Performance — Stephan Jürgens

Stephan began his professional career as a dancer. Trained in modern dance and ballet at the North Carolina School of the Arts (USA), he worked from the early 1990s with choreographers in the United States, the Netherlands, Germany and Portugal, in companies, festivals and independent projects. He performed at the Gulbenkian Foundation (CAM/ACARTE) and the Centro Cultural de Belém, and toured internationally with Cathy Weis's DUB, alongside dancers such as Ishmael Houston-Jones. Working across dance and theatre — with Paula Massano, Madalena Victorino, António Tavares and Paulo Filipe — he performed both movement-based and text-based roles, and several of these productions already brought dancers into direct relation with video and stage technologies. Performing remains the ground of his practice: the dramaturgies he later designed with media were first learned on stage, from the inside of the work.

Área de Risco (1999)

Performer (Theo) and movement classes, in a production by Paulo Filipe
Centro de Arte Moderna José de Azeredo Perdigão, Sala Polivalente, Fundação Calouste Gulbenkian, Lisbon, 2–13 November 1999

Written and directed by Paulo Filipe and co-produced by CAM/ACARTE, Área de Risco was a theatre production with a cast of nine, staged in the Sala Polivalente of the Gulbenkian's Centro de Arte Moderna. Stephan performed the role of Theo and also gave the movement classes for the company, bringing his work as a dancer and choreographer into the preparation of the actors. The production was supported by the Portuguese Ministry of Culture.

Credits: text and direction Paulo Filipe; music Carlos Bica; set and costumes Vera Castro; lighting Daniel Worm d'Assumpção; movement classes Stephan Jürgens; hair Paulo Vieira; photography Susana Paiva. Cast: Isabel Ruth, Sofia Marques, Pedro Laginha, Stephan Jürgens, Alexandra Gonçalves, Sofia Froes, Amândio Pinheiro, Sara Rodrigues and Paulo Filipe. Co-production CAM/ACARTE and Paulo Filipe.

SOBREtudo (1997)

Co-creation and performance, with António Tavares
Teatro Cinearte, Lisbon, 24–26 October 1997 – Danças na Cidade 97 festival

Created with the Cape Verdean dancer and choreographer António Tavares, SOBREtudo is a thirty-minute duet in which two men meet and tell each other stories with their bodies: stories that time does not erase, memories the body keeps. The piece draws on Tavares's search for a personal contemporary dance vocabulary rooted in Cape Verdean culture, and opens with an excerpt from Mia Couto's short story "O Pescador Cego". Alongside performing, Stephan also played the clarinet in the piece. Its title carries three meanings in Portuguese: "overcoat", "about everything" and "above all".

Credits: direction António Tavares; co-creation and performance Stephan Jürgens and António Tavares; music selection António Tavares; kissange compositions Victor Gama (Projecto Pangeia); clarinet Stephan Jürgens; lighting design and operation Pedro Machado; costume design Daniela Roxo; props Nuno Olim; sound anthropology Suzana Santos (Projecto Anacruse). Production Danças na Cidade 97. Dedicated to the memory of Edson Reina.

Alma 13 (1997)

Performer · Teatro A Comuna, Sala das Novas Tendências, Lisbon, 2–9 March, 10 p.m.

A choreographic work by Madalena Victorino for thirteen performers, danced without music. Over the course of an hour, the group works through what lies inside each of them — a piece whose starting point, as stated on the poster, is happiness, and whose emblematic figure is Mariana, a four-year-old child faced with a future she knows nothing about.

Choreography and dramaturgy: Madalena Victorino. Performers: Paula Castro, Filipa Francisco, Margarida Mestre, Teresa Vieira, Teresa Prima, João Galante, José Abreu F., Pedro Oliveira, Orlando Sérgio, Stephan Jürgens, Cláudia Gama, João Didelet, Patrícia Pacheco. Texts: Ruben A., Heinrich Heine and collective texts. Scenographic objects: Helena Fernandes. Production: Forum Dança. Co-production: ACARTE / Fundação Calouste Gulbenkian, Forum Dança / NAC. With thanks to Teatro A Comuna. Forum Dança is subsidised by the Ministério da Cultura.

Engate (1997)

Performer · Teatro da Trindade, Lisbon

A duet by Anna Pásztor on seduction — not as desire but as obligation: the core element of relationships, treated as the only available form of survival. Pásztor had made the piece as her first choreographic work, presented in 1994 in the ACARTE series "Dança à Hora de Almoço"; in this restaging she describes the second performer as a pictorial counterpoint to the magazine-cover woman she embodies. The work took its initial visual cue from early twentieth-century postcards and their stereotypes of seduction. Presented in a double bill with Pásztor's solo A Mulher de CH.

Choreography, set and costumes: Anna Pásztor. Performed by Stephan Jürgens and Anna Pásztor. Music: Kaija Saariaho. Lighting design: António Rodrigues. Sound: Carlos Garcia. Lighting technician: José António. Stage assistants: Carlos Carrilho, Sara Ignácio, Maria João Soares, Ana Freitas, Olivier Marques. Production: Perpetuum Mobile. Production assistant: Sofia Campos.

