Rosana Ribeiro

When the CPA dates were announced and we realized that Jadwiga wouldn’t be available, it was immediately clear that Jin was the only person who could take over the solo. The two worked very closely together on the duet, and they know each other extremely well.

Rosana Ribeiro

That’s a delicate process because my work is always a co-creation with the performer. We’ll begin from the depths of what already existed: the research, the layers that came from both Jadwiga and me. From there, we’ll continue through exercises and improvisations that allow Jin’s own voice to enter the piece. I think the core of the work — its structure and choreography — won’t change. It’s more about how to weave her personal experience into it.

Rosana Ribeiro

We really enjoyed exploring the concept of falling, of dropping down, and the importance of letting go in so many different moments of life. I was very interested in this idea of releasing something slowly, so that we can truly witness it — to see all those micro-movements, all the cells in motion. For me, that is a key part of the process: talking with Jin about what letting go means to her, and how it resonates in her life and her way of seeing the world.

Rosana Ribeiro

It’s really a combination — from me, from the dancer, and from everyone involved in our collective. Each person contributes something unique, and I actively look for that: the coexistence of many different voices. What I try to create, sometimes successfully, sometimes not, is a space where multiple meanings can exist at once, so that each viewer might connect to something that resonates personally. Maybe one part doesn’t speak to you, while another does. And something that means one thing to me might mean something entirely different to you — and that’s wonderful. When a topic like resilience comes up, it always starts from a very personal place, from something I might be experiencing myself. But as soon as it enters the studio, it gains another layer — a collective layer — through discussion and exchange. For instance, with Verena Pircher, my dramaturg, it often begins as a dance of words and thoughts before it becomes movement.

Rosana Ribeiro

So many. It’s impossible not to be influenced by what’s happening in the world, isn’t it?
Often it starts with a sensation, a texture, or simply an image of movement. Looking back at “Echoes”, I remember this first part that revolved around the idea of the “tumbles of life.” We also talked about different forms of resistance around the world — places where war and conflict are part of daily life — and how certain gestures or movements can carry traces of that reality.

Rosana Ribeiro

We began by exploring the many times you fall and, through those falls, encounter different things. It might be heartbreak, or a physical challenge — like receiving a diagnosis or living through an illness — something that shakes you deeply. We looked at how the body can fall from different perspectives, and how it can release itself slowly enough so that you can really see it.

The titles of each section of the piece are “Adaptive Transformation” and “Vulnerable Flexibility”. In the first part, there’s this idea that from the many times you drop, you might float, glide, or just instantly fall — playing with speed and with how time stretches or contracts in the fall.
One improvisation started with standing upright, and then something begins to crush you or pull you down, so you start to tilt, a bit like the Tower of Pisa. We played with the question: what if your axis isn’t where you expect it to be? How does that disturb your movement?

For the second part, we began with an image that came from another piece — a plant pushing through cement. The structure is rigid and powerful, but the plant finds its way through by circling, growing upward little by little. That became a metaphor for this vulnerable flexibility: when the body feels broken, how can you find ways to rise again, even if you keep coming back down? I remember we also played with trying to pass through a very tiny space, just to see how persistence changes the quality of movement.

Rosana Ribeiro

Yes. At the time of “Echoes”, I was reading “The Body Keeps the Score”, which talks about how movement can help process trauma when it becomes stagnated. I’m very curious about that. My later piece “Tidal Wave” also deals with cyclical forces and how they can open unexpected spaces. In “Echoes of Resistance”, the question was how to move through what is stuck, how to adapt to things that are overwhelming or shocking, and how to expose this “vulnerable flexibility” even while falling. It can be very empowering to open up — if you are in a safe space, of course.

Rosana Ribeiro

Definitely, though in a rather unexpected way. And even though all that acrobatic knowledge is still in my body, I needed a break from circus for a while — to step back and understand it. I’m probably still in that process. What has stayed with me is how circus allows creativity, history, and imagination to flow freely without strict labels. You can’t present anything in a purely technical way; it always has to have an artistic dimension. That openness has been very formative for the work I do now.

Rosana Ribeiro

At the circus school, what fascinated me was how social work, education, and performance were all connected. Everything was concept-based. We mixed dance, theater, acrobatics, and aerial work — and that fusion stayed with me. When I was still performing with the hoop and doing acrobatics, I realized I was most drawn to how dance seemed to become the kind of gel that glued everything together. I loved this possibility of dance as something that carried so much meaning.

