Mula
Mula
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Mula
Mula

ℳ𝓊𝓁𝒶 was born as an independent political gesture, affirming the importance of independent artistic spaces, practices, and communities in Porto as vital infrastructures for critical thinking, artistic experimentation, and community building, choosing gathering as a form of resistance. This pilot edition takes place around the spring equinox, a moment of balance between day and night, light and shadow, consciously marking the passage of time and placing encounter and coexistence at the heart of artistic practice. It honors everything that is prepared and aligned during the night.

ℳ𝓊𝓁𝒶 happens between sunset and sunrise, claiming the night as a space for preparation, restoration, dreaming, leisure, plotting, and transformation. Celebrating the equinox is a gesture of orientation: affirming a preference for transitional and moving spaces, and the right to set our own rhythms, to choose how we occupy spaces, bringing the body and dance back to the center.

In Portuguese popular ballads and songbooks, the influence of temporal markers - seasons, agricultural cycles, and religious rituals - is clear in the nature, origin, and performativity of different songs and poems. Popular artistic expressions are deeply rooted in communal life. The fixation of time has its roots in a religious practice that appropriated pagan rituals - by co-opting agricultural and nature communion rituals into canonical and monastic prayers. In the northwest of Portugal, however, this practice has always remained linked to themes of popular culture, often associated with orally transmitted ballads.

Attention to time resonates in certain Portuguese popular traditions, particularly the orientation around a solar liturgy in the organization of the workday, where natural cycles, seasons, agricultural rhythms, and religious rituals shaped the function and performativity of work songs in oral tradition. In northwest Portugal, the timing of collective singing during the agricultural workday shows the intimate connection between artistic practice, communal life, and communion with nature. ℳ𝓊𝓁𝒶 continues this lineage: a contemporary practice that sees the past not as nostalgia but as a tool to imagine new ways of being together, now.

Independence here is not an adjective but an essential condition for the living development of a city, where different temporalities, bodies, and practices can coexist and transform. These spaces and gestures function as breathing zones, allowing for experimentation with other forms of encounter, creation, and audience engagement. Outside the logics of formal representation, ℳ𝓊𝓁𝒶 seeks to maintain a porous, sensitive, and ever-changing city. Autonomy is assumed as a concrete, shared practice.

ℳ𝓊𝓁𝒶 is a weekend–festival–gathering focused on dance and its hybrid languages, spanning continuous, astral, oracular, and temporal readings. By weaving together spaces and people, it affirms conviviality as an artistic and political practice. Performing arts are understood here as modes of resisting abstraction and producing presence. We refuse rigid separations between artists and audiences. ℳ𝓊𝓁𝒶 exists in the in-between, as an undisciplined body, as a space of friction and crossing. We don’t celebrate an innocent beginning but a conscious restart: a gesture of informal organization, collective imagination, and relational permanence.

ℳ𝓊𝓁𝒶 does not aim to grow into something else. It does not intend to replace or represent but to gather and add. It seeks to root and sustain a vital ecosystem for a culturally active and relevant city.

By embracing hybrid formats, zones of contamination between disciplines, languages, and ways of doing, ℳ𝓊𝓁𝒶 champions an artistic and curatorial vision that sees the evolution of performing arts as an open, sensitive, and necessarily undisciplined process. We believe artistic experience is not exhausted by explanatory or pedagogical models, increasingly dominant and prone to reducing the complexity and plurality of audience experience. On the contrary, we aim to preserve the space of the unspeakable, the ambiguous, and the affective. ℳ𝓊𝓁𝒶 also insists on the urgency of less formal, less bureaucratic modes of production and access to culture, prioritizing direct relationships, economies of care, and formats based on trust, presence, and shared time.

ℳ𝓊𝓁𝒶 carries symbolism spanning multiple traditions. Etymologically, it refers to origin and roots. The mule, a hybrid working animal, evokes resilience, strength, and resistance, carrying stories and memories across time and space. Celebrated when day and night are almost equal, ℳ𝓊𝓁𝒶 marks a beginning around the central star, inviting the creation of a space where the moving body is at the center.


