At Home is a project designed for dance artists, inviting them to develop their work throughout the year at the EVC. Having welcomed Miguel Moreira, João dos Santos Martins, Jonas & Lander, Marlene Monteiro Freitas, Teresa Silva and Victor Hugo Pontes in previous years, we now invite Sofia Dias and Vítor Roriz into the various spaces of the EVC with their installations and performative projects: Arrumar a casa ["Putting the House in Order"], Da desordem das paixões ["On the Disarray of the Passions"], Labirinto ["Labyrinth"], À distância de um braço ["Within Arm’s Reach"], and Dueto ["Duet"].
Once “at home”, we will start with some housekeeping—sorting out our archive of nearly 20 years, which urgently needs to be reviewed and organized. MiniDV cassettes, DVDs, CDs, program notes, handouts, posters, notebooks, hard drives, pen drives… materials of all kinds that were scattered around our house and which we are now bringing to the EVC, finally deciding what to preserve and what to discard. But there’s more to this project, ARRUMAR A CASA, than housekeeping. Along with the intense work on our archive, we will try to share some bits from our rediscovery of it as we infiltrate the spaces of the EVC in an ever-changing way. Don’t be surprised, then, if throughout the next months you come across some videos, photographs, sounds, or texts in the nooks and crannies of the EVC. Later, in June, during the Popular Saints’ Festivals, we will organize an event with an installation now in plain view, and we will share with you the results of a research laboratory focused on various performative devices and/or materials from some of our performances.
As we look back at our past as a duo, we are also turning our gaze to our collective past through four projects to be developed over the course of the year. Two of these projects, albeit developed with different collaborators, share a focus on the Baroque, specifically on the connection between dance and music that characterizes this period. The first one, **DA DESORDEM DAS PAIXÕES”, will be co-created with the music group Músicos do Tejo, and will premiere in 2026. LABIRINTO ["Labyrinth"], a typical metaphor in the Baroque period, is the title of the second project, with no premiere date yet, but born from a desire to experiment with musicians Helena Raposo (lute) and Ana Castanhito (harp). The two other projects are not focused on the Baroque, yet they aim to further the reflection about the past in connection with museum spaces. The third one, À DISTÂNCIA DE UM BRAÇO, has been shelved for at least three years, and we are finally able to resume it through a partnership with Museu Nacional de Arte Antiga. With this project, we aim to challenge the settled way of looking at works of art in a museum by creating a performance that seeks to shorten the distance between the “past” that is presented and the spectator’s “present”.
All these projects will include periods of rehearsal and research at the EVC, and, in some of them, we will open to the public to share materials, reflections, or simply to exchange views on the state of the world.
Lastly, we will move on to the creation of a DUETO. Our last duet for the stage, O que não acontece, was created in 2018, and we already miss being alone together in a studio. The duet is the artistic form through which we come together, in which we come closer to who we are, closer to our path in shaping our identity as artists and to our collaboration throughout the last 20 years. It is in this format that we allow ourselves to share with the audience what is most intimate and contradictory about us. So, we will lock ourselves in one of the EVC studios doing what we love most, in order to share it with you afterwards. — Sofia & Vítor
