Biennial Programme

11 September – 15 October

Lisboa

Cinemateca Portuguesa

13 September – 23 October

Madrid

Filmoteca Española

cinema

João Pedro Rodrigues, João Rui Guerra da Mata

Malamor / Tainted Love

“Malamor / Tainted Love” is the name of the film cycle that brings together the BoCA, the Cinemateca Portuguesa and the Filmoteca Española, in a collaboration dedicated to cinema as an affective, political and unclassifiable territory.

12 – 14 September

Lisboa

Centro Cultural de Belém

opera

Dino D’Santiago

Adilson

More than an individual, Adilson represents thousands of people left on the margins of the system. The opera turns waiting into poetry and turns invisibility into an act of resistance.

13 – 14 September

Lisboa

Sala Estúdio Valentim de Barros / Jardins do Bombarda (TNDM II)

performance

Julián Pacomio

Toda la Luz del Mediodía

The second part of a long-term trilogy, this project explores the moment of midday, where intense, vertical light brings both clarity and weight. The work investigates the transition from excess energy to stillness, from exposure to fading, translating into choreography the tension between heat, rest, and visibility.

19 – 20 September

Lisboa

Culturgest

Theatre, performance

Tianzhuo Chen, Siko Setyanto

Ocean Cage

An immersive performance combining installation, dance, and film, inspired by the traditions of Lamalera, Indonesia. It explores ecology, spirituality, and interdependent relationships between species, in a sensory experience where ancestral rituals intersect with visions of the future.

20 – 21 September

Lisboa

Sala Estúdio Valentim de Barros / Jardins do Bombarda (TNDM II)

Theatre

Kiluanji Kia Henda

Coral of Bodies without North

In the theater show “Coral dos Corpos sem Norte”, Kiluanji Kia Henda thinks of migration as a process of the pemba. Going as coming back. The journey as a stay in place. A curse that accompanies us at every step and takes us back to where we started.

22 September

Madrid

Nave de Terneras del Centro Cultural Casa del Reloj

27 – 28 September

Lisboa

Carpintarias de São Lázaro

Dance

Elena Córdoba, Francisco Camacho

Uma ficção na dobra do mapa

A reunion between two choreographers, returning to a dialog that began ten years ago, where memory and the body are living archives. Based on the idea of inhabiting each other, this project revisits the deep sharing between the two, now aware of the transformations of time and the way the past resonates in the present.

1 October

Lisboa

Cinema Fernando Lopes

performance, cinema

Ana Pérez-Quiroga

¿De qué casa eres?

Alongside the film screening, in the performance created for BoCA 2025, “De qué casa eres? – performance #1”, this cartography of memory steps out onto the stage. A games table, a lampshade, a bench: objects that recreate the intimacy of home and a place of leisure.

3 October

Lisboa

CAM - Centro de Arte Moderna Gulbenkian

9 October

Madrid

Museo del Traje

conferência, performance

Pedro G. Romero, Niño de Elche

Descomposición/Choro

This conference-performance assumes itself as a listening to the border that refuses its connotation as a line of separation, but embraces it as a vibrant zone of encounters and tensions, where music, language and collective practices continue to (re)write stories to come.

3 – 4 October

Madrid

Teatro de la Abadía

25 – 26 October

Lisboa

Teatro do Bairro Alto

Theatre

Alberto Cortés, João Gabriel

Os Rapazes da Praia Adoro

A creation that brings together theatre and painting to explore the intimate encounter between two male bodies — one Portuguese, the other Spanish — on an imaginary beach somewhere between Lisbon and Madrid. This symbolic place becomes a space of connection and healing, where intimacy and desire intertwine, evoking memories of 1970s and 80s pornographic cinema. The piece proposes alternative ways of understanding male sexuality, marked by delicacy, poetry, and the need for affection.

4 October

Lisboa

Fundação Calouste Gulbenkian / Anfiteatro ao ar livre

11 October

Madrid

Museo del Traje

Concert

Niño de Elche, Pedro G. Romero

El cante rasgueado

In the ‘stripe’ that separates — or unites — the south of Portugal, Huelva and Extremadura, sound operates as a link in a chain between geographies and histories. There we hear the cante alentejano with its viola campaniças, the fandango cané in Alosno chanted by groups of men over the incessant strumming of guitars, or even the luso-extremaduran tangos and jaleos handed down by Portuguese Romani communities.

4 October

Lisboa

Espaço BoCA

Concert, performance

Tristany Mundu

Essays from a city around a city

“Ensaios de uma cidade volta de uma cidade” is an acoustic performance that proposes a sensitive reflection on the movements of the city and its margins.

