Turkey’s Compagnie du Paon has won Imaginarius’ artistic creations competition and will be invited to create a new project to debut at the next edition of the Imaginarius festival. Their poetic performance of Hayali theatre and dance, which had its Portuguese premiere in the Lóios Convent cloister, got the jury’s highest score among the 21 projects from 13 countries that competed in this edition.
Hayali, a word of Turkish origin that means “imaginary”, becomes a poetic performance of movement, symbolically representing the separation of two bodies. Based on the dynamics of balance, this show (re) creates a parallel world, hanging in several antitheses: remembrance / oblivion, acceptance / denial, love / hate and ascension / fall. It is wordless odyssey, where the body becomes the narrator of the action and transports us to rhythms and distant times, in a poetic journey to our senses.
In this edition, the jury of Mais Imaginarius was: Alexandra Moreira – DECA, University of Aveiro; Isabel Bezelga – Department of Arts, University of Évora; Bruno Pereira – School of Music and Performing Arts of Porto (ESMAE); Jordi Duran – Artistic Director of FiraTàrrega, Spain; Jens Frimann Hansen – Artistic Director of PASSAGE International Street Theatre Festival, Denmark; and Kathrin Bahr – Artistic Director of Tête-à-Tête, Rastatt’s International Street Arts Festival, Germany.
Mais Imaginarius is a section of the Imaginarius festival that aims to give space to emerging artists willing to show their work through a competition of artistic creations. This section challenges them to present proposals that approach the public space in its various perceptions, while testing formats and models, towards the construction of new artistic identities.
The diversity, quantity and quality of the projects that have been presented in this competition in recent years shows how much artists from all over the world wish to occupy Santa Maria da Feira’s public space and express themselves there through multiple languages.
In 2018, Mais Imaginarius had an unprecedented international demand: 295 artists and companies from 49 countries, from all five continents, submitted applications to this artistic creations competition, which is open to emerging companies and artists from around the world.
