This text was written by Pedro, as a part of the Live Art Writers Network, taking place at Festival Dias da Dança, in April-May 2025. To view the other commissioned texts in response to the festival and its performances, as well as an introduction to the project, see here. Texts available in English and Portuguese. This text is a translation of the original written in Portuguese here.

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Listen to the text read by Xavier de Sousa here: 

While accompanying different festivals over the last few years, I’ve experienced first-hand the impact they have on the cities they take place in – real utopian windows that open up, an exercise in connecting the society that hosts them, perhaps because of their intense inclination for collective celebration.

It’s no coincidence that many of our longest-running festivals emerged with the aim of contributing to the reconstruction of territories in post-terror periods, moving between life and death, reviving awareness of our fragile existence. Such is the case of the Avignon Festival, which arose as part of the municipality’s efforts to revitalize the city after the intense bombings of April 1944 – a process that involved not only architectural reconstruction, but also the cultural revival of the territory – as well as the Edinburgh International Festival and its parallel showcase, the Fringe, also created at the end of the Second World War with the aim of “raising the spirit” of the Scottish people, as Rudolf Bing, the event’s founder, declared at the time. On the other side of the Atlantic, the Manizales Festival, created in 1968 in Colombia, and the Caracas International Theater Festival, founded in 1971 in Venezuela, among the oldest in Latin America, arose to some extent as a response to the dictatorial regimes that marked these countries, a context similar to the one that later inspired the Bogotá Ibero-American Festival (1988) and the Santiago de Chile International Festival (1994).

On the other hand, it is increasingly common to encounter contemporary experiences characterized by “a certain solemnity in the celebration, an exceptional and periodic nature that is sometimes rendered meaningless by the proliferation and trivialization of modern festivals” as French theorist Patrice Pavis observes in his Dictionary of Theatre book. In other words, festivals in which the absence of a curatorial thought and the overlapping of the numbers achieved – in terms of audiences, shows or sponsorship – take precedence over reflecting on the effective cultural impact that these events could or should generate in the cities where they take place. In many cases, the glow from statistics overshadows the complexity of the cultural relationships that could be built in the long term and, even though they impact local economies, stimulate tourism, generate jobs and promote the circulation of works and artists, these events often become instruments of urban marketing, operating under a logic of profitability and visibility, rather than social or cultural transformation.

This set of factors fuels a kind of symbolic race between cities that wish to have a festival “to call their own” — often more as a strategy for positioning themselves in the global cultural market than as a commitment to local artistic production. However, fortunately for those who live here, the city of Porto manages to escape this logic through the festivals it hosts, scheduling events capable of attracting significant numbers without neglecting the curatorial thought that governs the selection of the works presented.

With nine editions under its belt, DDD – Festival Dias da Dança has quickly established itself as one of the most important cultural events in Portugal, bringing together a significant audience, occupying various artistic spaces and transforming the city of Porto, albeit temporarily, into the “dance capital” of Europe. Although the festival does not adopt a fixed curatorial line or propose a unifying theme that explicitly guides the selection of works, it is possible to see a conscious movement towards broadening the narratives around the bodies that inhabit and tension the territory. This curatorial gesture – however diffuse – seems to be in dialogue with local urgencies traversed by persistent colonial structures, marked by historical processes of exclusion and silencing. It is from this critical perspective that I propose to reflect on some of the works presented, moving through a kind of journey experienced over the course of a few days.

Let’s start with May 23rd: it is opening night, an evening of celebration. The Municipal Theatre of Porto – Rivoli is getting ready to start another edition of DDD – Festival Dias da Dança. There is intense buzz in the foyer, where artists and spectators share the enthusiasm of taking part in a festival that has quickly become part of the city’s cultural imagination. Tickets are almost sold out, pre-booked invitations are distributed by the staff, and the few remaining tickets are available at the box office. But when does a festival really begin? The moment the curtains open, or in the vibrancy of the gatherings and encounters that precede the show outside the performance hall?

The chosen performance for opening night was Os Gigantes (‘The Giants’), a new piece with artistic direction by Victor Hugo Pontes in collaboration with the collective Dançando com a Diferença, based in Madeira and recognized for their work in inclusive dance, as well as its mission to promote social and cultural inclusion through art. The message conveyed by the curators is clear: on the one hand, the appreciation of a collaboration between two consolidated references of the Portuguese dance scene; on the other, the effort to amplify the presence of other corporealities in the festival’s program.

