On 4 July 2026, the Mértola Community Theatre premiered the community production Canção aos Lugares de Encontro at the Marques Duque Cinema-Theatre in Mértola. Since January 2026, the Centre for Art History and Artistic Research (CHAIA) at the University of Évora has been collaborating with the Mértola Community Theatre on the development of the production Canção aos Lugares de Encontro. The production brings together 14 participants from the community.
Over the course of seven months, performing arts artist Rita Sales (co-founder of boa CRIAÇÃO) and Ana Moya (researcher at CHAIA) developed a process of co-creation, artistic mediation and research, devising exercises and workshops with the community that gave rise to the show’s dramaturgical structure.
Canção aos Lugares de Encontro is a celebration and a reflection on the construction of the collective through individual journeys and identities. For it is the encounter that creates the place. The performance explores the different ways of inhabiting a place, recognising that this experience changes depending on who leaves, who stays, who passes through or who returns. We celebrate the universal experience of encountering the other in multiple contexts — intimate, public, symbolic and ritual — whilst preserving its poetic and transformative dimension. Places thus cease to be merely physical spaces and become affective, social and symbolic configurations, where relationships are built and reinvented. We propose a reflection on the transformation that arises from interaction with others. The collective emerges not merely from the simultaneous presence of people, but from the shared interpretation and reframing of objects, gestures, memories and meanings, turning the stage into a living space of connection, belonging and shared creation.