TERRITORY is a programme dedicated to young dancers aged between 14 and 18, from dance schools across the country. During a month of rehearsals, those selected will engage directly with the artistic language of two choreographers, as they prepare a restaged piece and a new creation.
Over the course of its various seasons, the programme has welcomed more than 100 young people from across the country, from around 40 dance schools; they have worked with choreographers such as Douglas Lee, Filipe Portugal, Alexander Ekman, Maurice Causey, Marco Goecke, Iratxe Ansa & Igor Bacovich, Wayne McGregor, Shahar Binyamini, Marcos Morau, Dorotea Saykaly, Sol León & Paul Lightfoot, Akram Khan, Jermaine Spivey and Nadav Zelner.
In its 9th edition, the programme welcomes choreographer Wayne McGregor with a restaging of FAR (excerpt), and choreographer Liliana Barros with a new creation, RHIZOME.
Wayne McGregor is a British choreographer renowned for fusing contemporary dance, science and technology. His work views the body as a field of experimentation, exploring highly physical movements, extreme precision and an unconventional choreographic vocabulary. Collaborating frequently with digital artists, cognitive scientists, composers and designers, McGregor creates works that challenge the boundaries of perception and form, situating dance within issues of identity and memory.
Liliana Barros is a Berlin-based Portuguese choreographer and performer whose work stands out for its strong visual component and highly stylised movement vocabulary. Her creations explore hybrid worlds straddling the organic and the artificial, combining technical rigour, theatricality and an aesthetic characterised by meticulous attention to detail in gesture. Through intense sensory environments, Barros constructs choreographies that investigate bodily states in metamorphosis or at their limits.
This edition also features a short film screened between each piece, directed by Filipe Faria, winner of the Território | Estúdios Victor Córdon Award in the Best National Director category at InShadow — Lisbon Screendance Festival 2025.
The Millennium bcp Foundation is the patron of the Territory IX Programme.
17 and 18 JUL 2026 / 9PM, 7PM — [PREMIERE] Teatro Nacional São João (Porto) / Tickets on sale at BOL.
22 and 23 JUL 2026 / 10PM — Millennium Festival ao Largo - CCB (Lisbon) / Free admission.
25 JUL 2026 / 9:30PM — Teatro Aveirense (Aveiro) / Tickets on sale at Ticketline.
FULL PROGRAMME
FAR (excerpt)
With FAR, Wayne McGregor embarks on a fascinating creative journey, starting from a process of radical cognitive inquiry. Inspired by the controversial Age of Enlightenment and the first encyclopaedia by the 18th-century French philosopher Denis Diderot, the resulting choreography is at once physical and immediate, yet also intensely intellectual.
Choreography Wayne McGregor - Studio Wayne McGregor
Music Ben Frost
Adaptation of the light design Cárin Geada
Transmission and Restaging Catarina Carvalho
Premiered in 2010 at Sadler’s Wells in London
RESPIRA
Movement has not taken shape yet. There is a room, bodies, pauses, waiting times, repetitions, hesitations, breaths, noises, objects, small, almost imperceptible transformations. A notebook of observations centred on traces, latencies and suspensions: that which comes before or after the visible or audible event, that which wavers, breathes or is almost lost before taking shape. Listening as a form of presence. Editing as an approach to the invisible matter that remains in the space before, during and after movement.
Director and Photography Filipe Faria (Winner of the Territory Award | Estúdios Victor Córdon at InShadow — LisbonScreendance Festival 2025)
Music Filipe Faria, Sete Lágrimas [in Requiem (after K. 626) 2026]
Assistance Rita Santos, Luís Sequeira
Production Arte das Musas
RHIZOME
Inspired by the rhizomatic structures of mycelia and biological models of organisation, this piece explores the body as a living architecture in constant transformation. Through branching, aggregation and cooperation, bodies form hybrid organisms, where the boundaries between the individual and the collective, the human and the non-human, the body and the environment dissolve.
Like an underground network expanding in the darkness, the choreographic material emerges from the circulation of impulses and interdependent relationships, giving rise to unstable, mutating and unpredictable forms. The piece presents a moving ecosystem, where each gesture is a connecting point within a distributed intelligence that crosses bodies, spaces and different times.
Choreography and Costume design Liliana Barros
Music
- "Crabe", Thomas Vaquié (Ecume, 2016)
- "Forêt blanche", Thomas Vaquié (Ecume, 2016)
- "Mechanicus", Louis Frere-Harvey (Collection 001, 2021)
- "Darwin's Finches", Resina (Speechless, 2021)