Choreographer and performer, she situates her practice in the field of dance from a transdisciplinary perspective: visual arts, scenography, documentation and writing articulate fictional realities in her creative processes. She maintains a very plastic approach in her creations, regularly working with materials such as blocks of ice, cement, clay, powder, etc. Now she is a bit obsessed by gray mountains and volcanos landscapes. Born in Belo Horizonte, Brazil, she lived for a long time in Lisbon and, since 2019, she has lived and worked in Montpellier, where she dedicates herself, through the choreographic platform LAB-L, to collectively creating fertile conditions for artistic research.

Take a look at here website here.

Mariana Viana will work for two weeks in MDT on research for her new piece Matière grise/Gray matter.

Gray matter is an area of indefinition, immense but finite. A chromatic field defined by an absence. A desaturation of vision. A microscopic detail. An imminent turning point activated by a minor gesture. I am interested in a catastrophic dimension of the body that does not necessarily have to do with an impact. I am intrigued by the possibility of activating a body with a very specific temporality, but which lives on a kind of border – or a gray area – between the everyday body and fiction, weight and humor, visibility and opacity, surface and abyss.

— Notes to unfold these days in MDT:
1. Geological time, human time.
2. Choreographing attention: minor gestures and inflexion points.
3. Minerals and the brain (the gray matter).
4. Landscapes and their stories: mountains, metals, sandstone.
5. Black and white cinema: still shots, moving shots, detail shots.

Matière grise/Gray matter is the fourth part of the Cinema Catastrophe research project, a series of performative situations around the relationship between the body, matter, time, image, cinema and perception. It counts on the collaboration of Daniel Lühmann, Anat Bosak, Juliette Catelle and Geoffrey Badel.