Assemblage is ASSEMB’s latest creation and comes as a follow-up to the project Viagem Sentimental (Sentimental Journey), which began in 2017. Francisco Camacho has travelled to various regions and realities of the country, producing performances that are always different but with a common working methodology, based on research in each of the geographical areas visited.If the various sentimental journeys had been intentional and conceived within a framework of ephemerality, whose public presentations only made sense in the geographical context that had motivated them, the choreographer was instead accumulating a creative repertoire to which it would have been regrettable not to give continuity. Thus, at a time of increased attention to sustainability issues, Assemblage is also part of a strategy to recover and valorise the professional and artistic investment made over the years. The operation is carried out with a view to sharing, with the artist bringing together a group of creators with whom he has explored new configurations for the previously elaborated performance materials and, once again, in the company of Hugo Coelho, who has collaborated since the beginning of Viagem Sentimental in the areas of light and video, as well as in the scenographic and sound aspects.

Based on the choreographer’s encounters with various places, this creation is not intended to be a sociological or ethnographic treatise, nor a review of the account of those journeys. The main focus is the choreographic material, the language of movement that these forays into the territories brought out.

Although the artist does not shy away from a critical view of the different realities encountered, the reworking of these local traits has been undertaken to create a performance that addresses identity and its construction, challenging the narratives and symbolic places in which communities are located.

The set of themes that Assemblage traverses includes the tension between tradition and modernity, the increasing gentrification of cities, migration, and self-care, oscillating between critical perspective and opportunities for irony, without losing sight of the evocation of small pleasures and the will to move forward.