Bocarra
(2024)
Luísa Saraiva
Bocarra means a very big and open mouth or maw. In Bocarra we depart from female singing repertoire from northern Portugal and Galicia about violence, feelings of bitterness and foreignness. Understanding many of these songs as traditions of non-conformity and as veiled and unresolved resistance against heteronormative roles, we work with movement vocabulary that deals with the continuum between care and violence within physical closeness and the particular vocalic qualities of these musical forms. Bodies are placed discursively and performatively in the voice, and are shaped and transformed by the voices that produce them. In collaboration with sound artists Inês Tartaruga Água and Francisco Antão we propose an understanding of musical objects/instruments as organic beings that function as extensions of the inner organs, the breath and the physical body, and which are activated through movement and gestures. Together with performers Luisa Alfonso and Alexandre Achour we work choreographically with ways to sing through and with bodies in space, beyond binary and exclusive categories of vocal registers and range.
