NÔT - Marlene Monteiro Freitas

New piece by Cape Verdean choreographer Marlene Monteiro Freitas, premiering in Spain at the Sala Roja Concha Velasco of Teatros del Canal as part of the Festival de Otoño, combining dance, theatre and performance.

NÔT, which means « night » in Creole, is the production with which Marlene Monteiro Freitas comes to Spain as part of the Festival de Otoño. The choreographer trained in Lisbon and at the P.A.R.T.S. school, founded by Anne Teresa de Keersmaeker, and her career has unfolded on stages in Avignon, Lyon, Vienna and Berlin.

The staging takes Las mil y una noches (One Thousand and One Nights) and the figure of Scheherazade as its starting point, to explore how stories can resist violence and sustain the possibility of survival. Eight performers, who dance and play percussion at the same time, move through a phantasmagorical space where passion and conflict alternate with confinement and freedom. The piece addresses survival in the face of patriarchal terror.

The carnivalesque character shapes a chaotic, overflowing world, in which identities shift incessantly and opposites intersect. The choreographer's language relies on accumulation, transformation and excess. In earlier works such as Bacantes, Jaguar or Guintche, the ritual and the grotesque intersect with the physical and the musical. Teatros del Canal is a performance venue that mainly programmes theatre.