CasaFloresta is a performance by the duo Joana Sá & Luís J Martins with video by Lucas Tavares, created within the scope of the project with the same name developed by the collective à escuta in 2022. After working on both ends of Serra da Estrela with different communities and several collaborators throughout the summer of 2022, the performance invites spectators, in the urban centers, to listen and to relate to these territories, their multiple voices and their (de)forest, seeking to make tangible and close what is apparently distant.

A stage is a stage is a stage is a piano is a piano is a guitar but not that much.
Listen closely

On a forest-stage, the instruments of Joana Sá (piano & others) and Luís J Martins (multiple guitars and others) intertwine with audio recordings and video (Lucas Tavares) made throughout the project, unfolding, recasting and surfacing the complexity of the relationships established with the forest. Stemming from traces, textures, memories of these relationships, CasaFloresta dismantles the notion of an opposition between Casa/House (inside) and Floresta/Forest (foris, outside).
How to conceive one without the other?

The performance is usually presented together with the installation Anti-mapa; floresta/ Forest: Anti-map by à escuta collective.

Co-production: TBA Teatro do Bairro Alto, Jazz ao Centro, Casa da Cultura de Seia

À escuta (listening) is an artistic collective – Joana Sá, Luís J Martins, Corinna Lawrenz, Lucas Tavares, Ana Viana – that works (mostly) in territories of the Serra da Estrela Natural Park (PT), proposing an inter/transdisciplinary reflection on the past, present and future of these territories. Intimately connected with a notion of ‘listening’ as a resonant relation with the ‘other’, its artistic projects involve local communities, collaborators from different scientific areas, local civic movements and artists.

More information at www.aescuta.pt

In 2020-21 the project ‘Poetic catalogue’ was developed by à escuta in the tiny and beautiful village of Frádigas. Carried out with the local community, scientific partners - CISE and Estrela GEOPARK - and the civic movement MEV-Movimento Estrela Viva, it sought to reflect on the global scale phenomena of climate change and environmental and social problems, through the local scale of concrete and tangible relations established with the territory. The project had a final presentation in the village of Frádigas in a four-day festival with numerous presentations and activities - performances, installations, meetings, interpretive tours, an assembly, a workshop, a market with local farmers and producers.

From the meetings between elements of the project and its partners, different voices and multidisciplinary perspectives about the village and the Serra da Estrela Natural Park were either recorded or collected in maps, notebooks, and posters traced, manipulated and developed by each intervening member of the local community and the scientific community. In connection with these meetings, perspectives and materials, the musicians Joana Sá and Luís J Martins and the Camposaz architecture and self-construction collective/workshop conceived and developed a set of installations/performances.

These installations/performances were conceived as fragmentary works, non-linear paths in terms of space and time. An installation is developed in relation to a specific performance and site, and, while the performance necessarily occurs in a given moment in time, the installation, though ephemeral, can have a longer lifespan, enduring as a remnant of that performance or relationship.

The poetic catalogue will be made up of fragmentary works that relate and resonate with each other, even though they are scattered around the village… waiting, from a distance, to be discovered by the spectators’ eager eyes and ears.

www.aescuta.pt

Nearly. Nearly a song, somewhat familiar. Nearly comfortable, almost  fulfilling. The melody stays ever-open, indefinite, and then the song departs, breaks, never arrives. It's not surrender, it’s a game, open to the listener. The avant-garde replaced musical statements with this new desire to offer something to the ear: the sustained notes of the "Sarabanda" never lodging in the periphery of memory, the dissolving of pitch into percussion, the repetition of musical cells, the loops, the ever different superimposed patterns, the changing textures and the suspension of climax… but for how long? Almost a Song is still a duo. And not only between guitar and piano. This in spite of the electroacoustic ramifications and of the instruments being - without losing the acoustic strength of their gestures- sometimes nearly swallowed by their own sound.

Joana Sá and Luís José Martins formed a duo in 2000 dedicated to the interpretation of contemporary music. They have developed numerous projects together amongst which the collective POWERTRIO with harpist Eduardo Raon. Luís José Martins is a member of the group Deolinda and Joana Sá has developed mostly solo work, namely Through this Looking Glass.
Artistic pathways converging at this game of pleasure and freedom, which is Almost a Song.

Guilherme Proença

For this singular and poetic celebration, Joana Sá & Luís J Martins created and performed the exhilarating musical performance ‘Almost a Songbook’- moving between and intertwining Cage’s iconic ‘Songbooks’ and the duo’s work ‘Almost a song’. They were joined by the great baritone Jorge Martins.