We’re back!

23/07/2020

The 2020 edition of the Cumplicidades Festival kicked off on March 6, after the Dance Passport section was held, being interrupted in less than a week after the Covid-19 pandemic outbreak.

We were happy with the vibrant energy at the start of this edition, which had a huge audience and created an enriching dynamic for the city.

This joy was twice overshadowed, not only because the pandemic affected the lives of so many people, but also because it has exposed more crudely the difficult conditions of subsistence of the majority of those who make dance happen in Portugal. The precarity that afflicts the artistic milieu was evident in the context of this emergency, aggravated by the absence of measures to safeguard the despair of many workers in the cultural sector.

We believe that it is important to re-establish the conditions so that artists and other professionals associated with the 2020 edition of the festival resume their activity, wanting and being able to do so. It is in that sense that we’ve been working since March, and thinking also on how important it is to reactivate, attentively and within the current circumstances, the cultural dimension of social meeting in physical spaces.

Thus, it is with enthusiasm that we announce that Cumplicidades’ programme will resume this year, happening at different times, in conjunction with the festival’s partners. There will be a first moment between September and October this year, and a second, and last, between February and March 2021.

The circumstances will necessarily be different when we resume, and always susceptible to unforeseen circumstances arising from the evolution of the pandemic. This return does not reflect a militancy for the new normal, not least because we don’t believe that there was a normality before. But it seems to us that the artistic dimension will always be essential in this ceaseless work of building the world and determine what we want it to be.

July 2020,
Francisco Camacho, André Guedes and the festival team