Vânia Doutel Vaz
violetas
- 21.11 — 23.11 2025
- ages 6+
- 1H
A dance between gesture, gaze, and listening.
violetas is an intimate dance piece where the dancers exist and resist. In a minimalist environment without music, five Afro-Portuguese women inhabit the stage and its limits, treating the dancing body as both unique and sufficient. With no music, the piece invites the audience into a deeper, more intimate experience of space, body, and time, while a minimalist set and a lighting design that evolves almost imperceptibly evoke the possibility of questioning perception, hierarchy, identity, and visibility.
violetas creates a space where nothing is fixed, but fluid and shared — where everyone, performers and spectators alike, becomes part of the performance. This is Vânia Doutel Vaz’s first group piece. In 2022, she premiered her solo O Elefante no Meio da Sala, presented at Teatro do Bairro Alto as part of Alkantara Festival.
Credits
With Lua Aurora, Lucília Raimundo, Sara Fonseca da Graça, Vânia Doutel Vaz, Wura Moraes Creative Direction, Set and Costumes Vânia Doutel Vaz Lighting design matéria leve: Bee Barros e Ska Batista (creation), Leticia Skrycky (monitoring and mentoring), Priscila Altivo (writing about the lighting project) Support in residency Filipa Peraltinha Dramaturgy support Yasmina Reggad Collaboration in residency André Cabral, Natacha Campos, Piny (premiered in Festival DDD) Production Joana Costa Santos Administration agência 25 Co-production DDD - Festival Dias da Dança, Teatro do Bairro Alto, Alkantara Co-production Residency Alkantara, Casa da Dança, Estúdios Victor Córdon, O Espaço do Tempo Support República Portuguesa - Cultura I DGARTES – Direção-Geral das Artes Special thanks Cristina Planas Leitão, Josefa Pereira, Nina Botkay e Zia Soares Photography João Octávio
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Download the full Alkantara Festival 2025 programme
Vânia Doutel Vaz, Angolan, born in Setúbal, is a performer and creator working in the field of dance. In a hybrid territory between performance, choreography and interdisciplinary collaboration, she uses the idea of the body as an archive and a vehicle for fiction, focusing on relational questions. She is interested in creating a rotation of points of observation, allowing different subjectivities to emerge through the dialogue between bodies, gazes and presences. In this way, she seeks, through the relationship between performer and audience, to foster the emergence...