The DDD pre-show announcement plays and it’s long, maybe too long – I haven’t experienced a vignette last that long in ages! Could it be an omen? Os Gigantes is based on Os Gigantes da Montanha (‘The Mountain Giants’), an unfinished play by the Italian playwright Luigi Pirandello, an author with whom Victor Hugo Pontes had already engaged with for the conception of his show Drama (Teatro Municipal Porto – Rivoli, 2019). In this new creation the fable, the unfinished, the oneiric and creative freedom are clear hallmarks of the director’s aesthetic proposal. However, the result here reveals a fracture: a latent disconnect between the poetic and dramaturgical universe that has guided Pontes in recent years and the work developed by Dançando com a Diferença. What initially seemed to be a powerful encounter between languages and perspectives, became an unequal overlap where gestures of inclusion end up being diluted by a direction which shows little dialogue with the specificity of that collective.

With the results seen on this stage, even though openness to different collaborations is a hallmark of the Madeiran collective, I couldn’t help but reflect on the strategic choice of inviting different creators to sign their works over the last few years. Since 2017, they have invited names such as Tânia Carvalho, La Ribot, Vera Mantero, Marlene Monteiro Freitas and François Chaignaud. Is this a legitimate attempt to explore new creative methodologies and broaden artistic horizons? Or was it a search for aesthetic and symbolic validation, a way of acquiring recognition for the work developed over more than two decades – which in itself should be enough – through collaborations with established choreographers?

In the case of Os Gigantes, the contradictions between the institutional discourse and the stage result is striking. Dançando com a Diferença’s ethos, as advertised on its website, aims to contribute ‘to the valorisation of the artistic capacities and competences of dancers with disabilities’. However, what we see on stage goes in the opposite direction. The choice of festive costumes and the forced playful tone result in an evident infantilisation of the bodies on stage, generating a kind of embarrassment for the spectators who find themselves in front of a work that does not emancipate, but exposes – compromising not only its own artistic potential, but also its social, cultural and political dimensions. Throughout the show, a series of unfortunate decisions pile up: the soundtrack reinforces the caricature tone; the lighting design seems more interested in playing with the RGB (Red, Green and Blue) palette than engaging with the expressive needs of the scene; and the artistic direction opts for an aesthetic that ignores – or at least underestimates – the singular corporealities that are manifested there. The result is a symbolic erasure disguised as inclusion.

Frustration was inevitable, especially when compared to recent experiences of a profoundly different aesthetic and ethical nature. At FITEI 2023 (International Festival of Theatre of Iberian Expression), for example, the play Hamlet, directed by Peruvian Chela Ferrari and starring a cast of artists with Down syndrome, proved to be a moving, precise and politically vigorous experience. In that piece, the audience didn’t just accompany the performance: they wanted to stay, to be affected, to keep being moved by it. As for Os Gigantes, I confess – and I do so with regret – that I silently hoped it would end soon. Not out of disrespect for the performers, but precisely out of courtesy for them, because of the uncomfortable feeling of being inserted into a performance device that hardly listened to them.

A few days later, I made my way to the Teatro Municipal de Gaia (Municipal theatre in Vila Nova de Gaia, the city adjacent to Porto, on the south of the Douro river) to see one of the works I was most looking forward to, a new creation by Brazilian artist Gaya de Medeiros, entitled Cafezinho. I have followed her career in Portugal with interest and admiration, not only for the artistic quality of her work, but also for the strength with which she has broken through – with all its intersectionalities – the still conservative environment of many Portuguese cultural institutions.

Watching her work, to a certain extent, is also a gesture of reconnection with my country, Brazil, a reunion with the aesthetic codes that constitute us, as artists of a generation marked by common references. In Gaya, I identify traces of the Minas Gerais’ scene – especially in her relationship with words, the body and the delicacy of gesture. For me, her writing carries echoes of the theatre maker Grace Passô, for example, a central figure in the renewal of contemporary theatre language in Brazil.

In Cafezinho, Gaya starts freely from Café Müller (1978), by Pina Bausch, a work marked by a feeling of loneliness, helplessness and searching – and which here becomes a space of melancholic elaboration. There is something autobiographical about the way Gaya sews this feeling to her own journey between Brazil and Europe. The work builds an aura of intimacy, where musicians and performers share an atmosphere of longing, of emotional and affective displacement.

However, at certain points in the piece, some noises started to rumble in my mind. For example, during one passage in which Gaya says something along the lines of “I come from a country whose people still sing, despite everything we’ve been through.” It is with this statement that, while evoking the figure of a people who resist by singing, smiling, reinventing life, the artist cuts in with the song “Canta, canta, minha gente”, by Martinho da Vila. For me, the scene offers a kind of displacement between lyricism and the abyss – between the desire to belong and the weight of migration, between the idealised image of a country that sings and the silent pain of those who leave.

