®João Octávio Peixoto
Synopsis:
“How to dance upon ruins? How to exhume violated archaeologies, in communion, exhaling and distilling melancholies and nostalgias? Metamorphosis and fragile presence erupt a poetic substrate at the core of primordial nature — evanescent forms between becoming and immutability, in a timely moment in which the Taciturn trembles. The present is a precarious offering that devours itself in its own voracity, dissolving and multiplying into fears and desires. It is the eternal conflict between past, present, and future. Between what changes and what remains, a fragile presence is born. One dances between thresholds — between being and non-being, desire and void, life and death. From threshold to threshold, the dance gives birth to unrepeatable moments — moments uncancellable by terror — metamorphosing apocalyptic urgency into survival atop corpses. Upon the remnants of what it was, we invent ways to continue. Who rises from the ashes?”
Hugo Calhim Cristóvão & Joana von Mayer Trindade
Artistic Credits
Direction, Choreography, Dramaturgy, and Training: Hugo Calhim Cristóvão & Joana von Mayer Trindade | Dance and Performance: Sara Miguelote, Lucia Marrodan, Ethel Desdames, and Marta Pieczul | Lighting Design: Luís Ribeiro | Costumes: UN T | Scenography: NuIsIs ZoBoP & UN T | Music and Sound Design Paulo Costa & NuIsIs ZoBoP | Sound Design João Oliveira & NuIsIs ZoBoP | Theory and Philosophy: Hugo Calhim Cristóvão, Joana von Mayer Trindade, Celeste Natário, Carlos Pimenta, Cláudia Marisa, Cristina Aguiar, Ezequiel Santos, Hugo Monteiro, Rui Lopo, Mário Correia, Nuno Matos Duarte, Elter Manuel Carlos, Chris Page, Afonso Becerra, Armando Nascimento Rosa, Madalena Xavier, Ana Coimbra Oliveira, Paulo Azevedo, and Sofia Vilar Soares | Video: Os Fredericos | Photography: Alípio Padilha & João Peixoto | Executive Production: Cristina Aguiar & NuIsIs ZoBoP | Co-productions: Casa das Artes de Famalicão, Centro Cultural Vila Flor – Guimarães, Teatro Stephens – Marinha Grande, Oficina Municipal do Teatro – Coimbra, Teatro Municipal de Bragança – Algures a Nordeste Festival de Dança Contemporânea, Casa Varela – Centro de Experimentação Artística-Cineteatro Pombal, Fábrica da Criatividade — Castelo Branco and DDD - Festival Dias Da Dança | Support: Teatro Aveirense, Teatro Rosalía de Castro – Coruña | Artistic Residencies: Casa Varela – Centro de Experimentação Artística, Kale/Armazém 22, Centro de Criação do Candoso / Fábrica Asa – Guimarães, Teatro Viriato – Viseu, Casa Museu Afonso Lopes Vieira – Marinha Grande, Teatro Aveirense, Centro de Criação e Investigação NuIsIs ZoBoP – Porto
®João Octávio Peixoto
25 April 2026
4:00 PM – 5:30 PM
Portuguese Centre of Photography, Porto
THEMATIC INTERARTS AND INTERDISCIPLINARY CONVERSATIONS – Photography ¼
Nuisis ZoBoP launches, on April 25, the second Cycle of INTERARTS AND INTERDISCIPLINARY THEMATIC CONVERSATIONS, with a debate at the Portuguese Centre of Photography, at 4:00 PM.
This cycle unfolds around the dance piece When the Taciturn Comes From Threshold to Threshold The Fragility Of The Present, taking it as a field of resonance between body, image, time, and thought, and is integrated within the research project Dance and Philosophy: Ethics, Roots and Horizons of the Fragile Present.
The event brings together Leonel de Castro, Carlos Barradas, Miguel Ângelo Pereira, Alípio Padilha, Hugo Calhim Cristóvão and Joana von Mayer Trindade, moderated by Cristina Aguiar. The conversation brings together different photographic practices to reflect on the image as a space of freedom in constant construction, in dialogue with dance.
In a context marked by the acceleration of images—and by moments in which the visual circulation of violence participates in shaping the perception of reality—photography asserts itself as a critical field where forms of visibility, attention, and memory are contested. Between digital flows and algorithmic regimes, the image becomes both more omnipresent and more unstable.
It is within this landscape that its relationship with dance gains particular relevance: between the moving body and the fixed image, photography questions not only what we see, but how we see. It inhabits an unstable territory—between what is set free and what remains wounded, between memory and a present that dissolves in the instant of the gesture.
