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ageing art

A Topology of Time with Olga Roriz: Memory, Body, and Dance

Photo by Paulo Pimenta.

In her most recent dance production, Salvado (“that which can be saved”), the performer Olga Roriz demonstrated, at Lisbon’s Teatro São Luiz (July 2025), that as she approaches the age of seventy, her creative journeys not only remain provocative and moving, but also embody a profoundly affecting history of love and longing for human presence and sharing.

Roriz drew inspiration from the remarkable film Memoria (2022), by the Thai director Apichatpong Weerasethakul, as well as from various workshops she conducted over the past decade, to stage a narrative of movements, sound and light compositions, at times humorous and satirical, at others touching and daring. By constructing what she termed a “topology of time,” expressed through the songs and words she selected, but also through a mountainous set that at a certain moment moves and deforms, Roriz undertakes a topography of her own body – an  anatomical description of a vast and rich mnemonic journey of emotions and stories that have already passed, yet remain present there. “I’m still here, but I’m gone,” the artist repeats.

In this impossibility of recounting what has been without adding the dimension of the now, Roriz hesitates between time and space, declaring her fascination with a certain “drunken” movement, that which is on the verge of falling. The movement of near-collapse, of the sublime, of being and having already been, is what elevates Olga Roriz’s performance to a meditation on the eternal, temporal wandering that defines us as human beings. Such a generous and challenging perspective on ageing could only emerge from a master of dance – that art form so deeply rooted in both the beauty and the terror of confronting music, rhythm, and our own human erasure.

The programme notes for Salvado, a collection of writings and photographs constituting an archive, in essence mirror the staged performance itself, insofar as Roriz’s body becomes a brilliant, ephemeral configuration of the emotions she is able to express. Demonstrating how her audiovisual choices function as “metaphors for a dancer’s body – as a repository of dance knowledge through time” (Goodridge 2011, 140), the mountains, chairs, and costumes enabling Roriz’s movements, turns, and interactions on stage serve as a reminder of the eternal, mysterious, and fascinating relationship between our vibrant bodies – laden with memories and scars – and our surrounding environment, physical, social, and at times deeply unsettling.

In an exercise in poetic openness, what Roriz has saved for the present moment is a glimmer of hope in the possible body: moving, bearing impressions and lived stories.

Reference:

  • Goodridge, Janet. 2011. “The Body as a Living Archive of Dance/Movement: Autobiographical Reflections.” In Fields in motion: Ethnography in the Worlds of Dance, edited by Dena Davida, 119-140. Waterloo: Wilfrid Laurier University Press.
Eduardo Prado Cardoso
Eduardo Prado Cardoso

OpenEdition sugere que esta publicação seja citada da seguinte forma:
Eduardo Prado Cardoso (11 de Julho de 2025). A Topology of Time with Olga Roriz: Memory, Body, and Dance. Desenvolvimento Humano Integral. Recuperado em 20 de Maio de 2026 de https://doi.org/10.58079/14c8v


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