Vera Lu

A white dress. Ice cream. 

A pink dress. 

A pearl necklace.

Lara Luz

A checkered towel.

Blue gloves up to the elbows.

A glass of champagne.

Tetê Souza

A wig found in the kitchen cupboard.

Long hair, up to the waist.

Raimunda Flor do Campo

Shoes. Green, red, blue, yellow. Each pair lined up as flowers thrown to the ground. 

An accordion.

Glitter.

A shower you take on the street, wet, shiny clothes.

In Serenatas Dançadas [Danced Serenades], we see four women reclaiming their own bodies. How to make them become a dubious and serene matter, how to find in them the murmur of all our most secret desires.

We're inside their houses. We see the physical presence of their bodies in space. We see their kitchens, where the pots hanged in the ceiling glow, reflecting the light that enters through the window. We see the rooms, the photographs, the saints, the flower jars, the wall calendars and the clothes drying up in the garden. We know their spaces and we also know their cravings, the songs they listen to, what they have lived and that they now rescue, through the shivering of their own bodies.

How beautiful it is to reauthorize the body to move the way it asks us to. 

How beautiful it is to reauthorize the dance to inhabit the aged but agile, fertile and vigorous body.

The house becomes a stage, the home environment expands, opening up in infinite possibilities, and the four women also morph, beautify, dress up, play, experiment, dance, feel their body, which is also home, an open house, which lets the morning light in. These women test the limits imposed on their old body, which continues to flourish, in an act of madness and transgression, like the flowers of clothes that dry on the clothesline.

Serenatas Dançadas is a manifesto of freedom and power. We watch these women dancing, knowing that our role as a spectator is not important. Because these women dance without spectators (or, to put it in another way, they preserve for themselves the act of doing and the act of witnessing). If, in fact, it is a serenade, it can only be a serenade addressed to themselves, who move their bodies towards what they want and what they desire. It is a sensual work and it is a political work – to make each woman the matter of her own work, to make women an unlimited space for experiencing the world, the body and the dance.