BOWING Rehearsals 
September 25, 2021 The first rehearsals for the BOWING performance
Related memories
Adolescents and children
Sitting on carpets in the São Teotónio Parish Council hall, familiar faces are ready for what they don't yet know. There are football teams and badminton pairs. Globes pass from hand to hand. 'We are playing with the world, and this is what humanity is doing'. The boys try a football dance, but their legs are too accustomed to competition. Time is a worry. The teenagers say: There is not enough time to rehearse. Abhijot films everything. The girls dance in a circle - the ring dance - moving between east and west in a female alliance. Arshpreet and Barbara create tension with the two globes, letting the force of gravity act. We want something more than the game. We want something from the game: the fall of walls and borders.
Women
There was a table discussion between Mandeep, from Punjab, Sathyia, from South India, another woman from Bangladesh, and us, from Portugal. The three women were thinkers, critical, and ready for dialogue. Others arrived and sat around them. We made cultural mistakes, mixing references from very different places. The women corrected us: 'I don't know that language, she does! My culture has nothing to do with that. There are huge cultural distances between the people we work with, and between them, there are also other distances. This play has rich movements of differences and similarities: the profound gesture and the path in-between that facilitates the encounter. Sathyia, with her four-year-old daughter, sat and discussed the differences between Punjab and South India with Mandeep. In those differences, they found complicity. Sathyia will be with Mandeep in the Curry Kingdom, explaining recipes, ingredients, and culinary stories from her place of origin and her grandmother.
Men
They all had a strong desire to dance but little Western rhythm and coordination. They tried hard, and each small step was an achievement they self-applauded. The energy dispersed and regrouped. Humour worked very well. Inês taught part of the sequence of a work by Israeli choreographer Hoffesh Shechter and, afterwards, a circle dance. In the end, Madalena changed the dynamic to a free and conscious exploration of movement rather than structured steps. Farouk is expressive and could be one of those speaking in Bengali on the balcony. In the end, Rajendra turned out to be the voice for all the migrants. The men from Bangladesh wanted to try out a dance from their country. We brought a traditional dance with bamboo to experiment together. The familiarity and joy it produced created an authentic choreographic laboratory with many creative solutions.
