Stage Direction + Set Design
Baroque Dance | Millefleurs, the return to the seclusion of others
Music > Campra, Couperin, La Barre, Detouches, Lully | Texts > Alcoforado “Portuguese Letters” 1669; Lully/Quinault: “Atys” 1676; Lully/Quinault “Armide”1686; Campra/La Motte “L’Europe Galante” 1697; Campra/Danchet “Fragments of Monsieur de Lully” (Moliére “Le Bourgeois Gentilhomme”) 1702; La Barre/La Motte “La Vénitienne” 1705; Detouches/Roy: “Callirhoé” 1712; Barreno, Horta, Costa: “New Portuguese Letters” 1972 | Dramaturg, Stage Director & Set Designer > Pedro Ribeiro | Music Director > Ana Mafalda Castro | Light Designer > Pedro Abreu | Costumes Designer > Leticia dos Santos | Cast > Catarina Costa e Silva, Daniela Leite Castro | Music Ensemble > Udite Amanti: Ana Mafalda Castro (harpsichord), Mariña García-Bouso, Ana Clérigo (violin), Inês Moz Caldas (recorder), Leonor Sá (cello) | Voice-over: Barbara Pais | Hair: Paula Ferreira | Production > Portingaloise A.C.A. | Armazén 22 Auditorium – Gaia, PTG | © Images by Susana Neves | 2025
Director’s note
The “Letters of Alcoforado”, confined within the solitude of a convent, unfold like embroidery. Each word delicately woven, each stitch imbued with devotion. The baroque dance notation emerges as a tapestry of movement. Every step threads its way through space with precision, and every cut gestures toward a possible narrative. Opera intertwines music and libretto like a warp, carrying the threads of a plot that sustain its dramatic pulse. The “New Portuguese Letters”, spun by three voices/spinning wheels relegated to the margins of an old and tightly bound state. Are women-ornament a flower – pure, sensitive, and delicate? Are one thousand women –millefleurs – a living tapestry where each design carries its weight in history? Why do we witness, today, a floral embroidery danced by two women? What compels us to challenge the narratives of feminine sensitivity, tangled in vertical jute and woven skeins? Do we cast away the needles that define these threads? Is it a question of sensitivity, of knowledge, or simply another strand for us to knot and tie?