Extemporânea is a project organized by Balleteatro, with collaborative curatorship by Flávio Rodrigues, Isabel Barros, Jorge Gonçalves, and Né Barros. Held annually, it develops a programme of performances and/or performative installations, inviting artists to articulate their practices in relation to the social, economic, and political context inherent to each edition’s location. Extemporânea seeks to expand notions of choreography and performativity across different social and geographical contexts within the city of Porto. Through a critical and discursive approach, it invites artists to experiment with presentation formats and modes of audience reception, questioning the spatio-temporal experience and the spectrum of possibilities between audience participation and contemplation.

The fourth edition of Extemporânea takes place on 11 July 2026 at the Faculdade de Desporto da Universidade do Porto. The large scale of its infrastructures—pavilions, tracks, fields, and corridors designed to contain and intensify effort—shapes an architecture of both excess and restraint, where the body is organized through regimes of repetition, measurement, and performance. In this place, the scientific codification of gesture and the quantification of performance coexist with a technical memory made up of marks, machines, and rhythms spanning decades. Extemporânea inhabits this space differently, allowing its logics to come into contact with other durations, other forms of attention, and other ways of inhabiting a body. Between training and ritual, between discipline and failure, between norm and its interruption, a space opens up where artists and audiences are invited to rehearse modes of presence that this architecture did not anticipate, but which, precisely because of its scale and strangeness, it makes possible.


Synopsis “Banho Maria”
Carminda Soares and Margarida Montenÿ
Banho Maria takes place in a changing room: a space of transition, preparation, or recovery. Between steam and humidity, two bodies move closer until they lose their contours, like two substances in slow fusion. Inhabited by amplified breathing, reverberation, and prolonged silences, the space becomes a humid architecture between intimacy and exposure, where gestures persist, repeat, and dissolve in a continuous oscillation between symbiosis and collapse.
The changing room becomes a suspended space where bodies slip out of social performance and enter a rawer, more diffuse state.

Notice to the audience: This performance includes moments with high sound levels.
(limited capacity)


Synopsis “Vai e Volta”
Gabriel Cruz and Tiago Pinho
In a space divided by invisible boundaries, two personas coexist side by side, trapped in constant comparison between what they are and what the other appears to possess. Each occupies their own footprint, their own territory, but the desire to reach the other’s space turns into a silent competition marked by envy, rivalry, and the desire for self-overcoming.
Inspired by the world of sports and the tension between rival teams, the duet unfolds through an intense physical language in which the bodies challenge, block, and propel each other.


Synopsis “META”
Ivo Saraiva e Silva and Ricardo Teixeira
META begins with the figure of the artist as an athlete subjected to a continuous regime of performance. Two figures occupy a running track and engage in exercises of effort that transport sport into the field of aesthetic and performative experience.
The cult of a healthy and productive body demands constant discipline: muscles, desires, and ego are all trained. Every gesture becomes construction; every action, an attempt to legitimize a presence. Everything is exercise. Everything is performance. Everything is a construction that legitimizes the context.
By exploring the limits of the body itself, META draws close to contemporary logics of self-exploitation, where personal growth becomes intertwined with mechanisms of productivity and control. The track thus becomes a space of repetition, resistance, and wear, where relentless movement reveals both a pursuit of power and the impossibility of stepping out of the race.