​Carla Jordão is a Portuguese choreographer, performer and dramaturge based in Cologne. Born in Lisbon in 1982, she studied Dance and Stage Performance at the Escola Superior de Dança in Lisbon and went on to complete a Master’s degree in Dance Composition at the Folkwang University of the Arts in Essen.

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In her work she observes everyday gestures, facial expressions and physical behaviour, and asks how social conventions, emotions and pressures shape them. Out of this observation she builds a choreographic language in which the ordinary gesture becomes dance and the body appears as a fragile meeting point of inner life and environment.

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In 2020 she founded the Cologne-based dance company SPECIES. Its central project is the series UNIVERSAL, a sequence of pieces that look at how different social conditions leave their mark on the human body. The first part, A UNIVERSAL WEAKNESS, inspired by the laughing faces in Yue Minjun’s paintings, asks two dancers to hold the same smile for forty minutes, exploring what happens when a culturally imposed expression collides with real effort and stress. The piece won the Kölner Tanztheaterpreis 2019.

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In 2024 she took on THE COMMUNITY in Stuttgart, continuing a concept by the late choreographer Juliette Villemin, whose interest in the body language of everyday life closely mirrored her own. Her most recent creation, ENTRE BRAÇOS (2026), made for the Companhia de Dança de Almada, examines the embrace as a gesture that is both instinctive and socially coded: who we hold, how, and for how long.

Her choreographies have been presented at festivals across Europe, including the Tala Dance Center Festival (Croatia), Insoliti Festival (Turin), ProArt Festival (Prague), Tanz NRW (Krefeld) and tanz.tausch (Cologne). Besides the Kölner Tanztheaterpreis, she has won prizes at the SzóloDuó Festival in Budapest, in Cologne, and at the Kontakt Energie competition at Theater Erfurt, and was nominated for the Kölner Tanztheaterpreis 2018 with Needless, Needles. Her work has been supported by the Kulturamt der Stadt Köln, including a four-year project grant from 2021, and by the Ministry of Culture and Science of North Rhine-Westphalia. She has held residencies at the Staatstheater Hannover (Think Big), Tanzfaktur Cologne (Inkubator), the Centro de Artes e Espetáculos in Figueira da Foz and L’Agora in Guilers, France.

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Before settling in Germany, she spent seven years as a dancer with the Companhia de Dança de Almada (2005–2012), working with choreographers such as Clara Andermatt, Benvindo Fonseca and Rui Pinto, and creating her first works for the company, among them La ligne de vie, inspired by René Magritte. She also performed with the Kamu Suna Ballet Company and in two works by Chaim Gebber in Berlin.

Alongside her own creations, Carla Jordão works as a dramaturge, outside eye and assistant, among others for El Cuco Projekt, DIPHTHONG, SONDER:SAMMLUNG:5, Julia Riera, Adrián Castelló, Johannes Wieland and Kristof Szabo, and as a performer in El Cuco Projekt’s Screaming Matter, just before falling and CAPTCHA. She was part of the choreographers’ network Barnes Crossing from 2017 until 2022 and co-directed the SoloDuo Festival NRW + friends from 2019 to 2021. She completed further training in cultural management in Cologne and worked one year in the artistic office of Theater der Klänge in Düsseldorf.

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