Collaboration with Jan Michálek (saxophone) and Inês Sales (movement), commissioned by Arte das Musas, as part of the Casa Comum series. The project was realised in Idanha-a-Nova, Portugal, between February and March 2024.

After exploring the area around Idanha-a-Nova and getting in contact with its history, memory and cultural identity, we worked on what we experienced and how, experimenting playfully with improvisation and the limits of our respective media (piano, saxophone/violin, movement), which finally led to this 45-minute performance.

The performance emerges from a stay in the rural north-east of Portugal, where we experienced a close contact with the characteristics of the local territory and population. The intense stimulation from specific places, encounters and the natural environment triggered especially our sensitive, fragile and vulnerable core, which we found woven into an enigmatic web of internal, external and interdependent relationships. The conscious will to look deeper into these dynamics gave rise to the creative inventiveness of this work and, by contrast, called its naturalness – and thus its purpose – into question.
The result is a playful, experimental and animalistic approach, in which our roles as performers are constantly redefined through both intentional and unintentional actions that shift the conventionality of our respective means. This movement leads to a delicate, accurately interwoven, blurred composition, without focusing on a final or “polished” state. For us, the fragile vulnerability that appears here is fundamental for the understanding and witnessing of honest creative expression. Lastly, the project points at the incapacity to grasp Nature’s essence and to the therefore necessary genuine, “uncategorical” devotion to the Other.

– October 2024

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Photo by Filipe Faria/Rita Santos