The logo of the post-migrant theatre Ballhaus Naunynstraße: a drawing of a dog’s head in profile, showing its teeth with its tongue hanging out. Next to the dog’s open mouth is a red star.

Ballhaus Naunynstraße

Zé de Paiva

Zé de Paiva

Zé de Paiva lives and works as a video artist, dancer and actor in Berlin. After training as a photographer, Zé de Paiva turned to the theater. In 2003 he became an ensemble member of the Teatro Oficina under the direction of José Celso Martinez Corrêa (São Paulo, Brazil).

The ensemble has made guest appearances in Germany, among others, with the five-night stage epic Os Sertões at the Ruhrfestspiele in Recklinghausen (2004) and the Volksbühne am Rosa-Luxemburg-Platz (2007). Between 2009 and 2018, Zé de Paiva was a permanent member of the Grupo Oito company as a dancer and video artist. In this context, he increasingly brought in his video works. His focus is on video installations as part of the stage design. The audiovisual content forms a reference horizon for the dance events; sometimes dance and video interact, they oscillate and merge into an artistic language.

For the dance performance Part of you (2016), which deals with the surveillance society in the digital age, he created video montages and a device that divided a 360°, 16 perspective projection allows. For the dance performance Sight (2016), he designed a cube of projection surfaces that are used from inside and outside. In Ubuntu – Permanente Beunruhigung I (2017), he linked his body with recording and playback devices for the first time: the camera and projector became moving, dance-like body organs.

Since 2016 he has been working as a cameraman and performer with author and artist Grada Kilomba. In addition to the Grupo Oito projects mentioned above, Zé de Paiva has also designed video spaces for other artists at Ballhaus Naunynstraße, for example for Atif Mohammed Nor Hussein’s work Courageux! Furchtlos! (2021) and for Nasheeka Nedsreal’s Junctions (2022). With Cyclops, he created his first own video-choreographic work in 2019. For the akademie der autodidakten production GEGENRHYTHMEN (2024) he took on the role as facilitator.

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