This text is from a conversation that took place at the Dias Das Dança Festival 2026, on the 13th of April as a part of the Live Art Writers Network programme at A PiSCiNA, featuring contributions from Pedro Vilela, Dori Nigro and Tiziano Cruz.
These bodies in this city: situated landscapes in performance and critical writing
How might performance and creative/critical writing become practices that belong and echo the city and those who live in it? This conversation brings together performers with a socially engaged practice and writers to reflect collectively on the role of performance within a city. Moving from within and beyond institutional and festival contexts, the discussion asks what performance can offer to everyday life, and how it might address, interrupt, or speak back to the city and its communities. The conversation convenes performers working in socially engaged ways alongside critics interested in writing that carries a social dimension, writing that reaches beyond the art world echo chamber and remains accountable to lived experience, public space, and civic life.
This contribution by Dori Nigro was originally given in Portuguese, and translated to English for publication. See the Portuguese version here.
The interventions by Pedro Vilela and Tiziano Cruz, can be accessed HERE.
Thank you for this bridge and, once again, for the collaboration with performingborders, with whom Paulo and I have had long shared a common approach to thinking about festivals and looking back at the past. I thought I’d go back to 1988 here – the year I was born and the year Mário Calixto, Wura Moraes’ father, arrived here in Portugal. Wura was also born in the same year, so we have 1988 in common.
Because, following today’s thought-provoking opening of the discussion, which sought to reflect on the present and on what it has been like to create and recreate here in the city of Porto, particularly in relation to diasporic and Afro-diasporic bodies, looking at that past is, in a way, also a way of thinking about the present; it is a way of thinking about the future not only of the city but also of the festival, of DDD itself.
Mário Calixto was at and performed on stage at the Teatro Municipal do Porto during it’s 1990 season.
So looking at that past is also looking at the present, and above all at my own presence. Thinking of those people who paved the way for me to be here today, not just me, but everyone that in a way is part of this Afro-diasporic relation and the Yoruba cosmologies we’ve been working on. When I look at what I’ve been doing today, Mário was already doing it here in the 80s and 90s, so nothing is new; at the same time, we’re in this reverberation, aren’t we, as Wura’s play itself showed. At Wura’s invitation, I’ve been following her project, Confluências, Reverberações (Confluences and Reverberations) from its very beginnings, culminating with Wura’s first project, HENDA / XALA in which she pays homage to her father, and now this one, Reverberações, in which she pays tribute to her father, and now this latest one, where the original plan was for Wura to dance with Miltércio (Santos, her uncle), who sadly passed away during the development for this show, which premiered here at the DDD.
At Wura’s invitation, I have been poring over this archive, which has been preserved for many years by Wura’s mother, Ana de Moraes, ever since Mário Calixto’s passing. So I’ll start by reading a few sections of the text Reverberações e reparações: um olhar de corpo inteiro, a partir do arquivo-vivo de Mário Calixto (1960-1997).
To dance an archive
The archive: if we want to know what this will have meant, we will only know in the times to come.
(Derrida, 2001).
Dancing an archive requires time. There are archives that conceal more than they reveal and which, by their very nature, demand careful interpretation and a bold choreographic gesture, much like someone opening a family photo album and, in doing so, revealing the world.
This archive is a family collection that has been generously opened up to the world as an offering, meticulously preserved through the memories and lives of its custodians, Ana de Moraes and Wura Moraes, storytellers who reveal profound details of a life lived to the very end.
The archive traces the dance trajectories of Mário Calixto and Miltércio dos Santos (Mil), his brother, preserving not only a record of their dance histories but also the presence of Afro dance within the Portuguese diaspora. This archive also reveals the gesturality of the artistic processes, generously shared by Mário, from the genesis of his creations to the care with which he choreographed the events of his time.
They are unfinished gestures of freedom and of taking on life. In an archive where dance and life intertwine. Words alone are incapable of conveying such a rich history. We immerse ourselves in sketches of dreams, fears and hope.
To delve into this archive, you need to open up.
