Portuguese choreographer Marco da Silva Ferreira returns to Sadler’s Wells East with the UK premiere of F*cking Future, running Thursday 4 – Saturday 6 June 2026, tickets available here. The genre-crossing work examines over-militarisation and toxic masculinity in contemporary society, challenging the patriarchal systems of power that shape bodies and behaviour. Drawing parallels between military and militant bodies, it blends house and techno aesthetics with contemporary dance styles to create a high-energy, physically demanding piece. We sat down with Marco to discuss their upcoming performance.
Fcking Future explores militarisation and toxic masculinity through movement rather than narrative. What made dance the right language for these themes?
The control of bodies is inherently choreographic. Bringing together the macro-choreography of collectives- organisation, discipline, routine with a micro-choreography centred on how each individual experiences that larger structure gave me an interesting contrast between what the system constructs and the spaces of friction and deviation that emerge within it. Dance has this ability to contain layers of complexity within a single gesture. We can hold the tension of discipline while, at the same time, the histories of the characters and their emotional worlds begin to surface. Choreography, as a practical tool, is also fascinating because, on the one hand, a unison choreography can potentially suppress individual freedom. Yet, depending on the context and dramaturgy, it can also become the right tool for collective liberation.
Your choreography often blends urban styles with highly physical contemporary movement. How did you develop the movement vocabulary for this particular piece?
I wanted a pulsating body. I wanted contraction to be constantly present because it evoked the sensation of a heartbeat, but also because it emphasised the muscle and its symbolism.I began by creating a BPM map using a metronome. Over 40 minutes, the rhythm moved from 60 BPM at the beginning to 240 BPM. Using this structure, I developed many improvisations that combined marching, jogging, locomotion, but also sensations of groove and lyricism within those rhythmic patterns.Each metronome speed opened up specific ways of moving through space. After many weeks of these sessions, I had developed a strong movement vocabulary for each BPM in particular- 60, 90, 120, 140, 170, and finally 200.I wanted the work to have a score that could guide us, but I did not want it to feel cold. The bodies could not be forced into it… or perhaps they had already found the deviations they needed in order to exist. Bringing a certain eroticism into the material helped disrupt these masculinised and imperative models. It was almost as if the presence of an erotic body stood in opposition to a functional or productive body.
There is something both collective and confrontational about the dancers in Fcking Future. Were you interested in exploring the tension between individuality and belonging?
Since childhood, I have been a very expressive, animated and physical person. During adolescence, I experienced bullying at school, and the feeling of being different became very strong. That was when I began a process of seeking belonging and camouflage.At a certain point, I think I managed to find a place of belonging, but at the cost of a degree of resignation. Perhaps because I have never fully found that sense of belonging, this focus continues to be so present in my work. Maybe, through art, I am trying to explore questions that still remain unresolved for me: the relationship between the individual self and the collective self, cultural and collective inheritance, and the identity each of us has, or that gradually forms and transforms over time, perhaps.
The work feels vast in scale but also strangely intimate. How important was the relationship between the audience and performers in shaping the experience?
It was fundamental. I did not want simply to reinforce patterns, systems, symbols or codes that are not, in truth, dear to me. I wanted to use them and subvert them; to provoke, and to reclaim from militarisation what might strengthen a form of activism or militancy: strategy, direction, scale.But there is also a search for other ways of doing this without surrendering to those very tools. Dreaming, and creating an intimidating yet intimate proximity, opened a portal towards a necessary decompression and a kind of mutual penetration between bodies, which emerges more fully towards the end of the work.
Costuming and visual identity seem to play a powerful role in the production, especially with the chainmail and militaristic references. What conversations were you hoping those aesthetics would spark?
Perhaps the search for a kind of uniform was important to the work, but I wanted one that could reference both historical forms of militarisation and the queer post-war clubbing universe, where techno culture appropriated many of the tools and aesthetics that emerged from that horrific period in history.A pop sensibility has often been identified in my work, and I tried to bring those elements in as forms of appropriation, provocation and, at the same time, eroticism- something that feels so opposed to the symbols being referenced.At the same time, I cannot deny that there is a part of me that fetishises certain figures of power. Even as I try to challenge that, I also live within a society that has shaped my aesthetic sensibility and attractions in ways that I continue to deconstruct and examine carefully.
The title itself is provocative and defiant. In a world shaped by conflict and division, what kind of “future” were you imagining or resisting when creating this work?
I have said before that this piece sometimes feels like a conversation we have with ourselves in front of a mirror. Speaking out loud in an attempt to convince ourselves of certain things.Bringing “Dream Baby Dream” into the work (the Justice track, but in Bruce Springsteen’s version) became a way of searching for empathy and a need for closeness. Perhaps it is a reminder to myself, but also a reminder to the future.