I’d like to make it very clear, and with utmost care, that I’m not trying to impose a univocal reading of a country of continental dimensions like Brazil. I recognise – and deeply respect – Gaya’s right to reconstruct, from personal and artistic experience, the image of a Brazil that is her own. Even so, listening to that speech, as in other moments when this Brazilian imaginary is activated, I couldn’t help but reflect on how we artists often operate within imaginaries moulded by the expectations of others, especially at the intersections between affirming or subverting the images that spectators and, especially, cultural programmers construct about us.

Lilia Moritz Schwarcz, historian and anthropologist, in her book Sobre o autoritarismo brasileiro (‘Brazilian Authoritarianism: Past & Present, 2019), reminds us that:

Brazilians have often been portrayed as cordial, peaceful and cheerful, but this is an image constructed to hide the violence of our history and our present.

The Brazil I come from, the same one I spent 35 years of my life in, is perhaps not the same one that Gaya evokes. The Brazil I know bears deep colonial wounds, is traversed by brutal violence – physical, symbolic, moral – and is cyclically subjected to processes of dehumanisation. It is a country that only recently managed to get rid of a far-right president who is openly racist, misogynistic and negationist. It is also a country where, according to data from 2012 to 2022, around 111 black people were murdered every day. Given this, the idea of a people who ‘sing despite everything’ sounds to me less like resistance and more like romanticising a historical pain that is still pulsating.

I’m primarily concerned about the maintenance of a stereotyped imaginary – often reproduced abroad – that reduces the complexity of our existence (as Brazilians) to ready-made images, recycled since the 1980s and 90s, when Brazilian soap operas began to be exported on a large scale. This imagery is marked by a hypersexualisation of our Afro-Latin American bodies, by an almost automatic association with samba, carnival and malandragem* – images that, under the veneer of celebration, carry a violent potential for depoliticisation and silencing. These are images that continue to affect us directly, to the extent that even today we are read with suspicion, distrust or exoticism when trying, for example, to rent a flat in European territory.

Cafezinho is yet another work that demonstrates the clarity and maturity with which Gaya handles the scenic devices she chooses to explore, and orchestrates her fellow performers with precision. However, I share only one true desire: that Gaya doesn’t let herself be led into the traps of concessions to expectations or imaginary external frameworks – especially from European eyes that often try to mould what they expect to see. After all, if for the people of Minas Gerais coffee is more than just a drink – it’s a ritual of encounters and sociability – may we savour it to the full, recognising and celebrating all the diversity it can offer us.

It is precisely in this mode of identity affirmation that three works, in different ways, intertwine in their movement and provocations: Musseque, by Fábio Krayze; Violetas, by Vânia Doutel Vaz; and Vagabundus, by Ídio Chichava. In all of them, the black body takes centre stage – not as an object of representation, but as a pulsating subject, creator of languages and narratives. These are pieces that, each in their own way, activate complex relationships with otherness, memory and territory. Works that not only resist, but insist on affirming a presence that doesn’t bend to conventions, but rather transgresses them with poetic and political power.

On the eve of 25th of April, I headed towards Avenida dos Aliados, the epicenter of the celebrations in Porto that mark the 51st anniversary of the end of the Portuguese dictatorship. In a few moments, well-known artists would take to the stage, carnations would be distributed among the crowd, fireworks would light up the sky – all in the name of an essential reminder: freedom, for all bodies and thoughts, is non-negotiable. Near the avenue, in a small room at Mala Voadora, Fábio Krayze and three other performers (Selma Mylene, Xenos Palma, Elvis Carvalho) were waiting for us, to present Musseque – a word from the Angolan language Kimbundu used to designate peripheral suburban neighbourhoods, similar to Brazilian favelas.

The staging, with its simple layout, bringing the audience together around the scene, clearly showed that the body would be the work’s central motor. In it, Krayze revisits the wounds of the Angolan Civil War and the complex socio-political conditions of his country after Portuguese post-colonialism. As a wake-up call, his performance makes us recognise that the freedom being celebrated outside has not yet been fully realised in his native land, where the echoes of Portuguese colonisation still resonate.

Without resorting to victimisation, Krayze employs a unifying element for his people – music and dance – specifically, Kuduro – a musical genre born in Angola, with influences from Sungura and Rap, which is pulsating in this performance. The sincerity with which the performances give themselves to what the piece proposes is such that it awakens in the audience the desire to join in the dance, making the show a collective gesture of presence and resistance.

Some days later, I went to the Campo Alegre Theatre to see Vânia Doutel Vaz’s latest work, already surrounded by the echoes of enthusiasm that Violetas had been arousing in the city. Between expectation and perception, we are invited to enter a sensitive universe built by Vânia in partnership with four performers – Lua Aurora, Lucília Raimundo, Piny and Wura Moraes. Under a fixed light, the bodies of these women lead us through a choreography that oscillates between minimalist and expansive gestures, endowed with a force that pierces through each spectator. By validating the uniqueness of each performer, the work sustains silence as a space of revelation, where gesture – always charged with political and social power – emerges clearly. There, the tensions between inside and outside, self and other, are constantly summoned, reinforcing the centrality of the body as a territory of inscription, resistance and reinvention.

