Pedro Correia
'Beauty can also lie in creepyness and ugliness'
That Pedro Correia ends up on the “dance path” as an 11-year-old, he says, he owes mainly to chance. At school, he doesn’t have a very great time. “I wasn’t one of the cool people, was rather flamboyant and therefore the underdog.” Two classmates get to leave early every day and Pedro thinks: I want that too! It turns out they go to an amateur dance school in the afternoons and after some insistence Pedro is also allowed to audition. “At first I was like: okay, fine, as long as I can leave school earlier, but the dance school - where we also sang and acted - soon became my safe space.” When he moved from Madeira to Porto with his mother and stepfather when he was fifteen, his dance teacher suggested that he audition at the conservatory in Lisbon. “I don't really know if I was ready to take dance very seriously myself, but in any case, I thought it was an honor to be accepted at the most prestigious school in the country.” Laughs, “Although internationally that ‘prestigious’ is rather relative.”
Intuitive
In Lisbon, he has to work hard at first, because he lags behind the other dance students. But partly because of the focus on classical ballet technique, he says, the training did bring him a lot. That he ended up in Rotterdam after four years at the conservatory is a choice that, he says, was “mostly made intuitively. “My modern dance teacher suggested I go to Codarts. I had been there once during an exchange week, knew little else about the program, but thought: the building is nice, the city is nice, so why not?” "He is still enthusiastic about that city, Rotterdam, but Codarts did not really turn out to be “his place. “In my opinion, there was a lot of hierarchy. Some students received a lot of praise, but I felt I was pretty much left to my own devices. It was mainly guest teachers and choreographers who believed in me, who pushed and stimulated me to believe in myself above all else.”
Curriculum Vitae
Born
2002, Madeira, Portugal
Education
Conservatório Nacional de Lisboa, Portugal
Codarts Rotterdam
Danced before with
Conny Janssen Danst
At Scapino since
2024
Previously worked with
Cayetano Soto, Jianhui Wang, Jarek Cemerek, Martha Graham, Akram Khan
New direction
He thinks back on his internship year at Conny Janssen Danst with great gratitude. “I was given plenty of opportunities, felt enormously appreciated and Conny and Erik Spruijt (rehearsal director and coach - ed.) are incredibly nice people to work with.” But he also realized during that year that Scapino might be a better fit for him in terms of repertoire and the direction he wants to take as a dancer. “I decided to audition, then had an interview with Nanine Linning, and to my amazement she offered me a contract right away. Wow, that was crazy: never before had anyone shown such interest in me.” He loves, he says, being part of the new direction Scapino is taking under Nanine's leadership. “She has laid out her plans extremely clearly and convincingly. The multidisciplinary nature of her work really appeals to me and I'm looking forward enormously to all I can learn from her, as a dancer, and perhaps also as a potential choreographer.”
Freedom
Pedro loves to move big as a dancer. From reaching for the stars to sinking deep into the floor. But brought with the right emotion, he says, even a minimal movement, even if it is only of a hand, can touch to the heart. “It is not my ambition to succeed in one dance style, so to speak. Above all, I want to be as versatile as possible. I think a lot about space, am not so much concerned with how a movement looks, but more with the feeling behind it. Moreover, beauty for me can also lie in creepyness and ugliness. Furthermore, I take my freedom on stage. I always look for ways to really make a choreography my own. To take not only the audience, but also myself on a journey.” The acting classes in his youth apparently awakened something in him in that regard after all, because, he says with a laugh, “I'm all about drama!”
'This is who I am'
In addition to creating his own story in dance, Pedro also does so on paper and with his clothing style. At the conservatory, he immersed himself in Portuguese literature and already wrote many lyrics and poems. “I still do that on the weekends and also try to read regularly, but with a busy schedule it's not always easy to keep up. And in doing so, I probably lose myself too often in the delightful chitchat with my roommate.” Furthermore, he loves studying how people are dressed and how clothing can or cannot “empower” them. Therefore, he also cares about what clothes he himself wears. “Not when I go to a doctor's appointment, but when I go out. For me it's not so much about making a statement, but I want to show: this is who I am, this is how I want to feel, this is how I want others to see me. I've always admired unconventional people, but realized one day: admiring others is fun, but what if I became such a person myself?”
Text: Astrid van Leeuwen
This season featuring in
-
Origin
An absurdist satire and search for hope in dark times. Origin is created by three emerging avant-garde dance makers with a socially critical perspective in their work.