Santa Maria da Feira, Portugal, Sept. 25, 2025 (Lusa) - The Ballet Contemporâneo do Norte (BCN) celebrates its 30th anniversary in 2025, and after approximately 60 productions, it now aims to establish a permanent home that will facilitate new working dynamics.
The company's artistic director, Susana Otero, told Lusa that although the company is based in Santa Maria da Feira, it doesn't have its own headquarters and spreads its rehearsals and other work across different venues in the Aveiro district and Porto Metropolitan Area, including the António Lamoso Cineteatre, the Santa Maria de Lamas Museum, the Lavandeiras Sports Pavilion, and the Milheirós de Poiares Cultural Centre.
‘After 30 years, it's time we had a home of our own,’ says Susana Otero. ‘We do two big productions a year, but there's a lot of instability in funding and having our own, fixed space would allow us to develop smaller projects, artistic residencies, regular training and parallel activities such as exhibitions - things that don't always have a lot of visibility, but are useful and help form audiences,’ she explains.
The property with the desired conditions has not yet been found. Still, BCN already has a project for what he anticipates as ‘an effervescent centre for various artistic practices, residencies and informal presentations’: it will be called ‘Devoluto’ and aims to create a new community around dance.
"It could be an inactive school, an old warehouse, disused land, or even a building that we can give a new function. What matters is that the building has the conditions to host a “black box”, two rehearsal areas and informal meeting spaces, with a view to developing four residencies and 16 performances a month - including not only dance, but also concerts, theatre shows, conferences and courses in less developed areas," says Susana Otero.
Devoluto should therefore combine the valences of an educational service with those of a laboratory for experimenting with new company models, rotating curatorial programmes and ‘collaborative work processes that challenge traditional hierarchies and value the plurality of knowledge’.
If this can be achieved with financial profitability, so much the better, and not just because all BCN's shows and activities are free (which invalidates box office revenue and increases dependence on support from the Directorate-General for the Arts and the Municipality of Feira), but above all because one of the company's priorities is to ‘ensure decent working conditions for artists, combating precariousness and promoting ethical labour relations’.
Director of the collective since 2011, Susana Otero emphasises that the company, with only two other permanent members - Filipa Duarte and Liliana Claro - often hires other professionals, but prefers to put on ‘fewer productions a year and pay everyone involved fairly than to cut salaries to finance more performances’.
The BCN thus recruits around 20 people for each of its major productions, which on average represents three consecutive months of additional pay and fees for each show re-staged.
Specifically, with regard to the dancers, this professional career development is something that Susana Otero is proud of in the collective's career, founded by Elisa Worm in 1995. Although still an amateur group from Estarreja at the time, it was professionalized in 1997, well before its relocation to Feira in 2007.
‘Back in the 1990s, BCN was very innovative and for me, joining the company was a dream come true,’ she recalls. "It was 2002, I was only 18, and at that time there were no companies in the north of the country, so I could hardly believe that I was going to be able to make a living as a dancer! I'm proof that the social lift is really down to education!" she says.
The passage of 30 years, however, has had negative effects on this optimism, the most obvious being in terms of labour. "Back then we had 10 labour contracts to give out and nobody wanted them. Everyone preferred being a freelancer, they thought it was a guarantee of freedom. Now everyone dreams of a contract, but there's so much instability that it's increasingly rare and, with wars and populism, I don't think it's going to get any better," says the dancer and choreographer.
As for the art itself, after three decades, there are still prejudices, but BCN often works with schools and Susana Otero is hopeful about these contacts: "When people ask us what contemporary dance is and we say it's the way we dance today, in these times, adults aren't satisfied with that answer. Children, on the other hand, understand immediately. They don't need anything else.
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