Impressions from Festival Dias da Dança III

The Festival Dias da Dança (DDD), which took place for its tenth edition in Porto between April 8–19, 2026, offered its audience a comprehensive program embracing an expanded choreography approach. In this third and final piece of our series examining this year's edition of the festival, we discuss softness as a form of resistance within the radical ecologies of the body, centering around Lisa Vereertbrugghen’s Anti-Patriarchal Slow Dancing and Brazilian choreographer Alice Ripoll’s Adorno

Words: Dila Yumurtacı

Across the performances of the Dias da Dança (DDD) festival in Porto, a deep thematic link stands out across the entirety of the program: living spaces where expanded forms of consciousness and ecologies meet. Looking at the diversity offered by the festival, contemporary choreographers present works that dismantle the rigid, consumerist structures of modern life. While these works offer alternative ways of existing within our bodies, they urge us to rethink our approach to space, sound, and one another through participatory proposals.

Belgian choreographer Lisa Vereertbrugghen's choreography titled Anti-Patriarchal Slow Dancing (later retitled Again Forever which can be found on her website) takes place in a former electricity factory. In past editions of the festival, the performances I watched in this space were works that were in dialogue with the venue and were open to experimentation. These areas, once used for mechanical power generation, have today evolved into cultural ecosystems hosting many art collectives or creative workspaces. These spaces are configured as a black box; the audience is greeted upon entry by dancers chatting among themselves. This atmospher, which feels remarkably ordinary, adopts a stance that views an approach that views the audience and the performer as one, blurring the line between the stage and the off-stage.

As the music begins to rise slowly, the dancers start to move one by one. Everything about the performance feels ordinary and soft. Beyond being slow, this softness has a tactile quality; it feels as though they are physically touching, massaging, and even caressing each of us in the audience. Throughout the performance, our nervous systems actively unwind, and our bodies arrive in the present moment.

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Anti-Patriarchal Slow Dancing. Photo: Lisa Vereertbrugghen

The relationships the dancers build both with themselves and with each other are rooted in transparency and intimacy; it is evident from their every demeanor that they find joy in movement. Without needing a grand story or narrative, watching their slow movements and gestures enveloped in softness offers a pure experience of beauty for the spectators. Spatially and kinesthetically, Anti-Patriarchal Slow Dancing reawakens within me sensations of past intimacy by beautiful moments in my own life within my body: the touch of a close friend, a brief moment of locked eyes, intimate instances shared with a lover... It feels as though I am experiencing a temporally expanded version of the sum of all these isolated and intimate moments. How else can I explain this state where time stretches so profoundly and dance remains a continuous, beautiful sensation? As author Sophie K. Rosa states in her book Radical Intimacy: “Our normative ways of relating fall short of meeting our intimate needs.” Vereertbrugghen's work steps precisely into this void.

Vereertbrugghen's concept of hardcore body politics examines the relationship between musical genres like hardcore techno, gabber, and jungle, and the bodies dancing to these rhythms. Reading the treatment of the body through social and economic power structures, the artist critically analyzes how it is managed, colonized, and valued, particularly within a patriarchal and hyper-modern societal framework. She reminds us that we inhabit colonized bodies driven by a relentless, exhaustion-driven culture of competition, monetization, and ruthless efficiency. In this paradigm, concepts like rest, play, and leisure are cast aside as forgotten values. In stark contrast to this, Anti-Patriarchal Slow Dancing recalls the intrinsic value of softness, touch, slowing down, and micro-gestures. Reclaiming these states, such works acquire a revolutionary quality by offering a path toward the emancipation of the body.

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Anti-Patriarchal Slow Dancing. Photo: Lisa Vereertbrugghen

In her choreographic approach based on hardcore techno exceeding 160 BPM, Lisa brings all these values to light counterintuitively, without applying any harshness to the stage. On the contrary, the extreme intensity of the music softens the bodies. High-speed rhythms shatter physical and mental structures, rendering the body soft, vulnerable, spongy, and hyper-receptive. While speed in modern society is synonymous with capitalist production, hardcore reclaims this extreme speed for the exact opposite purpose: a deliberate, non-productive expenditure of energy. It consumes the body and essentially "wastes" time to escape daily productivity demands. Within this space, sound transforms into an almost virtual touch; while the distorted sub-bass frequencies pierce the gut, sharp synths caress our skin. This condition evokes the idea of a post-human kinship where sound physically manipulates the body from the inside out.

