Doutora Popovna comes from the East, so she often gets disorientated. She’s often in the East! She has a fascination with synchronised swimming. Do you know what she does in her spare time?
Nothing!
She loves to spend hours in the sea counting fish, but as she has a short memory, she’s always going back to the beginning. Rigorous and virtuous, she has a master’s degree in Swedish Gymnastics and a doctorate in falls. She has a penchant for slips, slides and silliness. She likes to test the limits of the sky and the limits of the ground.
Her speciality is spectacular falls with class. When she’s excited, she changes her b’s for v’s. Which leaves us wondering: is her name really Popobna?
He likes the coast for walking and the sea for surfing.
He never misses an opportunity to dance and often goes to the Lindyhop to increase his heart rate.
It was in 1987 that his lungs began to function, supplying oxygen to his cells. Her pancreas, on the other hand, stopped supplying her cells with insulin in 1998 and from then on Marta learnt to count the sugars in her food and measure her blood glucose levels.
She became curious about dichotomies and the infinite search for balance, and in 2017 she created a show called Balança (Balance), which uses the language of clown, puppets and musical theatre to talk about type 1 diabetes.
Between dichotomous issues, she studied and completed her degree in Sport and Physical Education at FADEUP in 2010. She has taught and coached students aged 0 to 87. She started in theatre in 2005 with CT4Ventos, in 2011 she continued her artistic training with the clown collective ClownLaboratoriPorto and since then, in addition to Doctor Popovna at ONV (2017), she has worked collectively with the companies Historioscópio (2017), Coração nas Mãos (2018) and Ervilha no Topo do Bolo (2019), an improvisation theatre group of which she is co-founder.
Since 2007 he has completed more than twenty theatre training courses in Portugal, Austria and Spain with trainers such as: Peta Lily, Ami Hanab, Josh Houben, Jaime Mears, Inês Lua, Nuno Pino Custódio, Pedro Fabião, Yumi Fuji-tani, Tom Roos, Silvia Leblon, Elisa de Almeida Rossin, Élise Ouvrier-Buffet, Lana Biba and Txema Perez from London Physical Theatre School, Antón Coucheiro, Zeca Carvalho, Chris Griswold, Andrea Macera, Nola Rae, Avner Eisenberg, Yael Karavan, Gabriel
Chame Buendía.
As a reflection of his unquestionable passion for theatre, and unable to contain his creativity any longer, he took to the stage the shows “Aceitas?” 2015; “Balança” 2017; “Chá das Cinco” 2018; “Martha Coast Gim” 2022 and “Albas” 2023.
She made her debut in contemporary circus as the presenter of “Cabaret de Circo da Esmae” (2017) and has a career that spans circus, clown, theatre, puppetry and improvisation.
In order to balance out how extraordinary and unpredictable her life is, Marta is very happy when there is simply her favourite dish on the menu: Creamy Vegetable Soup, well done!
