Review: The Rose Prize with Marco da Silva Ferreira’s CARCAÇA

The Rose International Dance Prize at Sadler’s Wells showcases four dance works from any genre that have been selected from a complex process involving ‘global’ nominators and a panel of ‘selectors’ in an arrangement described in my earlier review of Kyle Abraham’s An Untitled Love. It has been a two-year worldwide search intended to find the four best international works to compete for the £40,000 prize. So, this begs the question of how CARCAÇA (the Portuguese word for CARCASS) made the shortlist, since – being blunt – it wouldn’t be in my top 4 works that I’ve seen so far in 2025!

Having expressed surprise about how it got this far, let me immediately add that it’s not a bad production. The energy of the ten very diverse dancers is stunning. They are an impressive ensemble and Marco da Silva Ferreira’s highly-stylised movement technique is innovative, apparently built around four Portuguese folk dances – vira geral, vira del quatro and gota de Dem were entwined in the first section and fandango Scarlatti was embedded in the final scene – but with a thoroughly contemporary twist. This was partly characterised by a rolling gait, with the dancers twisting their feet (all wearing identical trainers) inventively onto their insteps, while pumping their arms to and fro like 100-metre sprinters. It was an interesting style but overly repetitive.

I think, to be fair, it’s a divisive work. One that will strongly appeal to the extreme edge of contemporary dance aficionados, people who love their dance to be modern, innovative and challenging; but alienate those that prefer some aspect of narrative or entertainment in their dance. That division was apparent at this show with a significant part of the audience giving the work a rousing standing ovation, while others left early or sat silently at the curtain call.   

No dancer looked anything like another and there appeared to be a significant age range (two decades or thereabouts?) with each dancer’s personality appearing to be somehow identified in different costumes, some wearing skirts with blocks of colour, others in skin-tight full-body leotards or tights with large cut-out sections. At some point, tops were pulled over the dancers’ heads (for no obvious reason) and the breasts of one dancer were exposed for the rest of the performance (again, for no obvious purpose).

In describing his work, Ferreira (who was also one of the performers) has talked about the construction of collective identity, the crystallisation of contemporary culture, the meaning of tradition and heritage and the exploration of death and love, amongst many other influences. I found it difficult to discern these ideas within the work although it often seemed to take the form of a working-class protest performance, especially when the performers repeated a song, which started as the lament of a working woman, and when they wrote and over-wrote the statement ALL WALLS FALL as graffiti on the backdrop. Clearly, elements of Portugal’s troubled past (including a 50-year dictatorship) were as embedded as those folk dances in the work.

The performance had begun with two musicians walking from the aisles to take up places on opposite sides of a platform that was placed between the main stage (at about half the height) and the stalls. One was a percussionist (João Pais Filipe), who opened the show with a steady, heavy beat and the other, an electronic musician working from a laptop (Luís Pestana). They were excellent and – over the 75-minute work (it could certainly do with an edit) – the music seemed to gather pace alongside the increasing momentum of the performers. One dancer (Maria Antunes) also arrived through the fourth wall and began to assimilate her twisting, rolling movement to the early iteration of the music. A slight drawback of the performances on the platform (at a lower height than the stage) was that the seats in the stalls were not designed to see performers at that level, and one was trying to appreciate the early part of the work through the heads of the audience in front! Eventually, the other dancers arrived, and they all climbed onto the main stage, leaving the musicians alone on their halfway house.

Ferreira has had a varied past: an international swimmer before discovering street dance in his Portuguese hometown, then qualifying as a physiotherapist before becoming a choreographer (he won Portugal’s So You Think You Can Dance TV contest) and setting up his own company (Pensamento Avulso). His use of space, development of pace and innovative movement style are all worthy of note and it’s good that the Rose International Prize has bought him to greater global attention. However, the work itself is not a contender in my view, which might very well mean that it will win!

Graham Watts

Graham Watts is a freelance writer and dance critic. He writes for The Spectator, Tanz, Shinshokan Dance Magazine (Japan), Ballet Magazine (Romania), BachTrack and the Hong Kong International Arts Festival and has previously written for the Sunday Express, Dancing Times, Dance Europe, DanceTabs, London Dance, the Edinburgh International Festival and Pointe magazine (USA).  He has also written the biography of Daria Klimentová (The Agony and the Ecstasy) and contributed chapters about the work of Akram Khan to the Oxford Handbook of Contemporary Ballet and on Shobana Jeyasingh for the third edition of Routledge’s Fifty Contemporary Choreographers.

He is Chairman of the Dance Section of The Critics’ Circle and of the UK National Dance Awards and regularly lectures on dance writing and criticism at The Royal Academy of Dance, The Place and (until the war) for Balletristic in Kyiv.  He was a nominee for the Dance Writing Award in the 2018 One Dance UK Awards and was appointed OBE in 2008.