BOWING (Performance)
We have arrived to the East in Alentejo. These words are the entrance which offers glimpses of India, Nepal, Bangladesh and other Asian cultures that inhabit the streets of São Teotónio. BOWING is a gift in the shape of a performance, which we offer while practising an economy that we believe in, receiving the audience with dance, music, words and images. Here, we map the journey through the continents of Hospitality, Gravity and Incomprehension, where we will try to host a true encounter. Welcome to the East that breathes along these streets.
BOWING performance in the town of São Teotónio November 12, 13 and 14, 2022
Related memories
MEDITATION CENTRE
Meet, a 15-year-old Indian boy who lives with his sister Maitri and his parents in Almograve, both from Gujrat, explains that meditation has three essential ingredients: focus, practice and peace. These instructions take our bodies in a collective meditation marked by the seven strokes of the church bell in São Teotónio. The gestures invoke Indian mudras, Portuguese prayers, and all the mysterious symbols in between, separating us and bringing us closer. We echo the words of the philosopher João Maria André, which also float around this town, asking the gods for the encounter to go well in a place where "we are all foreigners, symbols of one another, belonging to everyone and no one".
CURRY KINGDOM
Mandeep is a woman of the Sikh religion who departed from Punjab and arrived at Boavista dos Pinheiros. Sathyia, from the South of India, lives with her daughter and husband in Odemira and cooks dishes from her region every Wednesday in São Luís do Alentejo. In this Curry Kingdom, Sathyia and Mandeep share their cultures through food, where passageways are opened across dancing walls to a place of flavours.
CONFRONTATION BALCONY
Rajendra comes from Nepal. He receives the public from a balcony of a large house in São Teotónio, and a group of Asian youngsters accompanies him. With his magnetism, he captures everyone's astonished gazes. In Hindi, he raises his voice, sharing the truth that 13000 migrants in this region experience every day, claiming the right to other forms of coexistence. "Come closer. Listen, I have important things to tell you. This is our new history. Atithi Devo Bhava."
HOSPITALITY SQUARE
Laxmi, a Nepalese girl from Uralabari and a student in Odemira, wrote in a poem: "We are all under the same sky". We join her words to those of Richard Kearny, an Irish philosopher of Hospitality, and draw an enormous flower on the floor of a square, somewhere between a Western compass and an oriental mandala, which will give us instructions to cross foreign lands: the home of gods, monsters and strangers who also inhabit us. A trio of women unfolds a dance on the chalk-painted floor between word and action.
FAMILY VICTORIES
A collection of portraits where the new families of Alentejo welcome us in the fields in front of their homes, rewriting the story of these plains, these trees and hilltops. Many arrive alone from the East, but the families we see here successfully stayed together while crossing the world. Everyone leaves for a reason; everyone arrives with a purpose, a dream for the future.
GATE
An entrance door in the shape of a dance. A solo where the East and the West cross in the body of a female dancer. Movement is born on top of an altar that was used as the well from where the town's water emerged. The sound announces a fluid gateway to another space, Elsa's garden. Elsa was a girl from São Teotónio who escaped life and left a forest behind with her name, which we also named the Forest of Incomprehension.
FOREST
Masters, who are children, will fill the ears and hands of the audience with the incomprehensible languages of their countries. Through cinema, these distant territories are projected on picnic tables, and we visit the landscapes and atmospheres of Eastern cities. When the images penetrate the skin of three dancers who step onto the tables as if they were a stage, dancing bodies emerge and offer us the beauty of incomprehension. In this forest are dark crossings, clearings made of music and feminine spaces of shadow, with dances that curl around the pine trees like wild snakes. Asia settles on earth walls that form our new temple with a turban ritual, surrounded by dreamlike images projected on the dresses of unknown princesses.
LAST STOP
On the open field of São Teotónio, where animals are usually sold in the agriculture fairs, we enter the final part of BOWING, a moment dedicated to gravity and acceleration. Taking an excerpt from Hofesh Shechter's dance piece, "Political Mother", we call to our bodies movements of work, game, and exhaustion that inscribe this town in the map of great global changes. São Teotónio is part of the world as it transforms with it. Migrations, greenhouses, strangers. Work that kills, work that saves, joy, despair, children's play. Magnetic dances between men and women that prevail around the world, in all the bodies, through the repetition of infinite tasks.
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
A very special acknowledgement to all the artists, writers and philosophers who accompanied us in BOWING and fed us with their art and their thoughts. Thank you to the Irish philosopher Richard Kearney, Indian painter Nainsukh, French philosopher Jacques Derrida, Portuguese philosopher João Maria André, Portuguese writer and journalist Alexandra Lucas Coelho, Indian author Viasa, Israeli choreographer Hofesh Shechter, Indian painter Manaku of Guler, American video artist Bill Viola, Spanish poet Juan Vicente Piqueras, Indian filmmaker Amit Dutta, French filmmaker Henri Cartier-Bresson, English poet Kate Tempest, French philosopher Simone Weill, Bengali poet Rabindranath Tagore, American choreographer Steve Paxton and Indian film director Satyajit Ray.
CREDITS
MADALENA VICTORINO AND ANDRÉ DUARTE Artistic direction AAYUSH KC, ABDUL HOQE, ABHIJOT SINGH, ABHINANDAN DAHAL, ADRIANA MATOS, AMRITA BUDHA, APEKSHYA LOHANI, ARSHPREET KAUR, BELOV THAPA, BIPASHA ISLAM, DANIEL WANG, GROUKAL KUMAR, GURSJAS SINGH, GURSANJPREET KAUR, HARMANDEEP SINGH, ISABELA ALEIXO, IVAN LOHANI, JAGJEET SINGH, JASMEEN KAUR, KULWINDER SINGH, LARA GODINHO, LAXMI KHADKA, MAITRI PATEL, MAMATA BK, MANDEEP KAUR, MEET PATEL, MILAN MAGAR, MUHAMMED ABU BOKOR, NAIMA NABIN, NEDZHLYA GEORGIEVA, NURUL AMIN, ONKAR SINGH, PEDRO SIMÕES, SAIFUR RAHMAN, SAIMA NABIN, SAIMON KANDEL, SATHIYA KRISHNAMURTI, SHAMEM AHMAD, SHAMIN AHMED, SIRAJ UDDIN, SNEHA MALLA, SYED RAHMAN, SUSHANT ADHIKARI, RANI PATHAK, TANCHHOMA LIMBU Co-creation Bowing Team: MATILDE REAL Word INÊS MELO SOUSA Dance PAVEL TAVARES Video MARTA COUTINHO Executive Production NATALIA LIS, THAIS JULIA Dance MARC PLANNELS, MÁRCIO PINTO, PEDRO SALVADOR, PRAMIN GHATANI, RAJENDRA SHIWAKOTI, RÉMI GALLET, VITÓRIA FARIA MÚSICA ELKA VICTORINO Choreographic Support BÁRBARA SOUSA E FRANCISCA POÇAS, ANDREIA COELHO, CATARINA BERTRAND, JOÃO PARREIRA, MANUEL RUIZ Special Guests JOAQUIM MADAÍL Lighting Design and Technical Direction