Companhia Portuguesa de Bailado Contemporâneo

At the Companhia Portuguesa de Bailado Contemporâneo in Lisbon, a dancer can carry a repertoire in two directions. Maria Mira joined the ensemble as a performer and went on to make Almada E TUDO! for it in 2023. Her starting point was the writer and artist Almada Negreiros and his Manifesto Anti-Dantas, heard in the voice of Mário Viegas. A piece of Portuguese literary history becomes a provocation to move. Mira’s passage from interpreting other people’s work to giving the company a work of her own is a good introduction to what its founders wanted a repertory ensemble to be.

Vasco Wellenkamp and Graça Barroso conceived CPBC as a place where choreographers and performers could develop work together over time. That idea gives a particular meaning to the word contemporary here. A piece can be kept, rehearsed and revisited without every choreographer having to speak in the founder’s voice. In AMARAMÁLIA, Wellenkamp works with the recorded singing of Amália Rodrigues, a musical collage of his own and original music by Carlos Zíngaro. In Public Domain, Ricardo Campos Freire poses a different question, about the point at which attention to one’s own interests makes collective life difficult. The two pieces belong in the same repertory for reasons more interesting than a shared national label.

Space matters to this company. From 2020, its Armazém da Dança project opened rehearsal space to artists and organisations without a place of their own to develop or present work. The programme CASA brings that question of belonging onto the stage. It asks four teams what a home might mean. Vânia Doutel Vaz made Suite, Beatriz Mira and Tiago Barreiros made Light | Ten, Miguel Santos created Habita-me with input from the dancers, and André Mesquita and César Faria Fernandes made Sopro. Their names are worth distinguishing because the title on the theatre’s calendar is the name of a programme. The October 2026 engagement at the Centro Cultural do Cartaxo is a documented stop on its tour.

Susana Lima, a founding dancer and former rehearsal director, took over the artistic direction in December 2024. Her history with the repertory includes assisting Wellenkamp in Zagreb and Patrick Delcroix in Essen. A viewer can also encounter the company at a very different scale in Osmose. Made for television with RTP, this six-minute work places Wellenkamp’s dancers at the Calouste Gulbenkian Foundation. The architecture is part of what the dancers answer to. RTP’s recording preserves a work conceived for that specific place and for a camera, giving audiences outside the theatre a point of entry into the company’s practice.