I interpret Lisa’s approach as a somatic philosophy. This vision carries a strong reference to music critic Simon Reynolds' term "Hardcore Continuum," which he used to define the continuous evolution of British underground dance music. Merging with the deep bass obsession and rhythmic mutations of Jamaican sound system culture, this world rejects the hypnotic sway of traditional club environments. Instead, hardcore relies on breaks, ruptures, and complex staccato rhythms. These rhythmic frictions demand individual choices from the dancers—such as when to synchronize, when to pause, and when to break away—which Vereertbrugghen terms "dissonant togetherness." This anarchic and collective approach that resists uniformity moves me deeply. By opening up this space, hardcore rhythms facilitate a deeply meditative and liberating connection with the body. It proves that sometimes we need the heaviest frequencies to bring us back to our softest state.

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Adorno. Photo: Renato Mangolin

While Vereertbrugghen deconstructs the body through powerful sound frequencies and internal frictions, Brazilian choreographer Alice Ripoll externalizes this transformation in her performance Adorno. I attended Adorno, which made its world premiere in Porto, with no expectations, yet the moment I stepped into the hall, I was met with a striking sight: the entire rectangular stage was covered with thousands of black balloons of various sizes. The audience, seated on both sides of this "black mass," was instantly exposed to the pungent smell of latex and the friction sounds of the balloons. When fragments of human limbs slowly began to emerge and move from beneath the balloons, it felt as if a giant, non-human entity were coming to life.

This first section moves at a heavy pace. Bodies get lost inside the piles of balloons and re-emerge transformed—shifting from human to "the other"—serving as a powerful reminder of how we constantly reconstruct our identities. Adorno, which means ornament or embellishment in Portuguese, demonstrates in the performance how we restructure ourselves through trivial choices and small adornments, revealing how our ordinary choices can create a massive impact. Choreographer Ripoll builds an instinctual and physical environment out of ordinary materials to explore our outer layers.

A prominent figure in contemporary Brazilian dance hailing from Rio, Alice Ripoll establishes a link between these embellishments and the Rio Carnival, while thoroughly succeeding in moving beyond carnival aesthetics. What fascinated me most was how the dancers' individual differences manifested within the collective. Ripoll blends the kinetic virtuosity of street dance styles like Passinho and Kuduro with contemporary performance art; because each of the dancers, despite all their singularities, moves in a fluid totality throughout the performance, merging as if into a single body. The dynamism in the dancers' movements possesses a perfect balance between the precision of a mechanical machine and the harmony of an organic organism. Over time, they transform their initial contact with the balloons into a direct and raw contact with one another.

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Adorno. Photo: Renato Mangolin

There is no music in the first half of the performance; the squeaking of the balloons and the occasional sharp popping sounds are enough to create a tense soundscape. Over time, musical layers are added, but the true power of the performance stems from the dancers using their own breath and voices. They create their music using their own voices while dancing, thus embodying the beauty of the collective through their singularity. The dancers' theatricality, technical skill, and, most importantly, their unwavering belief in the work are so powerful that their souls become visible through their movements. Watching the company, it is abundantly clear from the high energy they capture that they spend long periods working together. This energy they generate around themselves while dancing radiates into the hall as both a transformative resistance and pure joy.

Looking back at the entirety of the festival, I observe that many works meet in a radical act of reimagining. It is a year where being a collective frequently appears as a form of resistance, and joy manifests itself as the most powerful weapon. Although I do not mention all the performances I watched, these prominent works that highlight the general approach make visible the processes where bodies come to the fore as relational, permeable beings that are in relationship with their environment, rather than being isolated. They show how togetherness can be built despite dissonances, how softness can be experienced in a radical version, or how the collective can disrupt and alter the status quo when it prioritizes joy. In a period where dance awakens such potent effects, DDD—in this edition where all these experiences and thoughts blend into life—whispers to us that the way to disrupt the status quo is by returning to the body and never letting go of collective joy.