Porous

Choreography & concept: Pierre Bastin

Creation & performance: Isabella Arboleda, Pierre Bastin

Brussels, 2025

“Porous becomes another attempt to translate current concerns and inspirations linked to the climate and biodiversity crisis. Allowing body and movement to convey images of revolt and communion, expressing anger and dismay, simplicity and complexity, unison and porosity.”

Lagunas de miel, de Librisco al Magma

II Manifesto

What is left from myself after the desire and the illusion? In the game of chance, I walk without feet to come closer to the magma. The magma is this incandescent illusion that I have invented to be able to continue, to walk without feet and with my hands inside the Earth throwing blood from within. I wanted to overlap narratives, energies, intensities as ancient Sanskrit poets used to do in their writings. To me this was a way of embodying the sincresis that I believe is present in my body;  nothing concrete over what a body wants to say and to keep.

As a statement this performance dissolves in my hands, with no other motif than the one of breaking myself into fragments in order to reach the unity -another illusion- between body, space, time and desire.

Yes, to name it I will call it desire: “the overflowing, incessant force that could rip-off the social tissue”. Rip-off, search life in the invisible spaces or yet remain silent with other angels besides me as if they were humans. 

Théâtre Arsenaal, Mechelen – Outside-in festival

Bruxelles, 2025

Costume: Lola Ilegems
 

HEDONE- A multisensorial guided tour

Curation & Artistic direction: Isabella Arboleda

Concept & Production: Isabella Arboleda, Ismini Slijper

Partners: Vermeylen fonds, KMSKA-Royal Museum of Fine Arts Antwerp

With the support of: Sidewards vzw

Goce desdichado

Extract from “To Have Done with the Massacre of the Body” Félix Guattari. Recherches magazine n° 12, 1973 (France)

Extracto de “Para acabar con la masacre del cuerpo”, Félix Guattari. Revista Recherches n° 12, 1973 (Francia)

Practicing Death

Film direction: Oliwia Fit

Dance, voice: Isabella Arboleda

May 2023

Thanks to Moving Forward Dance Co.

Taal ha parido

Dance: Raphael P. Damasceno, James Hall
Concept & Direction: Isabella Arboleda
Royal Conservatory Antwerp, BE
2020

Practicing death

To be listened with earphones

In collaboration with: Lisah Adeaga

2020

KAKENYA’S NEGOTIATION

“When I reached age 12, the age at which girls undergo female genital mutilation and get married, it was time for me to take a risk. If I followed the expected path, my dreams for a different future would end with my circumcision and marriage. I did something no girl in my village had ever done.” Kakenya (Kenya)

DeSingel Kunstencampus, Antwerp (BE)

2019

SIGHS, CRIES & LIES

Sighs, Cries and Lies is a physical podcast performance that reveals and celebrates the idyllic and uncomfortable aspects of love and letting go. Three crazy characters embrace their vulnerability and folly and invite the audience to surrender to their remedies, melodies and weak knees.

Dance and co-creation Isabella Arboleda, Elliot Minogue-Stone, Pauline Thuriot

Aarsenal Lazarus Theater (BE)

The Place (UK)

2018-2021

Parafina

The body is the presence of an absence

Broiehaard Kunstenfestival, SAMWD Lier (BE)

Highs&Lows, OT301 Amsterdam (NL)

2018

Emotional Landscapes

Choreography by: Ido Batash

CAMPO, Ghent (BE)

2018

Weiss

“En azaroso y desesperados procesos de destilación, fundida con los siete metales planetarios, trabajada con el mercurio hermético y el vitriolo de Mercurio de Chipre, y vuelta a cocer en manteca de cerdo a falta de aceite de rábano, la preciosa herencia de Úrsula quedó reducida a un chicharrón carbonizado que no pudo ser desprendido del caldero.” 

– Gabriel García Márquez, Cien Años de Soledad; Madrid Cátedra , 1992, p. 87

Pina Bausch theater, DE

2017

Space

Somewhere in Düsseldorf, GE

2017

REINA

REINA departs from the symbols, impulses and images that are contained in my body. They reveal -like in a sort of manifesto-what I have been believing in: the encounter with the opposites, my cohabitation with creatures and the devotion to what the eyes cannot see.

Brussels

2022

FOUNTAINFEST

Conception and Artistic direction: Ismini Slijper, Anna Tejero, Isabella Arboleda

Edition 2022: De Roma, Antwerpen

Edition 2023: KAVKA, Antwerpen

Sponsored by: Soroptimist International (BE), Nationale Loterij, Stad Antwerpen, Vermeylen fonds

My artistic practice revolves around the flux between the action and the stage. Each piece is conceived in synergy with an action that engages with a specific context, situation, or institution. What happens on stage is created in resonance with the implications of this deliberate action in that specific context and viceversa, the action is informed by the sensorial ecosystem that I have traversed inside the studio. Both in the private and public space, the body is conceived as a source of narratives and dance as a medium capable of distorting existing ones.

From what I call the poetics of transgression, I search for situations, images, text, states, movement that can pierce the tissue of something that is established. I often work with the past as a tissue to pierce or transform under the light of the present.