Gestures as Portals is a research and ongoing performance that expands the questions of the project While Taking Shape by choreographer and dancer Amparo González Sola.
The month-long performance takes place during the dismantling of the exhibition Vultures & Fireflies by Mexican artist Alejandro Galván. Visitors encounter the performers in a house where remnants of the exhibition remain visible, alongside traces of its deconstruction and empty spaces.
Amparo González Sola resumes the questions and choreographic methods explored in While Taking Shape,* extending them into a durational, site-responsive format. For Marres, she develops a continuous performance that unfolds over four weeks, inviting visitors to spend as much time as they wish in the space. The work evolves daily, allowing the choreographic materials—and the space itself—to transform gradually through repetition, presence, and interaction.
Gestures are central to González Sola’s practice. She approaches them as portals to memory and connectors between bodies, shaped by context, inherited through generations, and always relational. During her time at Marres, she works with the gestures found in the rooms: those of the performers, the visitors, the workers, and traces from the former exhibition Vultures & Fireflies. These gestures are echoed, held, stretched in the space, repeated, reversed, reshaped: building a vocabulary of movement that slowly accumulates meaning.
The performance emerges from a growing sense of detachment in a world where terrible events are constantly projected onto our retinas through the media—an endless stream of images moving at high speed and stripped of context, seemingly freezing our ability to feel. How close does something need to happen before we feel a connection or a sense of responsibility? By focusing on small gestures, González Sola invites us to reconsider the dynamics of gaze, distance, and proximity as we reflect on what it means to bear witness.
*While Taking Shape is a dance performance created by Amparo Gonzalez Sola, premiered at SPRING Performing Arts Festival 2025.
Date:
10 Sept—5 Oct 2025
During Gestures as Portals Marres is open from Wednesday — Sunday.
Time:
Continuous performance between 12PM and 5PM.
On Friday evenings, Marres is open until 8PM. During those evenings and at various times throughout the week, González Sola offers workshops where visitors are invited to participate in her research.
Location:
Marres, House for Contemporary Culture
Capucijnenstraat 98, Maastricht
Follow us on social media for announcements and details.
What to expect
Performance
Dance and movement by performers Amparo Gonz.lez Sola and Leandro de Souza, accompanied by video, light, and sound.
There is no fixed program: each day unfolds differently. González Sola creates a daily score that indicates what happens in the rooms, at what time, for how long. These details will be shared with you at the entrace and on postcards. The Marres floor managers and volunteers are available to explain the program of the day and accompany you to the different rooms.
In every room she experiments with different forms of invitation—sometimes asking visitors to simply sit and observe, to listen with closed eyes to a sound recording and its echoes, or to watch projected images from a distance. At other times she proposes simple actions, like walking at a certain pace through the space. These invitations shift from day to day, reflecting the ongoing nature of her research.
Workshops
On Friday evenings and at selected times during the week, González Sola invites you to join her in participatory workshops. Here she shares elements of her choreographic research, encouraging participants to experiment with movement scores and instructions in an open and collective way.
There are workshops every Friday evening and at selected times during the week.
Artist talks
In a series of talks, González Sola discusses her work and process, reflecting on how gestures, movement, and space generate meaning and connection.
Amparo González Sola
Amparo González Sola (Argentina, 1984) works where dance meets social listening. Her choreographic practice moves between performance and participatory experiments, shaped by feminist activism, migration, and an ongoing inquiry into reciprocity—how bodies, places, and histories respond to one another. She treats gestures as portals: held, slowed, and reshaped to reveal the memories they carry and the connections they invite. Recent works include While Taking Shape, The Conspiracy of Forms, and If Every Rock Is a Hole, presented at SPRING Performing Arts Festival, alongside the long-term project Exploring Reciprocity, which convenes communities across generations and disciplines. From 2025 to 2028 she is an associate artist at Dansateliers.
Credits Gestures as Portals
Concept and direction: Amparo González Sola
Performance and research: Leandro de Souza, Amparo González Sola
Sound: Nahuel Cano
Light: Vinny Jones
Dramaturgical advice: Bek Berger
Video: Jesus Serrano Huitron
Co-productie: Dansateliers
Gestures as Portals is part of While Taking Shape, a co-production of Dansateliers, SPRING Performing Arts Festival, Frascati Producties.
Leandro de Souza (Brazil, 1981) is a choreographer and dance maker. His work moves across artistic languages, bringing together knowledge, perspectives, and voices in new ways. He explores unusual approaches to movement, and develops methods and strategies for artistic research and performance-making. Recurring concepts in his practice include escape, opacity, and entanglement, with a strong focus on the shifting possibilities of words, voice, body, and objects. His works include Musa Insistente (Insistent Muse), Eles Fazem Dança Contemporânea (They Make Contemporary Dance), and Sismos e Volts (Seisms and Volts), the latter awarded by the Association of Art Critics of Sâo Paulo.
Vinny Jones (Australia) is a light designer who uses light as a performative medium to shape the relationship between audiences and space. Her work spans experimental performances, large-scale site-specific projects, and collaborations on the stages of national theatres in the Netherlands, the UK, and the Czech Republic. She is drawn to light’s ability to create atmospheres, shift perception, and reveal hidden dimensions within a performance. Recent collaborations include works with Arno Schuitermaker, Lotte van den Berg and the artist duo Andrea Božić and Julia Willms.
Nahuel Cano (Argentina, 1982) is a sound experimenter, theater maker, and performer whose work explores the intersections of ecological collapse, grief, and colonial histories. He weaves together sound, film, storytelling, song, and poetry to create performances that center the transformative power of listening. His recent projects, including Ways to Listen to a River, invite deep connections between audiences, places, and histories. Since 2022, he has been an invited artist at Residenties in Utrecht, engaging with communities and institutions on themes of ecology and Dutch colonial pasts. His work has been supported and presented by local and international platforms such as Het Huis Utrecht, Buitenplaats Doornburgh, Gaudeamus Muziekweek, Hellerau, and WP Zimmer.
I know it’s happening, but who is it happening to?
— Kae Tempest (Pictures on a Screen)
Language of the body
The diptych of Gestures as Portals by Amparo González Sola and Terms & Conditions by Ingrid Berger Myhre continues Marres’ long-standing tradition of exploring the language of the body. The Floor is Lava (2019) by artists Sander Breure and Witte van Hulzen, and Museum Motus Mori (2019) by choreographer Katja Heitmann, were also dedicated to this theme.
Press
Partners / thanks to
Co-production: Dansateliers
Alejandro Galván and his inspiring work Vultures & Fireflies, Lisa Reinheimer, and the team at Dansateliers, Rita Bifulco and Amador Alina Folini for their contribution in this research, FPK, BAU AIR, Greenhouse, SPRING Performing Arts Festival, Rooms Performance Festival, workspacebrussels, Tanzhaus Zürich, CAMPUS Paulo Cunha e Silva for their support.
Marres receives structural support from the Ministry of Education, Culture and Science, the Province of Limburg and the Municipality of Maastricht.
