Luísa Saraiva
Bocarra
- 20.11 — 21.11 2025
- Performances
- Centro Cultural de Belém - Pequeno Auditório
- €13 (See discounts)
- ages 12+
- 1H
- In Portuguese and Spanish
Voice, movement and sound resonate through space and bodies as living matter of resistance.
Bocarra — a word meaning an oversized or wide-open mouth — draws on the female polyphonic singing repertoire from northern Portugal and Galicia, where songs speak of bitterness and evoke brutal violence against women. These voices — in shouts or whispers, ritualised or fragmented — emerge as gestures of non-conformity and resistance.
On stage, three performers sing, move and engage with a collection of original sound objects. Made from stone, ceramic, plastic or metal, these handcrafted instruments act as extensions of the internal organs and breath, activated by air, friction and touch, until the body itself becomes a soundscape.
Structured like a concert, where each song takes the lead, Bocarra composes a vocal and sensorial choreography in which bodies, transformed into instruments, produce melodic hauntings — cries that echo as forms of resistance.
Credits
Choreography, artistic Direction Luísa Saraiva Performance by and with Luisa Alfonso, Alexandre Achour, Luísa Saraiva Instruments Inês Tartaruga Água Sound design Francisco Antão Light design Cárin Geada Costumes Isabelle Lange Martial arts training Zeina Hanna, Manuel Pérez Bouza Vocal coach Fabíola Augusta External eye Niklaus Bein Executive production Övgü Özen, Nadine Freisleben/Apricot Productions (Germany), Mariana Costa/ Associação Calote Esférica (Portugal) Acknowledgements Matthias Mohr, Arnaldo Saraiva A production by Associação Calote Esférica e Crybaby GbR Co-production Festival Dias da Dança/Teatro Municipal do Porto, La Manufacture CDCN Nouvelle-Aquitaine, PACT Zollverein Financial support República Portuguesa – Cultura/Direção-Geral das Artes, Ministério da Cultura e Ciência Nordrhein-Westfalen/NRW Landesbüro Freie Darstellende Künste, Kunststiftung NRW Supported by Residencias Paraíso, Colectivo RPM
Luísa Saraiva is a choreographer and performer born in Porto, Portugal and living between Porto and Berlin. She studied psychology at the University of Porto and dance at the Folkwang Arts University in Essen. Her choreographic work explores the language of the body and voice and lies at the intersection of movement and musical composition. She was selected for the danceWeb scholarship in 2019 and in the season of 2019/2020 she was one of the choreographers-in-residence at the K3 | Tanzplan Hamburg. In 2022/2023 she was a recipient of the Tanzpraxis Scholarship from...