Frente e Verso: Úlulu

‘Úlulu’ means placenta in Forro or Lúngwa Santomé. According to an ancient ritual of São Tomé culture, the úlulu is planted, along with the umbilical cord, in the family’s large backyard. Thus, according to the older generations, children grow up and travel the world, but they always know how to return to the land where they were born.
In this performance, three creator-creatures evoke music, movement, poetry, and landscape in search of bonds of transmission and nourishment, while they speculate and repeat rituals to harmonize collapse and regeneration, and raise questions: What if belonging to non-human geographies is a solution in the face of impending extinction? How can we do so without losing the memory of rituals useful for this transmutation? Where can we leave clues for a possible escape toward return? — Raquel Lima

Frente e Verso cycle invites a prismatic gaze, a cross-perspective, based on the premise that we coexist in the same Time—we are Contemporaries—and, therefore, are troubled by similar themes, which we address through narratives and vocabularies that arise from this same historical context.