Corpo+cidade

Corpo + Cidade was born in 2014, the year in which Balleteatro went to inhabit the 5th floor of the Axa building. Over the years, as an integral part of its project, Balleteatro has produced cycles and festivals that contributed to the dissemination and sharing of projects that inscribed contemporaneity. This project, Corpo + Cidade (Body + City), emerges in this pulsing of life and art that can cross everyday life. In the Axa building - overlooking Avenida dos Aliados, the so-called heart of the city - emerged, therefore, the will to reflect that city, to contaminate it artistically, projecting dancing and image-making bodies, erasing the line that separates the audience and the performer.
We idealize to enter in the current of the daily life of the passers-by and, somehow, make them slow down, provoke, cheer and enjoy the dynamics and the fluidity that is the public space.
The look over the Avenue, and its movement, from that space/house, impelled the creation of a Festival for the public space. Corpo + Cidade proposed to participate in the reinvention of the city, enabling new urban experiences, crossing contemporary dance, urban dances, performance, contemporary circus, music and plastic arts.
In 2016, Corpo + Cidade joined forces with DDD - Dance Days Festival, and started presenting its proposals in the DDD OUT section.
Starting from Avenida dos Aliados, where proposals by Ricardo Ambrósio or Ana Ulisses were activated, other places branched out: the exterior of metro and train stations with Joana Von Mayer Trindade; the Carregal Garden with Gabriela Vaz Pinheiro; the Morro Garden (Vila Nova de Gaia) with Bruno Senune, Sara Marques & Alice Bonazzi or Lígia Soares; the São Lázaro Garden with Pedro Prazeres; the Crystal Palace Gardens with Charlotte Spencer; Praça D. João I Square with Isabel Barros & Vítor Rua, Momentum Crew or La Horde; and the Casa da Arquitetura (Matosinhos) with Jean Baptiste-André, in addition to other spaces, no less challenging, and with so many other artists who offered the public multiple and fascinating proposals.
Corpo + Cidade has also inhabited, until now, places less exposed to the indoor/outdoor relationship, whenever the proposals aimed at debating and conferring public art and site-specific art. This was the case, for example, with the projects by Maria Belo Costa and Carlos Zíngaro, with Cecilia Bengolea, François Chaignaud and Ana Pi in Le Tour Des Danses Urbaines En Dix Villes, or with Né Barros and her conference entitled O lugar do Corpo (The place of the Body). There was also room for stage proposals - these rarer ones -, which somehow reflected and took the street and its vivifying dances as a basis for thought and exploration, as happened with Bouziane Bouteldja's piece.
In 2019, almost in a premonition, Daniel Pinheiro and Lisa Parra, with Mediated Motion/Land Project, broke the barriers of physical distance, nurturing a presentation that made use of online.
In 2020, the Corpo + Cidade was cancelled due to the pandemic context. In 2021, still due to issues associated with the pandemic, all the projects breathed outdoors, keeping the concept of creations in public space, but the transmission happened in this sphere so present in our lives: the Internet. Ana Renata Polónia and Marta Ramos, for example, gave us the view of the sea from the Marginal of Matosinhos. Sara Marasso and Stefano Risso made us imagine a walk through Lisbon and Turin.

More than a programme of choices, Corpo + Cidade is completed and happens through affinities and responses to the motivations of artists who imagine their creations in less common or usual places.
Corpo + Cidade intends to be an encounter between creators, spaces (where the sun, wind and rain embrace us) and their communities - a triad that we believe in and that we want, with experimentation and the passage of time, to allow us to grow and strengthen in the territory of that which, with so much respect and dedication, we call Art. The essence of Corpo + Cidade, performance in public space, returns in the 2023 edition with a diversity of proposals/artists, who will inhabit spaces in the three cities, Porto, Matosinhos and Vila Nova de Gaia, returning to the natural approach to people, in a conscious gesture of invitation to that experience of participation and of living the city.
Isabel Barros & Flávio Rodrigues