Created by Carla Jordão
Scheduled to premiere on October 11, 2026, on Auditório Osvaldo Azinheira - Academia Almadense
“Entre Braços” (Between Arms) is a piece about closeness and with closeness. The human embrace is an emotional gesture shaped by society. It transmits and reproduces cultural meanings about intimacy, affection, and belonging, expressing social and political codes. This expression occurs in people through specific physical movements: the extension of the arms, the pressure of contact, the duration of the gesture, and the changes in the relationships of proximity and distance between bodies.
In “Entre Braços”, the author explores the interaction and interdependence between the emotional impulse to embrace and the social construction of this gesture. Her source of inspiration and investigative artistic approach are based on the metaphor of neuroscientist António Damásio: “Emotions are represented in the theater of the body. Feelings are represented in the theater of the mind.” Here, she stages the embrace as an encounter between these two theaters - where the emotional impulse of the body meets the social conventions of the mind. According to Damásio, emotions are represented in the body and feelings in the mind. With this metaphor, the author opens an image of the body and mind as stages, as places of theatrical events.
Carla Jordão investigates the theatrical potential of the human embrace – from the instinctive impulse to seek contact to the elaborate cultural conventions that determine when, how, and whom we can embrace. The embrace will be used to reveal the cultural norms of intimacy: the unwritten codes about appropriate duration, appropriate intensity, and the social contexts where this gesture is permitted, expected, or forbidden. The piece explores how a seemingly simple and universal gesture contains complex layers of political, social, and emotional meaning.
Carla Jordão is a choreographer and performer. Her choreographies explore the influence of social systems on the human body. Her minimalist and detailed artistic language is marked by painting, sculpture, and photography. After graduating in Dance and Performance from the Escola Superior de Dança, in Lisbon (2004), Carla Jordão studied for a Master's degree in Dance Composition at the Folkwang Universität der Künste in Essen, from 2014 to 2016. From the beginning, her work has addressed the human being as a social being. Aspects of interpersonal and social relationships have since been an essential part of her artistic practice. Stylistically, she works with the transformation and recontextualization of movement and dance references, including elements of ballet, contemporary and modern dance, animal-based movements, yoga, everyday gestures, and the individual movement patterns of dancers. From these references, movement forms emerge that always escape just before the recognition of a fixation. She contrasts this eclectic staging of movement and body with minimalist and geometric scenic situations. In this context, transdisciplinary engagement with the visual arts plays a particularly important role. This has led to works such as "Needless, Needles" (nominated for the Cologne Theatre-Dance Prize 2018), based on the eponymous work by Mary Bauermeister; a choreographed interpretation of "The Bride Stripped Bare by Her Bachelors, Even..." by Marcel Duchamp (nominated for the Cologne Theatre-Dance Prize 2020); and site-specific choreographies for light installations by Mischa Kuball, James Turrell, Keith Sonnier, and Mario Merz at the Unna International Light Art Center (2016). In 2019, she received the Cologne Theatre-Dance Prize for "A Universal Weakness", the first part of the "Universal" series of pieces, which explores gestures and social conventions/constellations. In 2020, she founded the dance company SPECIES.
