Varinia Canto Vila

Varinia Canto Vila (CL) is a dancer and choreographer that lives between Brussels and Santiago de Chile. She graduated as a dancer from the University of Chile in 1993 and from PARTS in 1999. In 2014, she graduated from London Goldsmiths University where she completed a master’s degree in theory on the relationship between Art and Politics. In January 2017 she completed a postgraduate degree in a.pass (Advanced Performance and Scenography Studies), in Brussels, in which she developed performative and video work. In 2004 she created Making of, a solo with the support of ‘Dans in Kortrijk’. In 2010, Canto Vila premiered her solo During Beginning Ending, awarded by Prix Jardin d’Europe 2009 in the category work-in-progress. In 2017, she created a duo by getting one’s hands dirty, premiered in the Kunstencentrum Buda Kortrijk. Canto Vila collaborated with several artists and choreographers as a dancer. Although on some occasions she was interested in the use of technique as an artistic challenge, her career as a dancer has mainly been interested in the work of those choreographers whose movement research conceives the body as a whole, where the dancer’s body does not necessarily predominate over The body of the person itself. Under this approach, both on her work as a dancer and as a choreographer, Canto Vila has explored real and fictional bodies, where the imperative of the dancer’s academic technique and a codified language are deconstructed and forgotten in the wake of the emergence of other possible bodies. Under this perspective, Canto Vila worked and collaborated for several independent choreographers / performance makers in Brussels in which they are: Lilia Mestre, Claire Croizé, Marcos Simoes, Mette Edvardsen, Thomas Steyaert and Raul Maia Claire Croizé, Marcos Simoes, Mette Edvardsen and Thomas Steyaert and Raul Maia. She also worked and collaborated with Meg Stuart and Damaged Goods on Highway 101 (2000) and VIOLET (2011).