Mnemónica

Part of an international film festival on archives, memory and ethnography, the Family Film Project, this event aims to challenge artists and theorists to explore performativity based on material or concepts from personal or third-party archives. As intimacies and familiarities are problematised, creative possibilities are projected that cross disciplines and boundaries, reinforcing, within the festival event, the fine line between real life and fiction. The archive is not created by a subject of knowledge, but rather in the multiple webs between cultural, social, political, economic, subjective and historical practices. The archive also informs this transformation, and the models adopted, once identified, add further meaning. Narrative and fiction intertwine because the plot is dense and resists reading.  At the same time that performance affirms its radical ephemerality, there is a growing demand to document and archive its practices in the name of performance research and historiography. Private Collection will, however, question the relationship between performance and the archive. This relationship may include the role of performance in archive culture and the role of the archive in conceptualisations of performance; the future of performance and the archive in the digital age; the role of the document in performance research; and the archiving practices of performers.  

Image credits: Carolina Ribeiro

Corpo + Cidade was born in 2014, the year in which 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 that separates the audience and the performer. 

Créditos da Imagem: Susana Neves 

This piece, in the style of a choreodrama, revisits the body as and in the landscape, something that runs through much of my work, to conjure up extreme and radical images of a foreseeable future catastrophe. It is also the landscape on the verge of transformation that interests us, particularly in the radicalism of catastrophes and the apocalyptic. In Lastro (2015), under a strange sky, bodies occupied a place, generating their routine and their connections. In this choreographic piece, the movements of the bodies, together with the scenic device, created the theatrical space: a place in flux, a place made of memory. In Esta hora de espanto, some of these notions are once again materialised through the body and the text, a fiction written by Tiago Mesquita Carvalho. Based on images of catastrophes, the questions of the body and its limits, of figuration and disfigurement in dance, are revisited. Fear, a vain understanding of things, unpredictability, the radical nature of catastrophes, hang over this tale where the characters reveal and destroy themselves.

Né Barros

Image credits: José Caldeira

Extemporânea is a project organised by Balleteatro, curated collaboratively by Flávio Rodrigues, Isabel Barros, Jorge Gonçalves and Né Barros. The third edition of Extemporânea took place on 5 July 2025 with a temporary occupation of several commercial areas in the Cedofeita Shopping Centre. The heterogeneity and marginality present in this shopping centre indicate the paradigm shifts in retail trade in the urban fabric of the city of Porto, and here they make up a series of socio-economic dynamics that configure different scales of proximity in the ways of receiving and exhibiting artistic proposals. Anna Effe, Beatriz Albuquerque, Cristina Mateus, Júlio Cerdeira and José Alberto Gomes are the artists invited to design performative activations and installations for various shops, galleries, shop windows and displays, in which they equate the transparency and materiality of these commercial exhibition devices with their speculative nature and the transaction of the value of artistic work.

Image credits: Susana Neves