Performance 2016", Oi Futuro Ipanema, RJ, Brazil
Curator: Caroline Menezes
Creation and performance: Marcella França
Camera: Daniel Biléu
Liquid Dance, Video Performance ( video dance ), 2008
Creation: Marcella França
Dancer: Wagner de Faria.
Selected for the Festival Dança em Foco, 2009 at Oi Futuro.
Graffiti Dance, 2007
Multimedia Video Dance.
Project granted by Dança em Foco - Video dance International Festival.
Created with and for mobile media mixing graffiti in the street and dance.
Exhibited at OI Futuro, RJ, Brazil 2007