9 October

Lisboa

Espaço BoCA

Concert, performance

Deborah Krystall

Romi Ibérica

At BoCA Bienal, Romi Ibérica is presented as a concert-performance, revealing the rigour and inventiveness that Deborah Krystall has been asserting for decades at the iconic Finalmente Club in Lisbon. An invitation to breathe in the living memory of the Iberian axis, where every song and every gesture carries the indomitable beauty of a destiny that is sung to continue to exist.

10 October

Lisboa

A Voz do Operário

Concert, performance

Chrystabell

The Spirit Lamp

Chrystabell presents “The Spirit Lamp”, a show that transports us to a territory where music and image become luminescence, mapped by the creative memory of David Lynch.

11 – 12 October

Lisboa

MAAT – Museu de Arte, Arquitetura e Tecnologia

Workshop, Dance

Elena Córdoba

Anatomia poética: o calor vital dos vivos

Over two days, Elena Córdoba invites participants to focus on an element that is often invisible, yet remains essential: heat. Heat as the fundamental movement of life. As a silent language. Produced and dissipated continuously — by the skin, by breathing, by hairs — here heat is explored as choreographic material and relational medium.

15 October

Lisboa

Cinemateca Portuguesa

23 October

Madrid

Filmoteca Española

cinema

João Pedro Rodrigues, João Rui Guerra da Mata

13 Alfinetes

Commissioned by BoCA, “13 Alfinetes” is the new film by João Pedro Rodrigues and João Rui Guerra da Mata, a work of fiction that blends devotion, desire and spectres. Drawing inspiration from a miracle attributed to Santo António and filtered through the restless gaze of the two directors, the film draws on this legend to construct a contemporary tale of faith, revenge and disillusionment.

16 October

Lisboa

Teatro da Garagem / Teatro Taborda

17 October

Madrid

Sala Berlanga

Concert, Music

Tânia Carvalho, Rocío Guzmán

Nossas Mãos / Nuestras Manos

This encounter reveals not the fusion but the coexistence of the Portuguese and Spanish artists, between melancholy and force, between the fragility of gestures and the power of presence.

16 October

Lisboa

8 Marvila

performance, Dance

Candela Capitán

SOLAS

The performance “SOLAS” addresses the overexposure of the female body in the digital age. Five performers, five computers and a streaming platform share the same space - physical and virtual - in a choreographic device where a group of female performers contemplate themselves while being observed, in a staging that confronts the gaze, repetition and surveillance.

17 – 18 October

Madrid

Réplika Teatro

performance, cinema, Music

Raquel André

Belonging | E di | Pertenencia | Zugehörigkeit | Pertença | 絆

Meeting people, getting to know their personal stories, their lives, their memories full of future. This show, which could be a performance film, suggests an immersion in the complexity of the idea of belonging.

18 October

Lisboa

Espaço BoCA

Concert, Music

Maria Reis

Suspiro…

Moving between acoustic and electric guitars, distilled rhythms and suspended vocal harmonies, she creates songs that are at once confession and invitation, crossing fragility with pop luminosity.

24 – 25 October

Lisboa

Academia das Ciências de Lisboa

Dance

La Veronal

TOTENTANZ - Morgen ist die frage

A show conceived for unconventional spaces where death — that age-old figure, feared yet fascinating — takes centre stage. Drawing inspiration from the medieval tradition of danse macabre (“dance of death”), the performance invokes a collective ritual for our times: a nameless mourning, a meditation on the fragility of life and its indiscernable end.

25 October

Lisboa

Panteão Nacional

Concert, Dance

Aurora Bauzà & Pere Jou

A BEGINNING #16161D

Five dancer-singers bearing portable lamps breathe, walk and talk, in a composition where the body that sings dissociates itself from the body that moves

Past events

Malamor / Tainted Love

Adilson

Toda la Luz del Mediodía

Ocean Cage

Coral of Bodies without North

Uma ficção na dobra do mapa

¿De qué casa eres?

Descomposición/Choro

Os Rapazes da Praia Adoro

El cante rasgueado

Essays from a city around a city

Romi Ibérica

The Spirit Lamp

Anatomia poética: o calor vital dos vivos

13 Alfinetes

Nossas Mãos / Nuestras Manos

SOLAS

Belonging | E di | Pertenencia | Zugehörigkeit | Pertença | 絆

Suspiro…

TOTENTANZ - Morgen ist die frage

A BEGINNING #16161D