“The voice of the sea has filled heaven and earth. A voice that is full and breaks, and never ends.”
In its continuous rocking, the sea brings and takes with it memories of all times.
It was the sea that brought Vasco da Gama to Inhambane, a town in the south of Mozambique that he named “Land of Good People”. And it was by sea that thousands of enslaved people were taken from Inhambane, many of them lost forever in its waters.
“– The sea is a world. There is life in the sea. There are mountains, plants, wind and fish. There is human life in the depths.”
Inspired by Drexciya’s mythology, which imagines an underwater people descended from African slaves who were thrown into the sea during the Atlantic crossing, and by the testimony of a healer from Inhambane about her experiences with the spirits of the sea, OU reflects on multiple encounters. The meeting of two bodies, with their strengths, their abstractions, their histories, their wills. The encounter between the sea and the land, the visible and the invisible, the ancestral and the contemporary, the spiritual and the down-to-earth.
The result of a collaboration between André Braga & Cláudia Figueiredo and Panaibra Canda, OU took as its starting point the landscape of Inhambane, a land of family and colonial memories, where the present mixes with the reverberations of the past: ‘Memory is rooted in the concrete, in spaces, gestures, images and objects’. We are interested in thinking about history from other perspectives, other voices, other languages and from a cross-section of thinking that overlaps past, present and future. We’re interested in continuing our research into what Paul Carter called the ‘politics of the ground’: ‘a new way of stepping that doesn’t flatten the ground, but lets the ground touch the body, determine gestures, movements, in a new social choreography’.
With a strongly transdisciplinary language, OU interweaves dance, sound, video, light and words in a sensory fabric that invites listening and imagination. The proposal is an invitation to think about history through fiction, fabulation and ghostly presence as a form of justice and memory.
The video projection in the show contains some parts with a strob effect.
Support for publicity 
