SELF-UNCENSORED [ON VOICE] | ARTISTS AND PROJECTS

Gaya de Medeiros
mamãevocêpapai

Concept: Gaya de Medeiros
Creators and performers: Paula Diogo, Francisco Rebelo and Gaya de Medeiros
Light and space: Tiago Cadete

“mamãe” is a word, but it can also be many images. Drawing from psychoanalysis and the archetypes that inhabit our imagination, the work navigates the foundations of sexuality and gives body to the unconscious. In this case, speaking about the unconscious means trying to pursue the word “papai”, for example, materialising images as they appear, without moralism, and making space for their abstraction, nonsenses and drives. In this way, sexual fantasies are removed from the common imaginary — leather, masks and whips — and reconsidered as possibilities to materialise something deeply internal and very difficult to speak about otherwise.

Gaya de Medeiros is a dancer, actress and director. She has worked with several choreographers and directors in Portugal. She created the performances Atlas da Boca (2021), BAqUE (2022), Pai para Jantar (2023), Cafezinho (2024) and Corre Bebé (2025), which have toured more than 16 countries and 28 cities. In cinema, she starred in the short film An Avocado Pit by Ary Zara, awarded at several festivals. She founded BRABA.platform, which supports, enables and finances initiatives led by and directed towards the trans and non-binary community.
Gaya’s research focuses on the expansion of autobiographical narratives and on the tension between body, word and audience.

Josefa Pereira
Golden Arrow

Concept and performance: Josefa Pereira
Artistic collaboration: Catarina Vieira
Acknowledgements: Lucas Damiani, Maura Grimaldi and Natália Mendonça

A quiver is a bag traditionally used by archers to carry arrows. Once, someone said: “The artist comes into the world with a quiver containing a limited number of golden arrows. They may shoot all their arrows when young, or in adulthood, or even in old age.”

When confronted with this image, an enormous list of questions proliferates in my mind. In this lecture-performance, I dwell on this series of questions, investigating notions of productivity, labour, linearity, ageing, privilege, and many others.

Josefa Pereira (BR/PT) is a choreographer and performer. She lives in Montemor-o-Novo and also works between creations and collaborations in São Paulo, where she grew up and trained artistically. She attended PACAP at Forum Dança and completed her Master’s degree at DAS Choreography – AHK (NL) with a scholarship from Fundação Gulbenkian. She graduated in Dance and Performance from PUC-SP (BR) through the PROUNI scholarship programme.
Her attention focuses on listening and sensitivity emerging from the relationships and frictions between the different materials involved in the creation of a choreographic gesture. Strongly practice- and research-oriented, her artistic approach begins from available materialities, which may reveal themselves as fabulous, enchanted or monstrous. She values intersectional and collaborative processes capable of generating transformations and activating other political and poetic potentials.
Alongside her own work and teaching activities in dance, including classes and workshops, Josefa also works as a performer and collaborator in dramaturgy, developing accompaniment methodologies with artists throughout their creative processes.
She is currently dedicated to the creation and circulation of her works, including the trilogy Bestiário PINK and Chama Chama Chama, as well as a new creation premiering in 2027. She is part of collective and collaborative contexts such as Piscina, Matéria Leve and Matilha.

Lígia Soares
Settling Accounts 

Concept and performance: Lígia Soares

Bringing to light issues often relegated to obscurity by an aspirational idea of a generalized middle class, which for a long time served to silence social inequalities. In Settling Accounts, Lígia Soares proposes to use the audience present in a performance based on the assumption that it is possible to redistribute our social benefits in order to compensate for the past and secure the future. Analysing the advantages and disadvantages we are born with, the lacks and privileges we embody, in a sort of comparative study aiming to rebalance the accounts between a temporary group of people, implicating them in the repair of their past and the sustainability of their future.
When all is accounted for, the intention is to speak about money and sustenance, goods and privileges, in the first person, taking these themes out of the censurable place to which the liberal idea of meritocracy has relegated them.

