Dialogue
Memory
Confluence
Territory

premiere

OU 4
OU 3
OU 2
OU 1

"The voice of the sea has filled heaven and earth. A voice that is full and breaks, and never ends".

In its continuous rocking, the sea brings and takes with it memories of all times.
It was the sea that brought Vasco da Gama to Inhambane, a town in the south of Mozambique that he named ‘Land of Good People’. And it was by sea that thousands of enslaved people were taken from Inhambane, many of them lost forever in its waters.

"- The sea is a world. There is life in the sea. There are mountains, plants, wind and fish. There is human life in the depths".

Inspired by Drexciya's mythology, which imagines an underwater people descended from African slaves who were thrown into the sea during the Atlantic crossing, and by the testimony of a healer from Inhambane about her experiences with the spirits of the sea, OU reflects on multiple encounters. The meeting of two bodies, with their strengths, their abstractions, their histories, their wills. The encounter between sea and land, the visible and the invisible, the ancestral and the contemporary, the spiritual and the down-to-earth.
The result of a collaboration between André Braga & Cláudia Figueiredo and Panaibra Canda, OU took as its starting point the landscape of Inhambane, a land of family and colonial memories, where the present mixes with the reverberations of the past.

“Memory is rooted in the concrete, in spaces, gestures, images and objects”. We are interested in thinking about History from other perspectives, other voices, other languages and from a crossed thinking that overlaps past, present and future. We are interested in continuing our research into what Paul Carter called the “politics of the ground”: “a new way of stepping that doesn't flatten the ground, but lets the ground touch the body, determine gestures, movements, in a new social choreography”.

With a strongly transdisciplinary language, OU interweaves dance, sound, video, light and word in a sensory fabric that invites listening and imagination. The proposal is an invitation to think about History through fiction, fabulation, ghostly presence as a form of justice and memory. — André Braga & Cláudia Figueiredo / Circolando – Central Elétrica com Panaibra Canda 

premiere

9

age rating to be defined by CCE

Credits

Artistic direction, concept development and dramaturgy
André Braga, Cláudia Figueiredo and Panaibra Canda in collaboration with Gonçalo Mota and João Sarnadas


Performance
André Braga and Panaibra Canda


Sound design
João Sarnadas


Video
Gonçalo Mota


Lighting
Santiago Rodríguez Tricot


Text
Excerpts from a conversation with Constança José Beoula


Set design
André Braga in collaboration with the whole team


Costumes
Sandra Neves


Construction support
Joana Mesquita Alves, Sandra Neves, Pedro Coutinho, and Nuno Guedes


Production direction
Ana Carvalhosa


Production
Joana Mesquita Alves (project coordination) and Cláudia Santos


Administrative support
João Gravato


Technical coordination
Pedro Coutinho


Communication
Joana Borges


Co-production
DDD – Festival Dias da Dança; São Luiz Teatro Municipal; Teatro das Figuras; Teatro Aveirense / CM Aveiro


Support and Coordination in Mozambique
CulturArte Mozambique


Acknowledgements
Provincial Directorate of Culture and Tourism of Inhambane, Provincial House of Culture of Inhambane, Machavenga Cultural Center, Rui Horácio Mbande, Luis Luis Chauque, Ana Lúcia Cruz, Lizette Chirrime, the group of participants in the creative workshop in Inhambane, Ana Barata, Fernanda Araújo, Francisco Babo

Accessibility

Accessible to wheelchair users