Novas Invasões Festival in Torres Vedras with Germany highlighted
Germany is the guest country of the Novas Invasões Festival, which between August 29th and September 1st recreates the time of the French Invasions in Torres Vedras.
For four days, the festival will have a hundred cultural events not only to recreate the time of the French Invasions 200 years ago, but also to showcase the innovation of cultural agents and other cultures.
Among the national productions, there is the premiere of the community opera ‘It is possible to resist’, by the Association of Opera and Contemporary Arts.
With libretto by Rui Zink, music by Luis Soldado and staging by Linda Valadas, the opera brings together 80 people, from professionals, students and members of the city’s artistic and cultural associations.
In this third edition, 12 companies from four countries and local cultural associations will present five projects conceived for the festival, after the artistic creation incentive scholarships launched by the City Council, which organizes the event.
Germany takes to the festival artistic productions and a cycle of culture, with events of gastronomy, literature, dance, and music.
From this country participate the company Theather Titanick, for the third time in Portugal in 20 years, with a production inspired by the medieval imagination and the painting of Hieronymus Bosh; Photini Meletiadis, with the dance performance “Tao”; and the reproduction of the video of a ballet created by Oskar Slemer, teacher of the Bauhaus art school.
The writer Paulo Condessa will also ride the festival on a bicycle, bringing in his luggage poems and quotes from German authors.
From Spain, the company Cia Holoqué, with a show of holographic puppets, the exhibition of the documentary of Phillipp Hartman and also Jean Phillipe Kikolas, appears in a show that combines clown techniques with circus arts.
France is represented by the company Cie with the performance “Les Irreéls”, inviting visitors to experience the camp inhabited by unreal beings, and the production “The Last Moment”, presented in 2006 at the Festival d’Avignon.
Portugal is also known through the puppet theater, taken to the festival by the companies A Bolha and Pia, the latter presenting a show with large puppets.
During the four days, the artist Gil Ferrão will build a sculpture from objects found in the city streets, so that the piece will be permanently exposed in Machado Santos Square after the event.
The program also features a nineteenth-century market, with 70 stalls, from taverns to live craft recreation spaces and vendors, and permanent animations with bagpipes and ethnographic groups.
The festival, with events taking place in forts, in the castle, in associations, and in the streets and squares of the historic center, also has workshops, lighting parades, traditional games, horse and donkey rides, and storytelling.
During the four days, the organization expects more than 32 thousand visitors, the number of the 2017 edition (the festival is biennial).
With the event, the municipality intends to boost the historic center of the city, take advantage of refurbished public spaces and enrich the cultural offer with the tourists in mind.
