Corpo + Cidade was born in 2014, the year when balleteatro moved into the 5th floor of the Axa building. Over the years, as an integral part of its project, balleteatro has produced cycles and festivals that have contributed to the dissemination and sharing of projects that engage with contemporaneity. Corpo + Cidade emerged from this pulse of life and art that can run through everyday life. In the Axa building — overlooking Avenida dos Aliados, the so-called heart of the city — there arose the desire to reflect that city, to artistically contaminate it by projecting dancing bodies and image-makers, blurring the line that separates the audience from the performer.

We envisioned entering the current of the everyday lives of passers-by and, in some way, slowing them down, provoking, delighting, and allowing them to enjoy the dynamics and fluidity that define public space.

The view of the Avenue and its movement from that space/home inspired the creation of a Festival for public space. Body + City set out to take part in the reinvention of the city, enabling new urban experiences and bringing together contemporary dance, urban dances, performance, contemporary circus, music, and visual arts.

In 2016, Corpo + Cidade joined forces with DDD – Festival Dias da Dança, beginning to present its programming proposals for public space within this major international contemporary dance festival, organized by the Department of Performing Arts of Ágora – Cultura Desporto E.M., Porto City Council, and co-organized by the Municipalities of Matosinhos and Vila Nova de Gaia.

More than a programme of selections, Corpo + Cidade is completed and comes into being through affinities and through responses to the motivations of artists who imagine their creations in less common or habitual places. Corpo + Cidade aims to be a meeting point between creators, spaces (where the sun, the wind and the rain can embrace us), and their communities — a triad in which we believe and which we hope, through experimentation and the passage of time, will allow us to grow and strengthen within the territory of what we, with great respect and dedication, call Art.

The essence of Corpo + Cidade — performance in public space — returns in the 2026 edition, with a diversity of proposals and artists who will inhabit spaces across the three cities of Porto,Matosinhos and Vila Nova de Gaia, renewing the natural closeness to people in a conscious gesture of invitation to this shared experience of participation and living the city.