Hi, I am Flora Mariah, creator of this ANCORAR project.
I am 36 years old, dance artist, educator, body and movement researcher, and mother of Lila and Samu. I am from Rio de Janeiro and have been living in Portugal for 6 years, 4 of which in Lisbon and 2 in the countryside of Castelo Branco.
Yes, I am one more who migrated to the countryside with the pandemic, and I confess that it was one of the best things I did in my life! The proximity to nature has repositioned many relationships for me, especially when it comes to food and the whole process through which it goes through until it reaches our table.
I am the daughter of a reichian psychologist, which I consider to have been a condition that undeniably influenced my perception and relationship with the body since I was a child. I have also always had a very strong physicality, the body has always been for me a place of grounding, connection, discharge and transmutation, and what has always emerged as the strongest expression for me has been movement. So when I discovered dance as a field of investigation, I had no doubt that this was where I wanted to go deeper.
I graduated as a dancer and dance teacher, and I consider that the most important part of my education was at Escola Angel Vianna. There I met my masters, found myself as a person, and discovered my true movement. My training was all based on somatic education through practices that move me and guide my studies until today.
I have worked as a performer and dance teacher over the years, working with different audiences in a variety of social contexts.
I have also traveled through different areas of knowledge such as music, set design, cultural production, and anthropology, and I feel that all of them have helped me build the understanding I have about the body today, with a broader spectrum.
To develop this work, besides using all the repertoire I have built along this trajectory, I also resort to different practices of somatic education, such as Body Mind Centering, Authentic Movement, Klauss Vianna Technique, Klein Technique, Laban/Bartenieff, and many others. I have also been very interested in the study of the body from a therapeutic perspective, and for that, I look for reference in some practices of care such as Rolfing, TRE (Trauma Release Exercises), Somatherapy and more recently I have been studying bioenergetics.
And to help me sew all this together, I use many resources from a work I'm part of as a collaborator, called AND_Lab, which equips me with political-affective tools that help me to better circumscribe, situate, and position my affections in the world, always in relation to.
I believe that the experiences and learning that I live in this body (and even out of it 🙃), build the understanding I have about it, always trying to put myself in relation to also refine the perception about the other's body. Therefore, I continue carrying my baggage and constantly studying, updating and thickening this broth that is ANCORATE.