Curatorship SÃO CASTRO
A Cidade Dança, an event promoted since 2019 by the Municipality of São João da Madeira and curated by São Castro, marks the International Dance Day each year in April. This year, the festival takes place from April 28 to May 3, with a programme dedicated to this artistic expression.
Bringing together performances, encounters between audiences and artists, a video-dance screening, and training opportunities in both professional and recreational contexts across various venues in the city, the festival welcomes a range of artists and organisations from the national artistic scene, while also engaging the local artistic community dedicated to the practice of the body.
April 28 | Tuesday
DANCE IN FACTORIES
©DR
Partnership: Industrial Tourism of São João da Madeira
Participation: Ginasiano Escola de Dança
With a programme that continues to reach out to audiences, “Dance in Factories” will once again take place in 2026 as part of the festival A Cidade Dança. In partnership with the Industrial Tourism of São João da Madeira and with the participation of Ginasiano Escola de Dança, a series of dance moments will be created across various factories and other local industrial spaces, fostering a closer connection between the community and dance, as well as the poetry of the body in movement.
DANCE IN SCHOOLS
©Tomás Pereira
Project DANCE AND CREATIVE LEARNING
Dance and Philosophy
Dance and Science
The school community of São João da Madeira welcomes Dance in Schools, an initiative that engages children and young people through the project Dance and Creative Learning, produced by Play False | associação cultural. These workshops propose a dialogue between dance and school subjects, using movement as a pedagogical tool to stimulate the development of creative thinking.
Grounded in the body and its movement as a field of action, this edition includes the workshops Dance and Philosophy, led by Joana Pupo, and Dance and Science, led by Rebecca Mateus.
April 29 | Wednesday
©Tomás Pereira
DANCE IN SCHOOLS
Project DANCE AND CREATIVE LEARNING
Dance and Philosophy
Dance and Science
The school community of São João da Madeira welcomes Dance in Schools, an initiative that engages children and young people through the project Dance and Creative Learning, produced by Play False | associação cultural. These workshops propose a dialogue between dance and school subjects, using movement as a pedagogical tool to stimulate the development of creative thinking.
Grounded in the body and its movement as a field of action, this edition includes the workshops Dance and Philosophy, led by Joana Pupo, and Dance and Science, led by Rebecca Mateus.
©DR
DANCE ACROSS THE CITY
6.30 PM – Municipal Garden
During A Cidade Dança, public space also becomes a place for artistic experience. Throughout the festival, squares and gardens host Dance Across the City, featuring performances by local schools and organisations dedicated to dance. The public is invited to take part in the city’s artistic and cultural life, engaging with these spaces as they take on a new and unexpected dimension — that of open-air performance venues.
April 30 | Thursday
©Tomás Pereira
DANCE ACROSS THE CITY
6.30 PM – St. Anthony’s Chapel Square
During A Cidade Dança, public space also becomes a place for artistic experience. Throughout the festival, squares and gardens host Dance Across the City, featuring performances by local schools and organisations dedicated to dance. The public is invited to take part in the city’s artistic and cultural life, engaging with these spaces as they take on a new and unexpected dimension — that of open-air performance venues.
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©Irantzu Pastor
HALLEY, Led Silhouette company (Spain)
9.30 PM – Casa da Criatividade
Ages 6+ | 70 min
Halley is a contemporary epic — a desperate race in which a group faces the challenge of organising itself before the comet returns and everything begins again. These are characters who carry burdens, who have a path to follow, and who long to overcome the setbacks and mistakes that stand between them and happiness. Because dreams cannot be consumed, but they can sustain.
May 1 | Friday
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MASTERCLASS with Martxel Rodriguez and Jon López
Cia Led Silhouette
10:00 AM – 12:00 PM – Torre da Oliva
Target audience: 15+ with dance experience
Capacity: 25 participants
This masterclass, led by Martxel Rodríguez and Jon López, choreographers and artistic directors of Led Silhouette, offers a sharing of their choreographic language and creative methodologies. Their work is distinguished by an innovative approach to dance, combining elements and cross-referencing influences from theatre, dance, and cinema.
©Irantzu Pastor
©DR
DANCE ACROSS THE CITY
3:00 PM – Parque Nossa Senhora dos Milagres
During A Cidade Dança, public space also becomes a place for artistic experience. Throughout the festival, squares and gardens host Dance Across the City, featuring performances by local schools and organisations dedicated to dance. The public is invited to take part in the city’s artistic and cultural life, engaging with these spaces as they take on a new and unexpected dimension — that of open-air performance venues.
©Andrea Couceiro
PROGRAM YOUNG CHOREOGRAPHERS
9:30 PM – Paços da Cultura
Post-show talk with the artists
The Young Choreographers Programme aims to be a platform for emerging artists to present their first creations, giving visibility to new voices and bringing together different choreographic approaches. It establishes itself as a space for presentation and development, where experimentation is valued as a practice of research and language-making, supporting processes still in transformation and opening up new ways of thinking and creating dance.
This programme features two distinct works: a duet by Beatriz Mira and Tiago Barreiros, The horMoans – is that all there is, and a solo by Inês Barros, Concierge.
May 2 | Saturday
SCREENDANCE SESSION
InShadow - Lisbon Screendance Festival
5:00 PM – Paços da Cultura
Partnership: Vo’Arte and Cine S. João
Post-screening talk with Pedro Sena Nunes (director of the InShadow Festival)
The InShadow – Lisbon Screendance Festival is an innovative initiative by Vo’Arte Associação and a reference in the field of multidisciplinary contemporary creation, highlighting the convergence of image, body, and technology.
This session will present award-winning films from the festival.
©Kati Kallio
©Tomás Pereira
GESTOS QUE ATRAVESSAM O TEMPO by Elisabete Magalhães
Participatory artistic project with local community
Premiere
9:30 PM – Sala dos Fornos, Oliva Creative Factory
Ages 6+
Performance with audio description.
In the year that the city of São João da Madeira celebrates 100 years as a municipality, this project proposes a sensitive listening to the city through the bodies that inhabit it. Gestures that Traverse Time emerges from the meeting between individual memory and collective history, inviting residents to share fragments of their lived experience, transforming memory into a living and present material.
This is a participatory project that brings together dance and photography as artistic practices that reveal the autobiographical body.
Over five weeks of intensive work with members of the local community, this piece—premiering at the festival—reveals gestures passed from body to body. Gestures that are not recorded in archives, but remain inscribed in the body.
May 3 | Sunday
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©Alipio Padilha
SONS (MENTIROSOS) MISTERIOSOS by Sofia Dias & Vítor Roriz
10:30 AM – Casa da Criatividade
Ages 3+ | 35 min
Family performance
In their first creation for children, Sofia Dias & Vítor Roriz set out in search of the magical quality that emerges from the friction between sound and image. Can an image mislead our perception of where a sound comes from? Or can a sound deceive us about its origin?
A performance for families that, much like children, moves freely from one idea to another, unafraid to raise questions that are at once metaphysical, ontological, aesthetic, simple, and almost always unpredictable.
A CIDADE DANÇA is an event promoted by the Municipality of São João da Madeira and PLAY FALSE | cultural association.
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