Lígia Soares is a choreographer and dramaturg. She began her professional career with Companhia de Teatro Senssuround in 1997 and graduated in Dance from Escola Superior de Dança de Lisboa in 2003. In 2001, she co-founded Máquina Agradável with her sister Andresa Soares. She was artist-in-residence at Tanzfabrik-Berlin and a DanceWeb scholarship holder in 2008 (Vienna). In 2022 she created Romance Associação Cultural, through which she currently produces her work, presented in several national and international theatre and contemporary dance programmes.
Since 2015, she has pursued research into creating scenic devices inclusive of the spectator’s presence, as in Romance, Turning Backs, Cuore and Ato da Primavera. She has created and written for several companies and artists, including Rita Vilhena, Miguel Castro Caldas, Henrique Furtado Vieira, Teatro Meia Volta..., Amarelo Silvestre, Paula Diogo, Cem Palcos, Escola de Mulheres, Teatro Experimental do Porto, Plataforma UMA and Companhia Ar Quente, among others. She mentors several dramatic writing programmes and regularly collaborates as a dramaturg in dance and theatre projects.
Her plays Romance (2015), Cinderella (2018), Civilization (2019), Memorial (2020), My Victory as a High-Performance Gymnast (2023) and Dressing Room (2025) have been published by Douda Correria. The play A Tight Knot was published by Urutau. In 2020 she received a grant from DGLAB – Directorate-General for Books, Archives and Libraries in the field of dramatic writing.

Maikon K
The Wolf and the Salmon Are Free to Kill

Performance as a state of exception. In this speech-action that conspires, Maikon K weaves together relations between crime, art and profanation in the search for a body that challenges the statutes of law. Are there really insurmountable limits for human beings, or can we oppose this fiction? And if together we decide that we are not human? What else would we wish to become?

Maikon K is a Brazilian artist working between performance and dance. He currently lives in Rio de Janeiro, where he attends a Master’s programme in Performing Arts at UFRJ, developing the creation of a “pedagogy of transgression” through performance art.
In 2020 he moved to Berlin with the support of the Martin Roth Initiative, an institution protecting and supporting artists at risk, after episodes of censorship against his work in Brazil. In 2022 he received the Weltoffenes Berlin grant, in partnership with Tanzfabrik, to investigate transgression in the field of the arts.
As a solo artist, he has created pieces investigating the shamanic body, scatological poetics and altered states of consciousness. In 2015 he was invited by Marina Abramović to present the performance DNA de DAN at the exhibition Terra Comunal in São Paulo.
In Berlin he collaborated as dramaturg with choreographers Michelle Moura (Overtongue, Lessons for Cadavers, Boca Cova) and Renae Shadler (Under my Gaze, Greyline), while also teaching classes at HZT – Berlin University of Dance.
He has presented his work at major festivals in Brazil, as well as in Portugal, Italy and Germany.
www.maikonk.com

Maikon K
PERFORMATIVE TRANSGRESSIONS
Workshop
20–24 July 2026, 7:30pm–11:30pm, Polo Cultural Gaivotas | Boavista, Lisbon

We will investigate ways of altering sensory perception, challenging social norms and notions of reality. The focus will be on creating experiences for the reconfiguration of individual and collective senses.
The concept of transgression will serve as a guiding thread, provoking us to think about how art can estrange the world, disturbing categories and behaviours. A body that no longer identifies solely as human challenges social statutes through the displacement of senses and language. A body can become other things and other beings and, in doing so, place the world in a state of delirium and risk, creating its own rules.
How can we understand the limits of society and the body and use them as working material? Transgression will be approached as a “radical disposition towards displacement”, a force capable of changing the position and state of things. We will practise using this force-concept to create actions and experiences.

Application form: https://docs.google.com/forms/d/e/1FAIpQLSfdR-aEpdfqbflaAFnaf4406keUrCWvizBmnQhnxwjfq-kbMg/viewform?usp=header

Rubén Sabbadini
Everything I Can't Say

Concept: Rubén Sabbadini
Lighting and Spatial Design: Tiago Cadete

A playwright interrogates his own self-censorship and contradictions as the far right advances relentlessly.

Rubén Sabbadini is an author, director and actor. He lives between Lisbon, Portugal, and Buenos Aires, Argentina.
He trained in Acting at E.M.AD. and with Ricardo Bartís. He studied Dramaturgy with Lola Arias, Rafael Spregelburd and Alejandro Tantanian.
As author and director he premiered, among other works: Surco (Una versión de Un Hembro), Um Femeo, 80 de un minuto, Trópico del Plata, Ruido de Hombre Fingiendo, No Apto, Plaga and Pluscuamperfecto, working in different venues in Buenos Aires such as Vera Vera Teatro, La Carpintería, Espacio Callejón, Teatro Beckett, ELKAFKA, El Portón de Sánchez and Nun Teatro, among others.
As an author, he has been published by INTEATRO and by Editorial Escénicas of the University of Social Sciences UBA, and translated into Portuguese by Dois Dias Edições, Lisbon, Portugal.
His works Trópico del Plata, 80 de un Minuto and Un Hembro have received distinctions and participated in several international festivals.