Ao pó voltaremos [To dust we will return]

Described as “a stunning piece, where landscape, heritage, movement, and dance merge in a poetic composition,” this captivating screendance film showcases the 16th-century monastery ruins of Messejana, Portugal (the convent of Our Lady of Mercy / Order of Saint Francisco). The film draws inspiration from site-specific research of the location, traditional "Ranchos Folclóricos" folk dances of the area, historical studies, and the weaving motions unique to the town's traditional "buinho" chairs.

In 2021, this site was acquired to be transformed into a "charming rural hotel" for tourists. Although the main facade will remain intact, most of what appears in this film will be demolished and lost forever.

Merli V. Guerra (MFA in Dance) is an award-winning choreographer and interdisciplinary artist who blends dance, film, art, and design. She is the Co-Founder and Artistic Director of Luminarium Dance Company, an award-winning 501(c)(3) nonprofit organization that integrates dance with video projection and interactive lighting design in Boston, MA (founded 2010), and Princeton, NJ (since 2017). She also founded and directs the PLACE Project (Presenting Landmarks through Artistic Community Engagement), an annual event that uniquely combines history, dance, and the arts to celebrate a town’s cultural and historic landmarks (founded 2012).

Guerra has performed lead roles as a modern dancer and classical Odissi Indian dancer with renowned companies on tours to India (2007, 2012) and Japan (2009). In 2021, she traveled across Tanzania with a local big cat biologist to create a series of site-specific screendances inspired by the ecosystems of its national parks; and in 2022, she was an artist in residence with Buinho Organization (Messejana, Portugal) where she produced a new screendance film honoring the town's 16th-century monastery ruins and a film series highlighting the community, now permanently installed via QR codes throughout the village. Guerra's choreographic works and films have been featured in over 100 events across the U.S., and internationally in Argentina, Brazil, Canada, the Czech Republic, France, Georgia, Germany, Hungary, India, Indonesia, Italy, Japan, Macedonia, Portugal, Slovakia, and Spain. She received a 2022 Individual Artist Fellowship Award from the NJ State Council on the Arts and Mid Atlantic Arts for her work in film; and was awarded the Massachusetts Cultural Council’s prestigious Gold Star Award in 2015 for her contributions to site-specific dance and community engagement. Her 2021 project “The Time Traveler’s Lens” is a series of 360-degree virtual reality screendance films illuminating the history of the colonnade ruins at Princeton Battlefield State Park, now a permanent installation on the park grounds. She presented this project and her work merging dance with AR/VR/XR technologies at Our World Heritage International Globinar 2.0 (2021), Harvard University Virtual/Augmented Reality (2021), and the Northeast & Mid-Atlantic Creative Placemaking Leadership Summit (2022).

In addition to choreography, Guerra is a freelance graphic designer and arts journalist who served as Art Director of Art New England magazine for five years, followed by her work at Princeton University Press. As a writer, she is a Senior Contributor to Boston’s The Arts Fuse, and a dance critic for the Toronto-based Fjord Review and Vancouver-based Dance International magazine. Guerra is the new Assistant Professor of Dance Technology at Texas A&M University. Learn more at merliguerra.com and luminariumdance.org.

Click to watch: