heading against the wall

In Autumn 2020, Cão Solteiro invited me to Lisbon to make a performance at Lux Frágil—a nightclub that, for a time, couldn’t be used for dancing. It was a lull in the pandemic, a period marked by distance, latency, and speculative connection.

The work emerged from questions: how do you begin something with people you’ve just met? What does collaboration mean when bodies remain apart? The result was a performance with no script and no fixed ground—a loose exchange of questions and responses that unfolded in development and onstage, tracing the beginnings of a relationship through repetition, misalignment and distortion.

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Heading Against the Wall unfolds in two forms: a live performance in a nightclub and a simultaneously broadcast online film. Spectators can only choose one. Both are structured around the same score—a sequence of unheard questions and unscripted replies offered by three performers.

The piece sits in a space between public and private, presence and absence, theatrical and virtual, what is heard and what is experienced. Across these layers, Heading Against the Wall becomes a staging of disorientation, intimacy, estrangement, and porousness. The more you find out, the less you know.

“This is a show about borders. This is a show about borders which become saturated and overflow. This is a show about borders which became saturated, overflow and enter bodies. This is a show about bodies. This is a show about bodies heading against the wall. And then, they die.”
— Maria Sequeira Mendes, Pastoral, Book of Texts