In the solo choreographer Vera Mantero performs in the 24^th edition of Festival Panorama we hear Gilles Deleuze saying that a body must be defined by its power to affect and be affected. This year’s program takes the liberty to expand this idea to a body that feels the other, the passage of time, the listening of the most hidden discourses in life and in the city.

In this difficult year for Brazil and for the world, at a time when the confrontation of ideas is so polarized, Panorama strengthens its role in articulating geographies, artistic visions and utopias. On stage, in the garden, on the streets, in the classroom, on the beach. The body is an arena of movement and words, a clash of languages in which the strongest doesn’t always win and, as the festival will have it, everyone can have a voice.

A program spread throughout all regions of Rio, this changing post-card that is the festival’s home, inspiration and challenge. The occupation of the streets and squares has grown, received the name of Panorama in the Carioca landscape and opens more windows for the residents that go by and build this body that, deep down, is the geographic body of the city. We arrive at Parque de Madureira for the first time; we go back to Cinelândia and Campo de Santana.

The relationships between movement, word and discourse are evident in many of this edition’s pieces, in various formats. Another network of relationships between languages received a special program in our first occupation of Sala Cecília Meireles: dance and music as composition processes.

Moroccan cabaret singers, inmates of the Brazilian prison system, different kinds of artists. Voices of women that don’t choose between dancing and speaking. Imagining the other, imagining the world through the other’s gaze. Be it at Centro de Artes da Maré, at Centro Cultural Banco do Brasil, on Ipanema beach. Babies, elderly ladies, young people and adults are invited to stop for a while and be together. Experimenting being affected.

We open the festival at Parque Lage, our partner in adventures for the last five years. We celebrate the anniversary of Oi Futuro, this visionary project that completes ten years of life and partnership. Another partnership of many years carries on with us: Contax. We are once again together with Rio’s City Hall, the Culture Secretariat and their cultural venues. This year we celebrate the 450 years of the city with premieres of Carioca artists and a debate about history and dance. Petrobras is another company celebrating ten years of Panorama.

We close the program at Cidade das Artes, a cultural center that was able to overflow the monumental scale of its architecture with a bold open program that redesigned Rio’s landscape, just like its building. This is the third year of Panorama Carioca na Cidade das Artes, which invited two local artists to create specially for the space.

This whole network of affections and effects bets on the unexpected, on what doesn’t fit, on what makes the public think differently about different things. Above all, it bets on the famous saying of American writer and activist Alice Walker: hard times require furious dancing.

Nayse López, Renata Pimenta, Renato Saraiva and Santi Elias

Directors