An archive that spans from the singular to the plural, offering a window into the history of Afro dance that is also Portuguese. Much of this work was created here in Portugal, shaped by Mário’s fleeting yet intense presence right up until Mil’s recent passing in 2024.
It is a rich collection that would be an valuable asset to cultural institutions, serving as an archive not only of these dancers but also of the many others who have shaped their lives on this land, yet remained on the margins of it.
While being an artist today means grappling with the challenge of creating, whilst at the same time producing, selling and circulating one’s work, things were very different in Mário and Mil’s day. Projects were undertaken by hand, without the conveniences and/or difficulties of our digital age, reviving a craft-based approach that required waiting for the handwritten letter to reach its final destination.
In this archive, we find a collection of family correspondence interspersed with working sketches and records of files, in which Mário meticulously annotated his technical requirements by hand, considering the logistics of his creations. Each project is a piece of architecture planned down to the smallest detail, revealing the artist’s thought process.
Everything was meticulously registered on paper: suggestions for lighting, costumes, sets and soundtrack selections, in a poetic interplay between the realities of life and art, which cannot always be separated. The manuscripts in the archive allow us to follow the creation of each work right through to its final realisation, revealing the care that went into every detail.
In the archive, I come across a series of photographs, projected in Reverberações, which have left indelible marks on the performers’ clay bodies. They are cracks in a mapped shroud, tracing the paths opened up in a strange land.
Photographs function as another reality, in which our deliriums create new images. The primacy of photography lies in its first-person testimony: proof that someone was not only present in a particular space-time, but also altered it.
For Roland Barthes (2006), photography does not evoke the past. Therefore, the photographs we see are, in fact, the futures of Mário and Mil, here and now. And, as a utopia, they also become our future, in the present.
A photograph is a piece of memory that seeks to fit into a jigsaw that is always missing a piece. The difficulty Mil had in recalling things from the past stems from his realisation that his own time has always been a non-linear choreography. Understanding this circularity soothes our lack of memory. For the gap is part of the process.
Dancing as memory
Memory is not neutral. Archives operate on the premise of memory. And agreeing to open the archive is a risky yet generous gesture, for, as Wura points out, the moment the archive becomes an offering, it ceases to belong solely to us.
Memory is fleeting. We are shaped by what we remember, but also by what we forget. Memory is influenced by what we choose, desire and project. We are haunted by a fear of remembering. And in this battle that is memory, gaining access to this archive is a restoration of memory itself, in the sense that certain memories and bodily experiences are filtered out of the archives.
This gesture demonstrates not only the power held by this archive to tell stories, but also the possibility that other stories might be told. In a way, we take on the role of storytellers when we encounter other people’s stories, simultaneously unravelling and selecting, dancing and choreographing our own stories.
To choose, to remember, to archive, to record. All these words express a certain power. What we consider relevant may not be relevant to others. It always depends on the perspective from which we observe. And this archive demands a full-body look.
Towards a pedagogy of contemporary (Afro) dance
Mário first arrives in Portugal in 1988, as part of a generation that entered the country a few years after the end of one of Europe’s longest-running dictatorial regimes, which had curtailed freedom. He settled in Máfrica, in the municipality of Amarante, transforming it into his emotional and creative base, and travelled through various Portuguese cities, both as a dancer and as an educator through dance. He also travelled through France, Germany and Austria, finding in those countries a greater resonance for his dance than in Portugal.
It was through dance pedagogy that Mário and Ana met. Ana was one of Mário’s students. She took part in his Afro-contemporary dance training whilst he was in Rio de Janeiro in the late 1980s, specifically in 1987. Since then, they have been partners in life and in their creative work. From this relationship came Wura Moraes and Mário Calisto. Following Mário’s untimely death, Ana Moraes became the custodian of his archive.
Mário has been developing his practice since 1984, when he left Salvador for Rio de Janeiro, where he adopted his own distinctive artistic language, exploring the concept of contemporary Afro dance and the challenge of de-folklorising African-rooted spiritual practices and expressions, whilst rethinking Afro dance as a contemporary way of life that transcends, yet does not deny, the liturgical rituals of Candomblé and the worship of the orixás.
