Marco da Silva Ferreira connects community and dance in CARCAÇA, coming to Montreal this month

How are shared identities created, and what role does dance play?

In CARCAÇA, choreographer Marco da Silva Ferreira explores the place of dance in contemporary society and in our understanding of the communities we are a part of.

Known for his background in urban and club dancing, the self-taught Portuguese artist blends street dance forms of Afro-American heritage like voguing and house dance with the rhythmic traditions of Portuguese folklore. Performed by 10 dancers and two musicians — a percussionist and an electronic musician — CARCAÇA is a high-energy performance that reclaims local symbols and challenges the erasure of cultural specificity in an increasingly globalized world. 

For four showings from April 30 to May 3, Ferreira and company are bringing CARCAÇA to Montreal audiences at Théâtre Maisonneuve, made possible by Danse Danse. So what can audiences expect? 

With this piece, he’s asking: “What shapes culture? What shapes collective identities, communities?” he said. 

In creating a piece firmly rooted in the local specificity of Portugal, using traditional folk dances from the region, Ferreira ends up capturing elements of the country’s political history too, from its colonization of parts of Africa and of Brazil to its movements of popular resistance under a 50-year dictatorship that devastated the local economy in the 20th century. The highly percussive music reflects the cultural fusion of today’s Portugal, with prominent African and Brazilian influences. 

“I couldn’t avoid the fact that the political regimes that happen in different periods of time can shape a lot. How do you define a country, a region, a group of people? What is the culture that is preserved or that is forgotten or avoided?”

 “I try to think of the place of dance nowadays but also this construction of collective identity,” Ferreira explained in an interview with Sadler’s Wells, a London-based theatre and dance organization. Sadler’s Wells shortlisted Ferreira for its Rose Prize in 2024, a biennal award recognizing international choreographers for excellence in their craft.

Music was the way into creating this piece for Fereira: “I started understanding that there were some rhythms, speeds, ways of putting weight that were similar between different styles, or that were a bit universal. And I start imagining a provocative encounter between these contemporary cultures that come from the other side of the Atlantic, in my case, and the ones that are from my geographic location.”

The dancers move in costumes that are bright, colourful, and slightly androgynous — garments that evoke the underground club scene while blurring the lines between traditional and contemporary, masculine and feminine. 

“They are colourful because they are related to people getting together, putting on layers, playing with gender questions, with social layers questions,” said Fereira. 

The wardrobe amplifies the work’s fluidity, reinforcing its themes of multiculturalism, identity, and transformation. As the audience will see, the costumes are also a prop in and of themselves, assisting in creating a blurring of bodies by hiding the distinctive features of the faces. 

Footwork plays a dominant role in the choreography, channeling the fast-paced, claustrophobic movements of clubbing culture, evoking the explosive energy of a tightly-packed dancefloor. Here, the body becomes a political statement, a vessel for memory, and a means of forging a shared sense of cultural identity.

“Carcaça” is Portuguese for “carcass”, reflecting the focus on the body and the stories it can channel through movement. In CARCAÇA, dance is more than just movement — it is a dialogue between the past and present, a reclamation of collective roots in an era of homogenization. 

“I think that the audience can really perhaps understand that [in CARCAÇA] bodies are claiming for joy, for happiness, as a very strong motivation to exist, and they can maybe can understand that the mission of this piece is to say that this idea of the other as something distant and comprehensible or far, when maybe they are actually closer, not so far.”

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CARCAÇA will be performed at Place des Arts’s Théâtre Maisonneuve (175 Ste-Catherine W.) from April 30 to May 3. This article was originally published in the March 2025 issue of Cult MTL.

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