I'm a worker of the performing arts. Sometimes I perform, sometimes I create, sometimes I curate, other times I teach. In a world that constantly demands specialization and sectorialization, I believe my practice weaves through time as I develop. I believe the only way is forward, even if that means that sometimes, developing means staying in the same place.

I am fortunate I am able to see the performing art world through different perspectives of a same prism.

I believe in kindness and in ethics. I tend to enter battles that I know I will loose but the possibility of change moves me forward.

My base is the body and its positioning in the world.

I depart from the premise that personal is political and that art, even if we want it to be, it is not political enough. I create not as and artist, but as a person, as a woman, as a citizen.

I don't believe in dance and I wish discipline designations would be abolished - our need to define is very often restrictive.

I approach my choreographic work as an act of resistance and affect, researching themes connected with social and political movements and their relationship with the performative body in the intimate and relational space of the theatre.

Politics and Transcendence are often themes I work with.

Affect, insistency, presence and contamination are key words.

I believe in the idea of ​​creating, through the act of removing what doesn't belong instead of the concept of adding. I take ecological responsibility as an artist by not creating too much.

My choreographic practice can happen on any medium but I still like the convention of the theatre, to be able to question it, expand and explode it. The achievement is not to create a new movement language but rather explore what is already there.

I work with several layers of attention that fade in and out, repetition and constant exposure of the research.

I do things for a very, very long time until I shed the layers of performing through insistency, intensity and intention. I play with juxtapositions and metaphors, always evolving and unfolding through the necessary means: voice, body, presence, and breath work. I invite to dive in the meanders of ambiguity; of concrete and abstract images; of a subject and an object body.

The work is not created by the performer alone but instead happens in the space between of transmission of performer & audience and relies on the experience of affect rather than effect. I would even say I believe in non-performativity – it is a real relation that is being established and that is definitely not performed.

The work is raw but meticulously constructed from all perspectives; unconventional in the content and form it is presented. It is soft choreography that deals with affect.

My work is deeply saturnine without even realizing it, it imposes limits, it's about violence, it's about time and it takes time to create, it researches anti-capitalism, modes of doing, breathing, breaking the stones.

My Saturn is strong, profound, defines me and my artistic work, carries the violence, the stern capacity to continue, the death, the not yets; my Jupiter is at home, it is my teacher and how I teach, it needs freedom and non-convention; my Moon is shady, milky, mystical and creative and it usually goes well with flexible routines and embodied praxis; my Venus is expressive and creative, connects to ghosts of past lives and comes from deep clean fire; my Mercury is curious and very fast; my Mars is shy and needs the wild and adrenaline to be visible right next to the Sun which radically soft goes steady towards its mission carrying the nurturing the world needs. I need a safe matrix of steady daily practice that can accommodate freedom. Everything imposed to me will make me smaller for a while and will be smashed sooner or later. I wish I could die for a minute, I wish I could live longer, I wish I could know more.

Cristina Planas Leitão