THE BRADLEY THEODORE SHOW

“Memories are like bones. Eternal!”

(Cláudia Martins and Rafael Carriço)

Authored by choreographers Cláudia Martins and Rafael Carriço, this creation was born from an artistic partnership between the Portuguese company Vortice Dance Company, and the painter Bradley Theodore, born in Turks and Caicos and residing in New York.

The piece is a deep dive into the creative universe of Bradley Theodore. Evoking the universality of color, skeletons, pop stars, icons and celebrities, Theodore distills figures into skeletal forms. A confrontation that the artist calls “an act of living”, bringing color to express memory, emotion and lived experiences. Cláudia Martins and Rafael Carriço “grab” this “act of living” giving shape to a fascinating creation, which through the power of dance and painting, recreates the intricacies of a life and a style that immortalizes itself with each work that is born.

In a raw and mundane parallelism with their own existences, made of flashbacks, creative impulses, moments in and out,... the choreographers, through the work of Bradley Theodore, bring us to life with the certainty of death, which hits a soft latency, in the background and that haunts us in moments of greatest loneliness. They also bring us the emotions reflected in each color, the memories, the people and the details that are forgotten between waking up and waking up from the best dreams. A blank canvas that gains color with fashion, characters, pop stars, icons and the genius of Bradley Theodore's painting.

“....I once told a magazine, I had two options in my head: either I kill myself or I'm going to paint.....so, I decided to paint!...I woke up and every day I painted something. I literally didn’t talk to anyone for about a year.”

“...I was painting so often that I injured my right shoulder due to the repetitive movements”.

“...my first mural (Anna and Karl, 2013) was the first time anyone saw my paintings. From the moment I put it on the wall, it was like wildfire.”

“The skull, for me, symbolizes a person’s spirit. It's like I'm wrapping his soul around his skeletal system.” Bradley Theodore

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