Entdecke Michelle Mouras Profil

It’s busy in Sofi Bakery, which offers a cosy hiding place from the Berlin cold. The bakery is one courtyard away from Sophiensæle. Formerly the home of the Berlin Craftsmen’s Association, Sophiensæle is now an important center for the independent performing arts in Berlin and a precious partner of choreographer and performer Michelle Moura.
 

It’s also the place where I saw the third and latest performance she developed in Berlin: Boca Cova. “When I came to Berlin in 2017, I didn’t manage to keep afloat at first. But I slowly started to perform for others, Something Great started to support me in the tour management, my solo Overtongue got invited to the Tanztage and that’s where I met Mateusz Szymanówka of Sophiensæle. 

Despite meeting during Covid time, Sophiensæle provided opportunities, nevertheless. They organized an internal showing of Overtongue—which then got invited to Tanzplattform 2022—as well as a Wiederaufnahme of the work. “The first sensation I got from the venue is that it is so gigantic! I didn’t know how to perform there all alone, it’s that big. But I got used to the proportions, and my perception of the size changed.”

Michelle grew up in Joinville in Brazil. Every year, the city organizes Festival de Dança de Joinville, a competitive dance festival for amateur dancers. That’s how she started performing. They also present professional work, and she got to see big ballet soloists like Cecilia Kerch and Ana Botafogo from Balé Municipal do Rio de Janeiro. At age 8, she experienced her first contemporary dance piece, performed by no one less than her fathers’ cousin. “As a child, I was really into ballet. Contemporary dance felt very strange to me. But also, very interesting.”

Despite—or actually because of—having many artists in the family, her parents didn’t think being an artist was manageable. They had seen too many of their family members struggling. But when she dropped out of her psychology studies when she was 19 and was medicated to handle her anxiety and panic attacks, she started dancing again. “While dancing, I sensed a difference in myself. It gave my fears, bodily and mental tensions a direction and expanded my imagination. Dance opened up new spaces in my life, where I learnt how to self-regulate my emotions by putting them into motion.”

She finished a dance bachelor’s degree, studied for two years in France, founded the collective Couve-Flor (cauliflower) with six others in Curitiba, and worked in a dance company in Rio de Janeiro. “At that time, under the Lula government, it was a very good moment to work in the arts and build a career in Brazil. There were many festivals and possibilities to create and perform. You could feel a strong urgency and necessity for the arts, and I was right there in the middle of it. In 2016, I met my (Berlin-based) partner. By then, this prosperous curve for the arts was at its end, and it was clear that Brazil was going to have an extreme right government. I decided to move to Berlin.”

During Corona, she rooted even more in Berlin and developed her career here with project funding for Lessons for Cadavers (2022) and Boca Cova (2024). She also became a mother in 2021. Up until then, she had always been interested in the impact of dance on her own body and her own subjectivity. Becoming a mother changed that. “Motherhood made a shift in my interest from my own body to the body of performers and the relationship between those bodies. What happens in between? How do they co-regulate and affect each other?”
 

In the freelance sector, you can also see a shift from the individual to the collective. “The freelance scene makes everybody an ‘enterprise’. Most of us are solo artists and this leaves less space to develop our ability to exist together. Now is also the time to acknowledge that the majority of the people working in the dance field is not happy with the way we work.” The independent scene is currently under threat, but it wasn’t ideal to begin with: project-based funding, the short amount of creation and performing time, the decrease in opportunities for mid-career artists, and the non-existence of a national performance structure in Germany (instead of just local or international) … Together, these factors have created a precarious dance field. “There are so many great dancers, choreographers, and artists in this city. At the moment, there is a lot of fear, but I also see so much engagement to think together, to hold each other, and to imagine new futures. I really feel I belong in Berlin, and I want to see where these challenging times will lead us. Hopefully, to a renewed, sustainable future.”

Veröffentlicht im November 2025. Text von Annette van Zwoll.