E MAR ANHA DO is Penelope’ shroud, constantly undone, constantly renewed by 11 different hands (22, because like the hands, we are always double); hands that have never touched each other and that are limited to an intangible and virtual environment.

A mosaic of lives, arranged in small rectangles, as if the body couldn’t fit in such a small space. Here the body is a place of pain, sorrow, confusion, but also of desire, reinvention, performativity and freedom. As is referenced in the film, the figure of the chimera seems to protect the 11 Brazilian artists, strengthening a multiple and aggregating nature, but that never fades the differences, expanding them. 

Dance becomes a territory of sharing worlds, pains and discoveries. The virtual platform that served as meeting point for these artists imposed limits on how they expressed their body and its relationship with the look of the Other. Sometimes, instructions are needed – "A little forward, a little backwards" – so that the body can be seen in the infamous digital rectangle. This dialogue is also another form of mediation, another way of interacting, facing the judgment of the Other, of the Other’s body. Through the small rectangles, we see arms, legs, mouths, teeth, tongues, genitals multiplying; wet, covered with saliva and dust, dye or semen. The substance is not important, if all its characteristics are nullified when confronted with the sterile truth of the machine. 

There are hesitations, setbacks, restarts, readjustments dictated by the virtual environment. And there are also tears, confessions, promises and desires. Childhood photographs are shown, stories are told, and something extraordinary happens: the image that each one is, in each device, overlaps with the image that each one reveals, through the chosen photograph, and we do not know which of these images is more real or virtual; we look and we have the feeling that each artist is a double of the other, like a reflection caught stealthily in any piece of mirror.

The isolation of the body we’ve experienced during the pandemic has given way to another form of sensitive interaction – movement continues to perpetuate itself in time and space, as a spectrum, and brings with it its human non-communicable vulnerability even more present.