Rosana Ribeiro

Yes. I wanted to deepen my understanding. At that time, I focused a lot on release technique and went back to the traditions of Graham, Cunningham, and Laban. But the real school came later, in the freelance world — first in London, then on tour — where all those ideas had to meet reality.

Rosana Ribeiro

My partner is from here. Just before the pandemic, I knew I wanted to be closer to my family — I already had a daughter then. That’s a huge thing, especially for women: how to balance family and work. Now I have two children, so that question became even more important — how to continue working and still have a family life. So, I started creating my own projects, worked a bit with Szene, and did a residency within their Workspace program. It began to feel like a place with good ground, somewhere safe and healthy for a family, surrounded by nature, but also culturally vibrant and open to new ideas. And they were supportive!

Rosana Ribeiro

The first piece, “Selva” — which is also the name of our collective — actually started while I was still living in Lisbon. It was my first research project, where I was trying to understand what I really wanted to do. It was inspired by the book “Women Who Run with the Wolves” by Clarissa Pinkola Estés. There was something very emotional about it, a kind of force I wanted to explore.

Rosana Ribeiro

For sure. All the topics that come to the table come from personal sensibilities and interests. And then you hope to find people who resonate with them. The theme of intuition and trust is huge for everyone, but especially for women. It’s present in all my pieces and also deeply shapes the process: how to trust that place inside yourself, to trust that something unexpected might emerge from it — and that it might have more force than you think.
In the collective, we often talk about creating our own ecosystem. That’s really the fertile ground for all my pieces, playing with this idea of nature, and where the border between nature and culture lies. When is one turning into the other? I’m still questioning that. The thread is that Selva — this jungle — is made of many forces coming together through different lives and organisms, all connected as one.

Rosana Ribeiro

Exactly! That sense of interconnectedness played a huge role. The piece after “Selva” was called “Mycelium”. It was about fungi, about the communication happening underground, in the earth and the forest, and about ancestry — these systems that exist long before us, this huge living network beneath everything.

Rosana Ribeiro

Tremendously. How to even put it into words? One thing I love most here is this in-between because we are also nature, right? Here in Austria, whatever people’s visions, professions, or political views might be, there’s a deep connection to the trees, the mountains, the ground. There’s a shared respect for the land and its knowledge, and here it can really live in harmony.
You can feel these powerful forces — from the Untersberg to the Mönchsberg, and all the water flowing through the city. For “Tidal Wave”, that sense of water’s force became essential.
Nature influences my work constantly. For example, when I walk up the Mönchsberg, I move into another rhythm, another timing, another cycle. That energy is what I try to bring back into the studio.

Rosana Ribeiro

Yes. For the past three projects, we’ve been working with an exercise that I learned from one of my mentors, Angélique Willkie, when I was at ATLAS. It’s called “landscape acknowledgment”. You start by really observing the landscape — the ground itself, like here in Salzburg, in Austria, in Europe — and understanding the place you’re standing on. Then you place yourself there with your body, your history, everything that comes with you. From there, we trace our own stories through the land — how the places of our lives and our families have shaped our bodies in different ways. It’s about this feeling of belonging and not belonging — how that makes you more fluid, more nomadic, how you carry many places within you. You leave traces and also take pieces of each place with you; they become part of you, part of your scars. We’ve been doing this exercise in the last three creations; it’s become a huge foundation for how we begin working with the body.

Rosana Ribeiro

Exactly. It goes back through the cells, through everything. It’s about bringing awareness to those cross-references — your personal memory, but also the memory that’s connected to the ground itself, to trauma, to history. And how that shifts depending on whose perspective you look from.

Rosana Ribeiro

I wouldn’t want to narrow it down to one single meaning. But one essential question is: how do you face something powerful — maybe aggressive, maybe destructive — without responding with the same force? How do you find ways to resist without mirroring violence? How can you create a space where resistance itself becomes a form of strength?

Rosana Ribeiro

Very much. In the end, having a body on stage, the body is a political entity, right? It always carries so much: personal history, lived experience, and the simple act of being free to express it. Creating a space where that expression feels supported is already huge.
So, I think that’s where resilience and resistance truly intertwine. Because you have to find ways to keep gathering strength while, at the same time, continuing to resist, while something is bringing you down.