Cristina Planas Leitão
& Luísa Saraiva

Mula
Mula
Mula
Mula

ℳ𝓊𝓁𝒶 was born as an independent political gesture, affirming the importance of independent artistic spaces, practices, and communities in Porto as vital infrastructures for critical thinking, artistic experimentation, and community building, choosing gathering as a form of resistance. This pilot edition takes place around the spring equinox, a moment of balance between day and night, light and shadow, consciously marking the passage of time and placing encounter and coexistence at the heart of artistic practice. It honors everything that is prepared and aligned during the night.

ℳ𝓊𝓁𝒶 happens between sunset and sunrise, claiming the night as a space for preparation, restoration, dreaming, leisure, plotting, and transformation. Celebrating the equinox is a gesture of orientation: affirming a preference for transitional and moving spaces, and the right to set our own rhythms, to choose how we occupy spaces, bringing the body and dance back to the center.

In Portuguese popular ballads and songbooks, the influence of temporal markers - seasons, agricultural cycles, and religious rituals - is clear in the nature, origin, and performativity of different songs and poems. Popular artistic expressions are deeply rooted in communal life. The fixation of time has its roots in a religious practice that appropriated pagan rituals - by co-opting agricultural and nature communion rituals into canonical and monastic prayers. In the northwest of Portugal, however, this practice has always remained linked to themes of popular culture, often associated with orally transmitted ballads.

Attention to time resonates in certain Portuguese popular traditions, particularly the orientation around a solar liturgy in the organization of the workday, where natural cycles, seasons, agricultural rhythms, and religious rituals shaped the function and performativity of work songs in oral tradition. In northwest Portugal, the timing of collective singing during the agricultural workday shows the intimate connection between artistic practice, communal life, and communion with nature. ℳ𝓊𝓁𝒶 continues this lineage: a contemporary practice that sees the past not as nostalgia but as a tool to imagine new ways of being together, now.

Independence here is not an adjective but an essential condition for the living development of a city, where different temporalities, bodies, and practices can coexist and transform. These spaces and gestures function as breathing zones, allowing for experimentation with other forms of encounter, creation, and audience engagement. Outside the logics of formal representation, ℳ𝓊𝓁𝒶 seeks to maintain a porous, sensitive, and ever-changing city. Autonomy is assumed as a concrete, shared practice.

ℳ𝓊𝓁𝒶 is a weekend–festival–gathering focused on dance and its hybrid languages, spanning continuous, astral, oracular, and temporal readings. By weaving together spaces and people, it affirms conviviality as an artistic and political practice. Performing arts are understood here as modes of resisting abstraction and producing presence. We refuse rigid separations between artists and audiences. ℳ𝓊𝓁𝒶 exists in the in-between, as an undisciplined body, as a space of friction and crossing. We don’t celebrate an innocent beginning but a conscious restart: a gesture of informal organization, collective imagination, and relational permanence.

ℳ𝓊𝓁𝒶 does not aim to grow into something else. It does not intend to replace or represent but to gather and add. It seeks to root and sustain a vital ecosystem for a culturally active and relevant city.

By embracing hybrid formats, zones of contamination between disciplines, languages, and ways of doing, ℳ𝓊𝓁𝒶 champions an artistic and curatorial vision that sees the evolution of performing arts as an open, sensitive, and necessarily undisciplined process. We believe artistic experience is not exhausted by explanatory or pedagogical models, increasingly dominant and prone to reducing the complexity and plurality of audience experience. On the contrary, we aim to preserve the space of the unspeakable, the ambiguous, and the affective. ℳ𝓊𝓁𝒶 also insists on the urgency of less formal, less bureaucratic modes of production and access to culture, prioritizing direct relationships, economies of care, and formats based on trust, presence, and shared time.

ℳ𝓊𝓁𝒶 carries symbolism spanning multiple traditions. Etymologically, it refers to origin and roots. The mule, a hybrid working animal, evokes resilience, strength, and resistance, carrying stories and memories across time and space. Celebrated when day and night are almost equal, ℳ𝓊𝓁𝒶 marks a beginning around the central star, inviting the creation of a space where the moving body is at the center.


Cristina Planas Leitão
& Luísa Saraiva

Mula
Mula