1 to 9 Dec 2025
creative residency
Performative Arts Centre of Algarve CAPa
a luminosa violência da perfeição
Daniel Matos / CAMA a.c
Portugal
artistic direction, choreography and plastic conception Daniel Matos
co.creation and interpretation Lia Vohlgemuth, Joana Simões and 4 performers to be defined in audition
artistic collaboration, photography and video João Catarino
artistic consultancy Beatriz Marques Dias
original music Through Pavane pour un Infant Defunte, by Maurice Ravel Joana Guerra
light design Letícia Scrycky
technical direction Ana Carocinho production direction Joana Flor Duarte production coordination Diana Martins communication & press officer this is ground control
co. production Teatro das Figuras, Centro Cultural Vila Flor, Cine-Teatro de Torres Vedras and Municipality of Lagos
residency of co.production O Espaço do Tempo Support GrandStudio Brussels -Materiais Diversos, Trois C-L Luxembourg, Estúdios Victor Cordon, CineTeatro Louletano, CAPA Devir, Teatro Experimental de Lagos, LAC – Laboratório de Atividades Criativas, casaBranca associação cultural, O Rumo do Fumo e CAMADA Centro Coreográfico production CAMA a.c.
What do a basketball game, a cavalry and the body of youth have in common? To be as honest as possible, I don’t know either, but these are the first three images that come to mind when I hear Maurice Ravel’s “Pavana for a Deceased Infanta”. A pavane is a slow dance, associated with a procession of processional and melancholic characteristics, with a heaviness and slowness that I feel carries a hidden speed. The truth that I find in this time-consuming transportation of a body tells me that it is trying to delay the burial of youth as long as possible. Perhaps because I realize that I’ve left things behind, or because I feel that I haven’t lived a slow adolescence that should be eternal, I now find refuge in this time of the pavane to generate an endless, uncontrollable choreography. A fugacity that never slows down from the beginning to the end of this procession, thus questioning what the durability of the absence of pause really is, using time at its maximum exponential. Can a body dribble itself in the field? Can wild horses and mares gallop backwards as an escape from a destructive future?
I think it’s time to breathe less and sweat more.
In this piece for 6 performers, a basketball team and a small local orchestra, the choreographer intends to understand Artaud’s plague as a work space, where escape and insistence serve as a stimulus for the development of the idea of a mutable collective, by bodies that have already been more loss than conquest. We’re looking for an object that works on vectors of fast, precise dynamics, in which wear and tear brings out the honest time of each individual person, thus generating processions alone in which we can carry everything we never wanted to see: time passing and the body disappearing. A largely melodious space is sought, which contrasts with the visual truth that is offered on stage, in this attempt to compose a pavane for the 21st century.
Life like the plague and youth like the mountain. And we go to the top of the mountain not to enter, but to get out of ourselves, to let the horses and mares run free, towards the death or purification that never returns.