Impressions from Festival Dias da Dança II

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 second 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

Following the exploration of bodily resistance and community in the first part of this series, the performances I witnessed at the Porto Dance Festival have expanded this state of “resistance” from urban terrains to the struggle against gravity, and even to the deepest illusions of our perception.

I first encountered Chiara Bartl-Salvi’s performance Heat Island on my Instagram feed; shoes striking fire from the ground and the momentary, flickering visuals of sparks appearing with every friction… In my mind, fragmented images resembling tap dance remained, like a reflection of social media’s “fast-consumed,” TikTok-esque viral moments. Watching the performance live at the Festival Dias de Dança, this momentary visuality was replaced by a much rawer and more permanent physical existence. Inside a small white square on the stage, three bodies with their backs turned evoked a sense of deep friendship through hands touching each other's shoulders, while the hum of the city accompanied their simultaneous steps.

The choreographer’s preference for the everyday sounds of the city instead of music was more than a coincidental aesthetic choice. In my own choreographic processes, I often try to understand the point of origin for movement: does the movement come first, or the music? Sometimes a specific situation moves me, and sometimes music provides this state. However, this performance proved once again that music is not a “must-have” for dance; I felt the depth of raw movement within the silence. When the harmony of the dancers' steps merged with the noise of sirens and distant crickets, the complex yet familiar side of the city came to life.

Heat Island. Photo: Paola Lesslhumer

While Heat Island referred to the phenomenon of cities being much warmer than the countryside due to concrete construction, it also addressed the ecological ruptures created by urbanity. In this modern reality where our lands are sealed with asphalt, the artist touched upon the “third spaces” defined by Ray Oldenburg. Beyond the home (first space) and work/school (second space), third spaces represent public areas (parks, playgrounds) where people gather freely and hierarchy diminishes. By staging third spaces like playgrounds, Chiara was redefining them not just as places to spend "leisure time," but as areas of social resistance and production. Playgrounds or squares, in the hands of the artist, became not just display venues but laboratories where urban temporality and social contact are tested.

The dancers transforming the asphalt they scraped with their feet into a playground through sound and light softened the harshness of the city with a creative act. Opening up space for the artists to freely watch one another during solo sections that spilled outside the white square made it feel as though the project filtered through a natural environment of community and friendship. This collective spirit stood as a stance against urban loneliness.

Hornfuckers. Photo: Alípio Padilha

Radical decisions -such as the choreographer directing the light entirely toward the audience, leaving the stage in darkness, or animating the rhythm solely with sparks in pitch blackness- kept the audience’s attention active by pulling them out of their comfort zone. From Chiara’s pandemic-era work What else can we do but play?, where she turned the public space into a stage, to today, I can say that this journey of filtering urbanity through a critical lens has matured significantly with Heat Island. The performance reminded us, on the sealed grounds of the city, that playing is not just about friction and transformation, but a vital form of resistance.

While Chiara’s performance focused us on the sealed grounds of the city and the social contact within them, Diana Niepce, with Hornfuckers, turned our gaze in the exact opposite direction: toward a vertical universe where the ground is completely ignored and gravity itself becomes a zone of conflict. The performance was built upon a powerful stage and sound design that immediately dominated the space. Everything began in the darkness, amidst a dense cloud of fog, with bodies suspended in mid-air. Movement first sprouted almost imperceptibly in the limbs and then spread to the whole body. These forms, floating and arching backward in the air, created a poetic atmosphere of their own in the midst of the void.

In the center of the stage, a massive, rectangular, industrial structure rose. The soundscape, fed by chains hanging from every corner and harsh noise elements, created a sharp dichotomy between this mechanical architecture and human flesh. Sudden explosion sounds, evoking a heavy mass crashing to the ground in the mind, resonated in the soul of the audience. Just as we were immersed in the poetics of this visuality, these sounds -waking us with a jolt- were the signature of a choreographer who knows exactly how to manipulate the audience's attention.

The ground seemed like an unnecessary concept. The dancers continued to dance, suspended in a state of constant lightness. However, periodically, some bodies would suddenly slam into the floor. In a world design where the laws of physics were ignored, gravity reminded itself by striking the face of reality. Among these floating figures was a disabled dancer moving in fluid harmony with the collective. The impression arose that the entire movement vocabulary of the performance was created by internalizing this dancer’s movement structure; this created a deep balance and collective synergy that made it easy to focus entirely on the stage composition.