What Mário proposed was that Afro-contemporary dance should be understood beyond the ritualistic and sacred aspects historically associated with it. He choreographed Afro dance by recreating a kind of syncretic dance that embraced the founding myths of Afro-Brazilian cosmogonies and incorporated his own background, without, however, neglecting its religious dimension.
It is important to question the stereotype that assumes every Black person who dances Afro automatically has one foot firmly planted in the terreiro. Mario activated, through his body-archive, his own unique learnings and techniques acquired throughout his time on earth, mobilising them at any moment, free from barriers and/or impositions. The words of Ana, his partner and accomplice who accompanied Mário for many years, best convey the complexity of Mário’s dance.
And here I quote Ana de Moraes, who says:
Mário Calixto transcends the Western physical body, the mental body and dances in a dynamic, metamorphic, Uranian style that communicates, through the realm of feeling, of emotion, his deepest reality in a movement from the inside out, emanating from an eternal, unchanging centre. These are not merely gestures or forms; they are the conscious pulsation in a free and powerful expression of a whole with a millennia-old cosmic dimension.
She can’t quite remember when she wrote that; she thinks it was sometime between 1989 and 1990.
I’ll move on to the next and final chapter:
Dance as a form of healing, or dancing as healing
Wura Moraes draws on this rhizomatic archive and expands on it through dance. In doing so, she brings the archive itself to life with every step, inviting us to interpret it in different ways. It is perhaps in this resonance that the archive gains even greater power, when intersected by other bodies, gestures and perspectives, but, above all, when those who stand before it allow themselves to be immersed in it.
In this process of learning I am currently undergoing, I have also absorbed this archive and its teachings, reflecting on the power of dance as a healing gesture.
The ongoing dance practice project, Confluências e Reverberações, is, above all, about reparations. I shall mention two that spring to mind as a starting point for a debate that should be even broader in scope and have multiple roots, just like this archive.
The first act of reparation Wura undertakes is to bring her father back to the stage of the Porto Municipal Theatre (TMP), this time with a name and a story.
Mário Calixto first took to the stage at the TMP in 1990 to dance in Carl Orff’s musical Carmina Burana, in what was to be the third production of the opera in Portugal. However, his name and image were overlooked in the archives when reports of that production were circulating.
The second addition is the inclusion of her uncle, Mil, in the dance. Having returned to the stage in 2019 after years away, in partnership with Akila, aka Puta da Silva, he dances with Wura in a metaphysical way. Mil has been part of this project since its inception, as an extension of the memory of his brother Mário, but ended up becoming captivated by it during the creative process.
I had the pleasure of meeting Mil in person whilst she was still alive. His energy was infectious throughout our lunch on that lovely afternoon in Lisbon. These are moments that happen only once in a fleeting life, and which, in some way, leave a lasting mark on our lives.
I can’t quite recall all the topics that came up around that table. There were many: food, cachaça, things about the Northeast. However, when the mind is unable to remember, the body reveals the truth. There are things that memory alone cannot grasp, as it is far too fleeting and limited.
What we cannot put into words remains within our bodies. And dance is a way for it to overflow.
So, we shall dance.
Dori Nigro is a creator, performer, art educator and researcher, having studied at the Faculty of Fine Arts of the University of Porto and the College of Arts at the University of Coimbra. Since 2007, he has been dedicated to interdisciplinary artistic practices. He holds a PhD, a master’s degree and a specialisation in the fields of contemporary art, artistic practices and art education. He has a degree in education and a bachelor’s degree in media studies and photography. He lives and works between Portugal and Brazil, facilitating collaborative activities with artists and local communities. Together with Paulo Pinto, he runs LÁRoyé, a home/studio for the sharing of emotional, creative and ancestral traditions, developing research and creative work within the fields of artistic practice and art/education. He is a member of the Black Union of the Arts (UNA).