In the frame of Avalanche, international artists from across the field of visual art, performance and dance are invited to test a brave proposal within the context of the Centre d’Art Contemporain Geneve and its spaces.

For the first act of this series of inter-exhibition performances, the Centre d’Art Contemporain Genève presents P-dance, a production by Ivo Serra (1979, Portugal), in an exclusive version specially adapted to the Centre’s building in collaboration with Julian Weber (1986, Germany) and Marc Lohr (1981, Luxembourg).

P-dance explores the rites of passage from boyhood to manhood through ethno-choreology, taking the folk costume from Podence, Portugal, as starting point. Considering them as social practices, these rituals are based on folk tradition (in the form of dance, music and costume).

Our sense of community and identity in our temporality has changed and widespread geographical, political, economical and cultural levels of reference. With this in mind the P-dance is not a general ideal of what European boys are becoming, but instead, a suggestion on how I am creating the conditions to reflect how rituals function through dance as a field of contemporary culture.

With P-Dance, Ivo Serra tries to reflect how these rites still exist in contemporary culture and questions our globalized gendered identity. Through a danced ritual, he touches upon himself as person in a European male body – in the light of recent feminist discourse – and tries to liberate it from shame, guilt and violence embodied and sustained through sexual expectations, social traditions and historical heritages.

Born in 1979 in Lisbon, Ivo Serra is a video artist and performer trained in the Professional Theatre School in Cascais, Portugal. Based in Berlin since 2011, he studied at the HZT-UDK in the program SODA (Solo, Dance and Copyright) and collaborated with many personalities of performing arts, including Tino Sehgal.

Julian Weber was born in 1986 in Bockenem (Germany). He studied at HBK Brunswick, the Academy of Arts Vienna and at HZT, Berlin. Since then he works intensively on spaces of interaction involving body, material and movement. He works with artists like Meg Stuart, Boris Charmatz and Tino Segahl and creates his own work on the intersection of visual and performance art.