This text was originally written in Portuguese by Letícia Maia in response to Bruno Humberto’s Enciclopédia das Escadas, Festival Citemor, August 2025. You can read the original HERE.
#10 dancing with stairs to disrupt the choreographic relationship between body and space
Proposed performance score: Two men dressed in everyday clothes perform this action on a staircase located in a public space. Throughout the action, they must always keep their backs to each other, allowing chance to synchronise their movements and draw their bodies closer together. They move along the staircase in all directions and senses, exploring its specificities. They alternate and vary their starting positions: each at one end, both in the middle, both from bottom to top, both from top to bottom. On the staircase, the two randomly perform a repertoire of gestures and movements designed in response to the specificity of the space. Experiment with relationships other than verticality: rolling, dragging, crawling, lying down, sitting, etc. Explore relationships with parts of the body that do not normally touch the steps, shoulders, forearms, back, palms, head, knees, etc. Reinvent the use of the staircase for about an hour.
Some notes on Bruno Humberto’s Enciclopédia das Escadas
In Enciclopédia das Escadas — a work presented as the result of an artistic residency by Bruno Humberto with the collaboration of João Ferro Martins, Miguel Ângelo Santarém and Mariana Sá Marques at the Citemor festival, still in early stages of process — we are invited to follow the alleys of Montemor-o-Velho, a Portuguese village where stairs sprout up everywhere. It was late at night when we began our journey, and the village, silent and quiet, seemed to be already asleep. Seated at the top of staircases — a vantage point from which we could see several planes of perspectives — we observed how light, sound, body, space, movement and displacement became elements of a performative composition that flirts with cinema, where everyday reality merges with intentional artistic propositions.
The staircases of public spaces, normally seen as mere functional devices for transit – for passing, going up, going down – are taken in Enciclopédia das Escadas as a space for permanence, scene and choreography. As they traverse different staircases on a journey through the upper part of the village, the artists explore and live compose their performance based on their physical, formal and symbolic characteristics, as well as the everyday uses and practices that inhabit this space.
In one of the moments that most stood out for me, two men dance on an illuminated plateau between flights of stairs, exploring the dynamics between light and shadow, appearance and disappearance. Their bodies seemed to attract each other, but they avoided eye contact, suggesting a tension between attraction and repulsion. But they do not perform virtuosity, they focus on a dance composed of minimal gestures – a vocabulary of movements that we recognise from everyday life and that would not attract attention in themselves – walking in circles, changing speeds and duration, sitting, lying down, pointing, putting their hands on their heads, checking pockets, leaning an arm on a wall, pressing the body against the wall, swatting mosquitoes above the head, etc. But when repeated, outside their usual functionality and context, they cease to obey the productive order of this public space of passage and reorganise everyday bodily performativity. As I noted: ‘the insistence on repeating these gestures out of context and purpose promotes a change of perspective that makes us see the choreographic and poetic hidden in everyday life.’
Climbing up and down stairs may seem like a purely functional gesture, but, as Andrew Hewitt proposes in Social Choreography (2005), our everyday movements carry and reproduce social, ideological, and political structures. The author calls this social choreography, a way of understanding how bodies, when they move, not only reflect society, but performatively construct it. This is not a metaphor, but a constitutive field of action — the body not only represents norms, it reiterates them and inscribes them in space.
By taking the staircase — an architectural element so present in our lives — as a starting point in friction with everyday time and space, Enciclopédia das Escadas tensions seemingly neutral gestures and spaces, revealing their symbolic and ideological charge. By proposing actions that merge with life, it activates space as a field of tension: between function and poetics, repetition and variation, expectation and possibility. It also excavates layers of meaning — hierarchy, ascension, access, separation, effort — and takes everyday gestures as choreographic material. It directs its interest towards the mundane, valuing the ordinary, the common, and challenging our expectations regarding virtuosity.
In this dynamic, the staircase ceases to be a simple support and becomes a device for creation. Inhabited by bodies that slow down, that do not obey the functional verticality of passage, it becomes a plateau of permanence, a terrain of invention. Enciclopédia das Escadas is in the early stages of development, but already points to a gesture that reveals itself as a potential disruptor of the normative use of the relationship between body, space, architecture and city.
For me, the idea of an encyclopaedia evoked in the title does not refer to total knowledge, but to a set of embodied experiences that remind us that dancing, walking, stopping and looking are ways of making – and also of unmaking and remaking – the world. Like a living encyclopaedia, made up of bodily, affective and relational experiences, the work highlights that the relationships between body, space, architecture and city are traversed by tensions and conflicts.
This act calls for a reorientation of our functional choreographic relationship with architectural space, reorganising everyday performativity and allowing us to notice what normally goes unnoticed. Even in its initial stage, the work points to this potential counter-choreographic gesture — tensioning and highlighting social choreography and opening space for other ways of being and moving with the city.
Originally published in Portuguese on Citemor’s website, 9th of August 2025
—
Letícia Maia (1988, Mairiporã – SP, Brazil) is an artist who lives and works in Portugal. She holds a Master’s degree in Fine Arts from the Faculdade de Belas Artes do Porto – FBAUP (2023, Portugal) and a Bachelor’s degree in Communication of the Body Arts from the Pontificia Universidade Católica de São Paulo – PUC-SP (2014, Brazil). Her artistic practice unfolds in a transdisciplinary field between performance, drawing and sculpture, with a strong interest in exploring the political dimension of the body — particularly issues related to gender, identity, sexuality, and normativity — challenging the ways the body has been represented throughout art history. In recent years, she has presented her work in a variety of contexts, participating in festivals, exhibitions, showcases and artist residencies in Brazil, Chile, Colombia, Austria and Portugal. She is currently developing the project “montar corpo”, supported by a creation grant from the Artistas Douro / Porto City Council program, in residence at Mala Voadora (Porto, Portugal). Her recent solo exhibitions include: “Decomposição Tropical” (Júlio Resende Foundation, Gondomar, Portugal, 2025); “MAKE FEMININE” (a project supported by a DGArtes 2023 artistic creation grant, presented at Maus Hábitos – Cultural Intervention Space, Porto, Portugal, 2024); and “D Ó C I L_corpo, genero, poder, e performance” (AL859 Space, Porto, Portugal, 2023). She is also active in the organization and curatorship of performance art events, like Performance Art Shows Movediça_ Mostra de Performance Arte, since 2017 in São Paulo, and trëma(¨), which premiered in 2023 in the city of Porto.
—
The Live Art Writers Network x Citemor 2025 project was conceived and curated by performingborders, Diana Damian Martin and Citemor Festival, with support from Dori Nigro e Paulo Pinto. Funded by Royal Central School of Speech & Drama – University of London, through UKRI Impact Accelerator funding.
Foto: Susana Paiva, with design intervention by Letícia Maia