New Graces Festival Lisbon

The AAIS collective brings forth their festival ‘New Graces’ in collaboration with Teatro Aberto in Lisbon, Portugal, through the 29^th of May to the 3^rd of June. The festival situates a discourse on the fidelity that individuals have towards their idiosyncrasies and intimacies as a contestable entity when pitted against the epistemic understanding of what is considered to be graceful. Employing the Portuguese play ‘Three Women in Iron Mask’ by Augustina Bessa Luis as an overarching framework the cohort delves deeper into the promiscuity of what being a grace and graceful is as an ontology, and also as a methodology to conjure contemporary art.

Through a series of workshops, seminars, and performances, we negotiate a moulting/shedding of a lascivious fringe. Even though our discussions belong to the realm of capriciousness, our modus operandi is to prostrate them as deftly as possible. The festival shall culminate with a series of performative events ‘Moult’ encompassing three evenings from the 1^st to the 3^rd of June, where the current cohort of the AAIS, acting within four spinster groups and simultaneously as a collective craft and performatively present productions namely ‘Metamorph’, ‘Parding your Beggon’, ‘SEEN’, and ‘Partita’ at Teatro Aberto, that maneuvers certain intimate affections oozing in and acting as a glue within their observed and lived social kinesthetics.

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