Impressions from Festival Dias da Dança I

Taking place in Porto between 8–19 April 2026 in its tenth edition, Festival Dias da Dança (DDD) presented audiences with an extensive programme embracing the expanded choreography approach. In the first piece of our series examining this year’s edition of the festival, we reflect on the relationship between the body, resistance, community and memory through the performances of Candela Capitán and Piny

Words: Dila Yumurtacı

The Festival Dias da Dança (DDD) celebrated its 10th anniversary this year from April 8-19 in Porto, hosting contemporary dance performances. Having followed DDD regularly for the past three years, it presents a phenomenal selection each year centered around expanded choreography*, driven by a curatorial approach that aims to build a bridge between established international choreographers and emerging local voices. The program is meticulously constructed each year to reflect contemporary social fractures, ecological concerns, and the decolonial shift in the arts. With its structure spilling into different parts of the city, historical venues, and the public sphere, the festival strengthens and expands a sense of community every year, not just among dancers, but for all dance enthusiasts. On this occasion, I would like to share my impressions of DDD through a three-part article series based on the performances I attended during the festival.

Bodies in resistance: The Death at the Club and a.travessa.de

Candela Capitán, The Death at the Club. © DR

I have been following Candela Capitán on social media for over a decade; witnessing her transformation from a digitally savvy creator into a provocative force in European performance art. The young Seville-born choreographer consistently continues to explore the concepts of social exhaustion and the hyper-productivity of the modern era through the body. On the opening day of the festival, within the historic walls of the Coliseu building, I was excited to experience the performance The Death at the Club. Knowing there are different versions of the performance -male, female, and solo- I set out to watch the edition presented that day, featuring seven male dancers.

The performance began with the seven men standing in statuesque silence for an extended period. Following an almost unnerving, long wait that started with the grandeur of classical music, a driving techno beat kicked in, and the dancers, one by one, began performing somersaults in a repetitive cycle.

These endless somersaults recalled the myth of Sisyphus. Transforming into a modern version of rolling the boulder uphill, the somersault served as a physically exhausting, punishing, and endless task. I thought this struggle reflected the absurdity of existence. As a spectator, while feeling the floor I sat on vibrate with the techno beat, I sensed that the nightclub environment -normally synonymous with liberation- had been transformed here into a space of exhaustion.

Candela Capitán, The Death at the Club. © DR

A profound sense of social isolation dominated the choreography. Capitán had pushed aside traditional stage setups in favor of a clinical, white square floor. Despite sharing the same area, the performers made no eye contact with each other or the audience. This reminded me of those lonely moments in nightclubs where individuals are swallowed by the collective sound yet trapped in their own internal endurance tests. While this space might seem uncanny to some, for me, it represented a meditative space where I could focus on the vibrations of dance in the body and stay alone with myself. Even when a body was exhausted to the point of collapsing, it eventually returned to the rhythm driven by an invisible, mechanical necessity.

From a choreographic perspective, the work felt less like a dance and more like a conceptual embodiment of “human as material.” As the performance progressed, the physical toll exacted on the body became the primary visual language. The reddening of the performers' skin and their heavy breathing transformed the human body into “undefinable flesh.” This transition from person to raw material felt like these bodies were the remnants of aggression, war, and an unwinnable struggle. It was undeniable that the performers were flawlessly prepared both physically and mentally, yet the execution of the idea left me feeling dissatisfied. The choreography was limited by its own conceptual weight. Even though the boundaries between dance and performance art were blurred, I found myself searching for a development or change that never arrived. In this sense, The Death at the Club left the audience with the discomfort of witnessing pure, unadorned effort through an uncanny display of the body's limits. I look forward to seeing how Capitán will continue to push these limits in her future works

Piny, a.travessa.de. © Pedro Jafuno

I was highly excited to watch the performance a.travessa.de -which translates to “alleyway” or “narrow street” by Piny, whom I have been following since my first year moving to Portugal. As the child of an Angolan immigrant family born in Lisbon, who explores her own roots and has experienced colonization from a personal place, PINY frequently voices the importance of creating community. She is a figure who knows that this knowledge lives within the community, and who researches, speaks, and illuminates this space to build an archive.