Marking the date of the Carnation Revolution, this encounter does not celebrate freedom as a completed achievement, but proposes to question it as a fragile, convulsive, and ever-unfinished process.
13 June 2026
4:00 PM – 5:30 PM
Marques da Silva Foundation, Porto
THEMATIC INTERARTS AND INTERDISCIPLINARY CONVERSATIONS – Architecture 2/4
NuIsIs ZoBoP returns, on June 13, with the second cycle of Interarts and Interdisciplinary Thematic Conversations, now featuring a dialogue dedicated to Dance and Architecture. The meeting will take place at the Auditorium of Palacete Lopes Martins, at the Fundação Marques da Silva, in Porto, at 4:00 PM.
The session brings together Pedro Bandeira, Nuno Matos Duarte, Carla Barros, and Joana von Mayer Trindade, moderated by Hugo Calhim Cristóvão.
This cycle is part of the research project Dance and Philosophy: Ethics, Roots and Horizons of the Fragile Present, within which NuIsIs ZoBoP develops research on dance as a philosophical, ethical, and political space. The work guiding this second meeting is Quando Vem a Taciturna — De Limiar em Limiar O Presente Frágil, by Hugo Calhim Cristóvão and Joana von Mayer Trindade, the project’s second creation, a piece that begins with a radical question: how can one “dance upon ruins, exhume violated archaeologies, in communion exhaling and distilling melancholies and nostalgias”?
Ruins are the space where architecture recognizes that time is greater than itself. The stone that remains after collapse preserves a memory that intact stone cannot formulate: the memory of lost function, extinct ritual, and the life that once inhabited that place and disappeared. Ruins fold the past over the present in such a way that they become simultaneous and indistinguishable, rendering time visible within matter itself. The ruined space exposes impermanence as a structural condition of what is built.
Dance moving through collapsing spaces confronts a choreography already inscribed in stone — made of crumbled angles, openings that have lost their doors, vaults that no longer shelter anyone. To exhume “violated archaeologies” is to identify within architectural debris the movements that once produced them: ritual, domestic, and political gestures that determined the shape of space. Dance reads what space can no longer reveal.
Architecture fixes human movement into constructed forms: every corridor corresponds to a procession, every nave to a genuflection, every threshold to the repeated gesture of someone who passes and hesitates. When these forms deteriorate, dance reactivates the movements that generated them, making visible the “bleeding palimpsest, embroidered in nerves of resistance” that persists beneath every constructed surface.
The conversation questions architecture through its own constitutive tensions.
05.09.2026
4:00 pm – 5:30 pm
Espaço Agra – Sala Y
INTERARTS AND INTERDISCIPLINARY THEMATIC CONVERSATIONS – Cinema 3/4
A conversation on body, image, time, ritual, memory and transformation, drawing on the performance Quando Vem A Taciturna De Limiar em Limiar O Presente Frágil by Hugo Calhim Cristóvão & Joana von Mayer Trindade, and on the radical legacy of Maya Deren, with invited filmmakers Eduardo Brito, Luísa Sequeira and Irina Oliveira. Moderated by Joana von Mayer Trindade.
Taking the creation When the Taciturn Comes From Threshold to Threshold The Fragility Of The Present as its starting point, this conversation explores the relationships between dance and cinema. The encounter emerges from the poetic universe of the work: a body in perpetual passage, inhabiting thresholds between presence and absence, metamorphosis and permanence, life and death. How can cinema become a way of choreographing time, space and experience—and dance?
We turn to the thought and cinematic work of Maya Deren. Situated between experimental cinema, dance and ritual, Deren opened up new possibilities for filming movement as a force capable of transforming space, time and perception itself. As in Deren’s work, this creation also moves through unstable territories, crossing physical spaces and states of consciousness where time is not linear and each movement opens onto different paths.
We therefore propose bringing together different ways of thinking about movement: dancing, filming, looking, repeating, transforming. Among ruins, memories, landscapes and bodies, what happens between one threshold and another, in that fragile place where dance and cinema meet?
This cycle is part of the research project Dance and Philosophy: Ethics, Roots and Horizons of the Fragile Present, within which NuIsIs ZoBoP develops research into dance as a philosophical, ethical and political space.
“How to dance upon ruins, exhume raped archaeologies, in communion exhaling and distilling melancholies and nostalgias?”
We invite you to enter this space of reflection with us, to look at movement, but also to allow movement to transform the way we look.
Nuisis Zobop
Associação Cultural de Criação, Investigação e Formação no Domínio das Artes Performativas
Produção eXECUTIVA
producaoexecutivanuisis@gmail.com
Rua João Martins Branco 172, 4150-430 Porto
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