About
WILL LOPES
Performer / Director / Researcher Born in 1978 in Brasília, Brazil. Based in Vienna, Austria since 2018.
Brazilian multidisciplinary performer, director, and researcher whose practice moves between performance art, theatre, dance, Butoh, circus, and transdisciplinary media.
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Trained at the University of Brasília (BA in Theatre Performance, 2003) and the Pontifical Catholic University of São Paulo (MA in Communication and Semiotics, 2016). In 2017, he received a scholarship from the Brasília government to study Butoh in Europe.
Since relocating to Vienna in 2018, Lopes has developed an international practice spanning performances, workshops, residencies, and collaborative projects across Europe, Asia, and South America. He is the founder and curator of the Hybrid Butoh Vienna Art Festival (three editions since 2022) and a member of the artistic direction team at Das LOT Wien / ECHOLOT – Kulturverein für transdisziplinäre Kunst & Artistic Research.
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His Butoh solo Kagebara, created under the supervision of master Atsushi Takenouchi, has toured across more than ten countries on three continents since its premiere in Italy in 2018 — including France, Germany, Brazil, Poland, Norway, Turkey, and Japan — confirming an international presence sustained across distinct artistic languages and contexts.
His central project, I Will – Foreign Portrait, has been in continuous development since 2021, presenting across Austria, Germany, Poland, and Japan. In 2023, with support from the City of Vienna and BMKOES, he directed the short film of the same title and launched Muiraquitã Bamboo, an experimental circus project. In 2024, the work premiered in its full performative-installation format at the Semperdepot, Academy of Fine Arts Vienna, within the Rotlicht Festival — where Christoff Wiesinger's photographic contribution was selected among the top 20 of 332 submissions from 43 countries. In 2025, the project expanded to Japan with presentations in Hokkaido and Tokyo, including a full presentation at the Embassy of Brazil in Tokyo as part of the official celebrations of 130 years of Brazil-Japan diplomatic relations.