My first encounter with Piny and her partner, dancer/DJ Leo Soulflow, took place during the Party Studies summer school organized by my university in my first year in Porto for my PhD. It was an international event where various artists gathered around the unifying power of dance and music as tools of resistance, featuring talks, workshops, and performances. She was an activist who knew and witnessed that dance emerged independently of institutions from different cultures and minorities, flourished in the streets, and stayed alive through communities, fighting for these communities to be valued. Through the lectures she prepared on the origins of dance styles like disco, house, hip-hop, and vogue, the documentaries she shared, and by animating the space through movement with the fellow dancers she invited, she reminded us all of the collective spirit. She reminded us that pure joy is the most powerful weapon against the soul-crushing, body-enslaving aspects of today's capitalist society.

Piny, a.travessa.de. © Pedro Jafuno

Her latest performance, a.travessa.de, emerged similarly around these themes. In the small stage of the Campo Alegre theater, a space used as a black box, Piny was reviving clubbing culture through DJ Leo Soulflow's beats, colorful neon lights, and her dancing body lost in the rhythm of the music. Believing in the pure power of dance, I, like all the spectators, thought the performance would proceed and end just like that, surrendering myself to the music and dance. At that moment, Piny took the microphone and began talking to the audience. While speaking about her grandmother, her mother, previous generations, and ancestors in the video projected on the wall, she was simultaneously reciting Portuguese poetry into the microphone and sharing personal stories. By including English subtitles in the video, she explained how her family migrated to Portugal and where dance stands in her life, while creating a fusion with movements from different dance styles like oriental, hip-hop, house, and kuduro. The message she delivered in the performance was quite clear: the commonality among women, and indeed all humans, is that bodies carry lived experiences, and this knowledge is passed down from generation to generation through the body. In a world where bodily knowledge is devalued and forgotten under the hegemony of Western society, Piny reminded us of how these connections, from the personal to the collective, serve as a powerful tool of resistance.

My eyes welled up with tears many times throughout the performance. While the images and information in the video continued, Leo's beats and Piny's dance proceeded in interaction with the audience. Natural and sincere, without hierarchy, it felt as though we had all created a moment in an intimate space, opening our private selves to one another. The artist's willingness to present herself so vulnerably was perhaps the most valuable approach to me, and one I emulate as an artist myself. Sharing what makes her dance, taking dance beyond mere entertainment, spectacle, or even an artistic search for meaning, added another layer of depth to her creations. I didn't want the performance to end; despite the heavy content, it felt light. 

At the end of the performance, she proposed a short sharing session for those who wished to stay. I joined the conversation in Portuguese, and I was happy that I could finally understand the language. I listened to the questions and comments of the audience with curiosity and respect for the presence of different cultures in Portugal. I felt as if we had all made a silent agreement through our belief in the transformative power of dance and the value we place on it. On my way out, I picked up the fanzine Piny had prepared, re-read some of the quotes she used during the performance, and examined the dance map featuring different street and club dance styles. Throughout the festival, I will continue to observe what resistance means in this and other performances.

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*Expanded choreography draws its origins from Rosalind Krauss’s 1979 theory “sculpture in the expanded field,” taking dance out of being a discipline limited solely to the human body and defining choreography as a form of organization constructed across any medium. William Forsythe, one of the most prominent advocates of this approach, treated choreography as a “structure of thought” independent of the body; through his concept of “choreographic objects,” he proved that movement can also be constructed through objects, space, and concepts. Thus, choreography goes beyond traditional sequences of steps to become an interdisciplinary installation, a social practice, or an exploration of spatial memory.