O Grito do Peixe (The Cry of the Fish)

In the course of a two and a half months long artistic residency at Olhão, Clara Andermatt creates a new work about the town, its contrasts, its fishing communities and their customs and traditions. Onstage, Andermatt joins five dancers, five musicians, and ten students between 12 and 16 years old, from the School EB 2,3 João da Rosa. Together, they bring substance and voice to the performance, inviting the audience to reflect about the narratives inscribed in this small town. A piece developed in close collaboration with composer João Lucas, that also counted with the collaboration of Rui Horta in the lighting design.

“Two and a half months of intense work and pleasure. We went through the town of Olhão, took a dive into its colours, its sweet and sour taste. We heard about its history, and learned to recognize on the facades of its buildings, on the wrinkled hands of the old fishermen, on the rhythm of the tides, and the abandoned factories, the myriad signs that identify this territory, from which we gathered the material we wanted to transform into a vocabulary, and with it talk about the beauty and the strangeness of the world, the cry that we cannot hear, within ourselves or from others. Here we met the youngsters that told us much of what we are saying now. In the beginning, they felt awkward, as teenagers often do. Along the days they started to be captivated by the magic of the experience, gaining discipline, and discovering something new to them. They surrendered to it with a poignant trust, and we saw them grow, conquer the understanding of the movement and of the sound, and develop a relationship with the dancers, the musicians and all the artists and collaborators, all of them becoming an essential part of a shared creative process.”

Clara Andermatt (2005)