Later on, I reencounter Ídio Chichava and his vibrant legion of Vagabundus, a piece I had seen months ago at the Mostra Internacional de Teatro de São Paulo (Brazil). In it, the 13 performers – all with plural and powerful bodies – take up traditional Mozambican songs from different eras to re-imagine ways of living collectively and reaffirm the value of community life. Watching Vagabundus, I was immediately transported to an emblematic episode that took place in Brazil in 2014: the so-called ‘Rolezinhos’. At that time, young people – mostly black and living on the outskirts – organised meetings via social media to meet in shopping centres in various cities, just to hang out, have fun and occupy spaces. Society’s reaction was immediate and revealing: the gathering of black bodies in certain social spaces became a political event, generating heated debates about racial and class segregation in the country. So how can we fail to recognise the political strength of the 13 performers of Ídio Chichava, who occupy the stage with a contagious collective gesture? With minimal resources and very few objects, their action seems to function as a chorus against the concreteness of everyday oppressions, bringing to the stage the beauty and urgency of bodies that insist – together – on remaining, creating and transforming.

In his work Critique of Black Reason (2013), Cameroonian philosopher Achille Mbembe discusses how the concept of the ‘Other’ (particularly the black other) has been historically constructed in the West. He tells us:

The Other is only tolerated when it submits to the condition of being a mirror. It must reflect back to the Self a comforting, familiar, undisturbed image.

Unlike Cafezinho, all three of these works do not sublimate the scars intrinsic to the corporealities that perform them. On the contrary, they renounce any kind of appeasement, validating presences and reminding us of absences. One of these absences, for example, concerns the scant presence of black bodies in the DDD festival space. During the performances of these last three works, I found myself repeatedly counting – almost involuntarily – how many black people were in the audience. The number rarely exceeded 5 per cent of the audience. It’s a silent statistic, but it’s no more alarming than the absence of black professionals in the management teams of the festival. If we really want to overcome the commodification of otherness – so present in many cultural events, where, as feminist and anti-racist theorist bell hooks points out in “Black Looks: Race and Representation”, ‘ethnicity becomes spice, seasoning that can liven up the dull dish that is mainstream white culture.’ – a more radical gesture is needed, and this gesture must begin with the very structure of the festival.

During the days that DDD occupied the Rivoli Theatre, a forest-installation was set up in the venue’s café – a kind of artificial jungle installed in the heart of a concrete building. This intervention, although visually engaging, said a lot about the ephemeral time that a festival can imprint on the life of a city. It was clear that when the event ended, all those plants would be removed. The forest would disappear. We would then return to the routine, the concrete, the cruel normality of our existence. But is this really what we want?

If, for me, the opening of the festival felt like a disaster, it was over the course of the week, through other work, that I clearly realised the relevance of an event like this for the city of Porto. Still, some questions remain: how can a festival like DDD really contribute to building a fairer and more equitable social fabric? How can we guarantee that different corporealities, races and nationalities not only occupy the stage, but feel genuinely welcomed and respected in everyday life in Porto – beyond the ephemerality of the festival? How can we make this brief window of listening and utopia last over time and become a sustained practice, not just a one-off gesture? And how can we artists activate our bodies based on our experiences, interests and languages, without concessions – and without being turned into merchandise?

The challenge is set: not to celebrate diversity for a few days a year, but to cultivate it like a living forest, in the structure of the city, in the relationships that sustain it and in the cultural policies that govern it.

^{*Malandragem is a term specific to Portuguese spoken in Brazil that roughly translates to someone who is ‘street smart’, a word that illustrates cleverness, being cunning, and can be both serious and playful. It speaks to a layered socio-political context, in which different communities have developed different survival mechanisms.}

All image credits: João Octávio Peixoto / DDD Festival
Lead image from Vagabundus by Ídio Chichava, image by João Octávio Peixoto / DDD Festival

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Pedro Vilela is an artist-curator-researcher. Currently pursuing a PhD in Art Education at the Faculty of Fine Arts of the University of Porto, he is also developing TREMA!, an association that artistically connects Brazil and Portugal, and collaborates with various organizations in the city of Porto. His main interest lies in the Afro-Latin American scene, engaging with themes such as decoloniality and frameworks of racialization. He is also the first Latin American to receive the Magaly Muguercia Fellowship, awarded by the Iberescena Program.

Let us cultivate the forest was commissioned by performingborders and DDD – Festival Dias da Dança, as part of Live Art Writers Network at DDD 2025