André Braga, Cláudia Figueiredo and Panaibra Canda set off from Inhambane, in the south of Mozambique, to reflect on colonialism.
Published at — 9 May 2025
Teatro Aveirense will host the outcome of a collaboration between André Braga & Cláudia Figueiredo, from the CRL - Central Elétrica company, and Mozambican performer and choreographer Panaibra Canda. Scheduled to be performed on 16 May, OU takes as its starting point the landscape of Inhambane, in southern Mozambique, a land of family and colonial memories, where the present mixes with the reverberations of the past.
Inhambane is a symbolic place, having been a landing point for Vasco da Gama, who baptised it ‘Land of Good People’. The evolution of the events and its colonial contours led to thousands of enslaved people leaving Inhambane, many of them lost at sea.
Inspired by the mythology of Drexciya, who imagines an underwater people descended from African slaves who were thrown into the sea during the Atlantic crossing, and by the testimony of an Inhambane healer 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.
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.
Inhambane is a symbolic place, having been a landing point for Vasco da Gama, who baptised it ‘Land of Good People’. The evolution of the events and its colonial contours led to thousands of enslaved people leaving Inhambane, many of them lost at sea.
Inspired by the mythology of Drexciya, who imagines an underwater people descended from African slaves who were thrown into the sea during the Atlantic crossing, and by the testimony of an Inhambane healer 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.
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.