Cristais (1995–96)

Dancer · Museu Nacional de História Natural, Rua da Escola Politécnica 58, Lisbon, 2 November 1995 – June 1996

An artistic and educational programme created by Forum Dança with the Museu Nacional de História Natural, for school groups from lower and upper secondary education. Crystallography and dance were examined side by side — visibility, symmetry and asymmetry, the organisation of matter in nature and in art, disaggregation and chaos — across a two-and-a-half-hour participatory museum visit. Three dancers performed among the display cases of the crystal room, lit in part by students volunteering to hold the focus lights; the audience then drew the dancers' bodies in held positions and traced the lines a moving body leaves in space, before working the same material physically in movement workshops. The choreography was built by Cristina Santos from the movements of classical ballet, taken as an organised system that could be set in direct relation to the formation of crystals.

Concept and pedagogical and artistic direction: Madalena Victorino. Scientific direction: Liliana Póvoas. Pedagogical support: Judith Silva Pereira. Choreographic creation: Cristina Santos. Dancers: Ana Terlim, Patrícia Pacheco, Stephan Jürgens. Workshop leaders: Manuela Pedroso, Margarida Mestre, Patrícia Pacheco. Music: Gavin Bryars; Balanescu Quartet / David Byrne; Kronos Quartet / Philip Glass; Michael Nyman. Lighting design: João Paulo Xavier. Executive production: Catarina Vaz Pinto. Graphic design: Céu Duarte. Photography: José Fabião. An initiative of Forum Dança and the Museu Nacional de História Natural, with support from S.E.J. / Instituto Português da Juventude.

Pinacolada (1995)

Performer · Centro Cultural de Belém, Lisbon, 27 May 1995, 9.30 p.m. — Danças na Cidade 95 festival

A work by Paula Massano on the expressionist period, built on the idea of collage: each scene addresses one element of that moment — painting (Munch), sculpture, cinema, and dance, through Mary Wigman and Pina Bausch. Originally created in 1988 for the series "Serões Expressionistas", it was restaged in January 1995 at the invitation of Culturgest, and presented at the CCB the following May in a double bill with The Circle Effect, by Harijo Roebana and Andrea Leine.

Choreography: Paula Massano. Performed by Paula Castro, Stephan Jürgens, Milton de Lima. Musical collage: José Ribeiro da Fonte. Musical excerpts: John Cage, Schoenberg, David Byrne, Frank Zappa, Robert Fripp. Visual realisation: Pedro Portugal. Lighting design: Paulo Graça. Production: Paula Massano. Executive production: Ezequiel Santos. With support from Fundação das Descobertas, ACARTE, Culturgest / Grupo Caixa Geral de Depósitos, Secretaria de Estado da Juventude / Instituto Português da Juventude, and Direcção Geral dos Espectáculos e das Artes.

Anteros, O Amante Visual (1995)

Performer · Sala Polivalente, Centro de Arte Moderna, Fundação Calouste Gulbenkian, Lisbon, 14–18 November 1995, 9.30 p.m. — world premiere

A sixty-minute work by Paula Massano, opening "Evocando Pessoa", the ACARTE dance cycle marking sixty years since the death of Fernando Pessoa. Its starting point is heteronymy: a single body producing multiple texts, which presuppose one underlying text and a process of repeated rupture. Each name — Álvaro de Campos, Ricardo Reis, Alberto Caeiro, Bernardo Soares / Fernando Pessoa — is given its own space and its own typology of movement, carried by one of the four dancers, each with a distinct path, personality and corporeality. The choreography proceeds from what Massano calls the "Imagem Básica", a body-machine of periodic, circular, endless movement; its ruptures open onto choreographic fragments built from the heteronyms' writing. The dancers contributed to the choreographic construction through improvisation.

Choreographic concept: Paula Massano. Visual concept: Pedro Portugal. Sound concept: Sérgio Pelágio. Lighting design: Paulo Graça. Dancers: Lisa Hurst, Milton de Lima, Peter Pleyer, Stephan Jürgens. Choreographic assistant: Ezequiel Santos. Production: ACARTE. With support from Fundação das Descobertas, Pro-Dança and Teatro do Bairro Alto.

*DUB*, European Dance Development Center, Arnhem (1993). Photo: Nienke Terpsma.

DUB (1993)

Dancer, in a work by Cathy Weis
European Dance Development Center (EDDC), Arnhem, 1–5 November 1993; School for New Dance Development, Amsterdam; Düsseldorf
DUB was an evening-length work by New York choreographer and video artist Cathy Weis, performed by a group of eleven dancers including Ishmael Houston-Jones and Stephan Jürgens. Video artist Tony Carruthers designed four rolling carts that fitted together like a puzzle, each carrying a television monitor. Weis's video images were synchronised with the movement of these structures as the performers rolled them through the space and climbed over them, generating new shapes and visual rhythms. Full documentation of the work: https://cathyweis.org/works/dub/