Throughout the performance, two individuals entered at intervals to pull chains and gradually bring this massive structure to a vertical position. As the incline steepened and the pull of gravity intensified, the dancers challenged this surface with their bodies, seeking new ways to hold on by falling each time. This scene evoked a poignant thought: perhaps we come into this life most of all to “learn how to fall.” How much could we really escape the fall? Though we crave for everything to be light and effortless, does the essence of the human experience often find meaning in the reactions our bodies give to these inevitable falls?

The lightness of those suspended bodies at the beginning transformed into a grueling struggle against a gravity that grew heavier as the minutes passed. Yet, refusing to surrender to this incline, the performers experienced a high energy burst that swept the stage in a state of collective frenzy toward the end. The rhythm and tension increasing in the final moments turned the area into a kind of battlefield. In this arena where aggression and speed reached their peak, arms and legs flew through the air as if scattered after an explosion.

When I thought about what remained after the curtain closed, I realized the success of the sound design was vital; this continuity allowed me to feel the visual experience sensorially in my own body. Niepce’s success lies in her compositional precision in orchestrating such a large-scale production. Although the work does not offer a radical form aesthetically, it was one of the standout performances of the festival as a powerful, ambitious, and impressive production in terms of the application of its idea to the stage. Following Niepce’s raw approach, which turned the stage into a gravity laboratory and pushed the physical limits of the body, Catarina Miranda invited us into a much more metaphorical, illusion-filled, and philosophical depth -the world of FΛRSΛ, where the body is re-envisioned as a skin or a shadow.

FΛRSΛ. Photo: José Caldeira

Catarina Miranda is one of the important names in Portuguese dance; every time I watch her, I am convinced of this once more. As a choreographer, she does not only deal with the body but approaches the stage as a whole, researching and establishing the body’s relationship with sound, light, and material in detail. I felt great excitement when I heard that FΛRSΛ, one of Miranda’s past performances, would be shown again on the Porto stage as part of the DDD. After watching her latest work ЯΛ́ЯΛ, which premiered last November and draws inspiration from the pagan mask traditions of Portugal and Galicia, experiencing FΛRSΛ meant getting to know Miranda’s complex world of thought and her courage to open herself to the unknown in every project.

FΛRSΛ is a work built on how we perceive reality, taking its foundations from Plato’s famous Allegory of the Cave, shuttling between illusion and truth. Its name is inspired by 19th-century optical illusion machines, while also prompting thoughts on absurdity, exaggeration, and a kind of social comedy, parallel to the concept of “farce” in Turkish. The soundscape, designed by Miranda’s long-term collaborator Jonathan Saldanha and inspired by Stravinsky’s The Rite of Spring, carries the atmosphere on stage to an uncanny dimension.

The performance began with a mysterious slit in a massive surface that covered the stage and resembled human skin. While this surface, supported by a powerful light design, moved slowly, a giant nipple appeared before us. The tension between this slit and the nipple became so strong through the effect of light and sound that, while watching, I felt my own skin transform into that surface, as if all of humanity would be born from this slit, gliding toward the unknown.

In an interview, Miranda states that this giant nipple on stage is actually “farsa” (the absurdity) itself. She constructed this symbol as a reference to censorship mechanisms on social media and the ethical control tools of modern society. This paradox -established through the acceptance of the male nipple while the female nipple is forbidden- is brought to the stage by merging with the metaphor of the “giant nipple that kills people” from Woody Allen’s film Everything You Always Wanted to Know About Sex But Were Afraid to Ask. This absurd yet striking image strikes our faces like a slap, asking who decides what is right or wrong.

FΛRSΛ. Photo: José Caldeira

The bodies of the dancers gliding through the shadows offer an aesthetic feast reminiscent of science fiction films, at times frightening but equally fascinating. This metaphorical narration, which contains emotions pertaining to the essence of us all beyond being human, reaches its peak with a two-faced character appearing at the end. This visual was so powerful that I am sure it will not be erased from my mind for a long time.

FΛRSΛ is as much a product of strong teamwork as it is one of those rare works that traps the audience inside the fascinating world it creates without being crushed under the weight of philosophical references. It is extremely valuable to question the distorted relationship we establish with knowledge in modern society through a dance that goes beyond what we perceive with our senses. Catarina Miranda peels away the masks and illusions created by culture throughout human history one by one, leaving us alone with our own truth in that dark cave.

These three different journeys I experienced within the festival -stretching from Chiara’s urban playgrounds to Niepce’s vertical struggle, and from there to Miranda’s philosophical cave- actually pursue a single common question: What tools does the body cling to in order to transcend the boundaries of the space it inhabits? Whether through the noise of the city, a steel chain, or an optical illusion, these performances prove to us once again that the body is not just a moving form; rather, it is the most fundamental “truth” that resists, falls, questions, and ultimately creates its own reality.