The “Com os pés” project is involving the Douro school community in the construction of a dance show that reflects on individual and collective freedom and pays homage to nature.
The process of creating the choreography takes place through artistic residencies by dancers Marina Nabais and Ricardo Machado, workshops with young students and collective walks. The show will premiere on April 28 in Aveiro.
“We’re collecting movements, drawings, words, testimonies and discovering how, through the feet, there really is a change here,” Marina Nabais told Lusa.
Reflecting on individual and collective freedom is the main objective of the project, which coincides with the celebrations of the 50th anniversary of April 25, a historic milestone that evokes the experience of being free or not.
In the renovated Teatrinho da Régua, the feet and hands of the students and artists connect with the earth that has been placed on the floor. Between walks around the space, the earth serves as a link between nature and the participants in the project that the Marina Nabais Cultural Association is developing together with the schools, the local community and the Douro Museum, based in Peso da Régua, Vila Real district.
Lusa attended one of the workshops run by eight 12th graders from the João Araújo Correia School Group.
“It’s been better than I expected. I came here with no desire and these days have been spectacular. It’s different, it’s an afternoon spent running,” said Matilde Santos, 18.
The student explained that the activities include dancing, writing, physical contact with the other participants, and her concern was “judgment”.
“It used to be that I was doing some movement, some dance, some characteristic of mine that would be judged by other people. But not anymore, when I’m here everything goes away,” she said.
In the little theater or rather in the Douro Museum’s educational service space, the participants move around the space, cross paths, dance, drop to the floor, close their eyes and feel everything that surrounds them.
The activities included a walk in silence and a moment of writing by the river Douro, which Matilde used to overcome sad memories of that place.
When challenged to a dance workshop, Carolina Conceição, 17, said yes and there she is learning to be more free.
“We learned to concentrate more on ourselves and together,” she explained, jokingly revealing that she discovered she had “46 bones in her feet”.
The workshop is led by Clara Bevilaqua, who explained that “we dance the dance that is in each other’s bodies”.
“We work from dance, with this access between dance, the arts and writing, in the background content of this creation that is ‘With your feet’,” he said.
The starting point is the feet. “The feet as a place to land, as a support for the body itself, as a possibility to cross, to walk. […] The feet with this possibility of traveling, of growing, of discovering new things,” said Clara Bevilaqua.
This is a shared investigation in which everyone is a co-creator and the result will be a dance show that focuses on movement and mixes it with theater, sound and scenic elements.
Marina Nabais said that, more than a message, the creation wants to leave questions and curiosities about “this more intimate and internal relationship with the body, the relationship with the outside and always in a kind of homage to nature itself”.
The association and the Douro Museum Foundation have been collaborating for 14 years. Marisa Adegas, from the Douro Museum’s educational service, highlighted the connection with the community and said that the aim is for residents to become increasingly aware of the place they live in, to get to know it, explore it and reinvent it.
In addition to Régua, the residencies and workshops take place in Setúbal, Almada, Aveiro and Mértola.
“Com os pés” is a project supported by the Directorate-General for the Arts.
