Corpo+cidade

Corpo + Cidade was born in 2014, the year Balleteatro moved to the 5th floor of the Axa building. Over the years, as an integral part of its project, Balleteatro has produced cycles and festivals that have contributed to the dissemination and sharing of contemporary projects. Corpo + Cidade emerges from this pulse of life and art that can cross everyday life. In the Axa building - overlooking Avenida dos Aliados, the so-called heart of the city - the desire emerged to reflect this city, to contaminate it artistically, projecting dancing bodies and image-makers, erasing the line between audience and performer.
We idealised entering the everyday flow of passers-by and, in some way, making them slow down, provoke, rejoice and enjoy the dynamics and fluidity that is public space.

Looking at the Avenida and its movement from that space/house led to the creation of a Festival for the public space. Corpo + Cidade set out to participate in the reinvention of the city, making new urban experiences possible by crossing contemporary dance, urban dance, performance, contemporary circus, music and the visual arts.

In 2016, Corpo + Cidade joined forces with DDD - Festival Dias da Dança, presenting its programming proposals for public spaces at this major international contemporary dance festival, organised by the Performing Arts Department of Ágora - Cultura esporto E.M., Porto City Council, co-organised by Matosinhos City Council and Gaia City Council. From Avenida dos Aliados, where proposals by Ricardo Ambrósio or Ana Ulisses were activated, other places branched out: outside the metro and train stations with Joana Von Mayer Trindade; Carregal Garden with Gabriela Vaz Pinheiro; Morro Garden (Vila Nova de Gaia) with Bruno Senune, Sara Marques & Alice Bonazzi or Lígia Soares; São Lázaro Garden with Pedro Prazeres; Crystal Palace Gardens with Charlotte Spencer; D. João I Square with Isabel Barros & V. Bonazzi or Lígia Soares. João I Square with Isabel Barros & Vítor Rua, Momentum Crew or La Horde; and the Casa da Arquitetura (Matosinhos) with Jean Baptiste-André, as well as other no less challenging spaces and so many other artists who offered the public multiple and fascinating proposals.

Corpo + Cidade has so far also inhabited places less exposed to the indoor/outdoor relationship, whenever the proposals aimed to debate and discuss 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 his conference entitled O lugar do Corpo. There was also room for stage proposals - these were rarer - which in some way reflected and took the street and its lively dances as a basis for thought and exploration, as was the case with Bouziane Bouteldja's piece. In 2019, almost like a premonition, Daniel Pinheiro and Lisa Parra, with Mediated Motion/Land Project, broke down the barriers of physical distance, nurturing a presentation that made use of the online.
In 2020, Body + City was cancelled due to the pandemic context. In 2021, still due to issues associated with the pandemic, all the projects breathed in the open air, maintaining the concept of creations in public space, but the transmission took place in this sphere so present in our lives: the Internet. Ana Renata Polónia and Marta Ramos, for example, gave us a view of the sea from the Matosinhos Marginal. 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 aims to be a meeting 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 what we so respectfully and dedicatedly call Art. The essence of Corpo + Cidade, performance in public space, returns in the 2024 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 this experience of participation and living in the city.