Boca Fala Tropa — Gio Lourenço

Boca Fala Tropa — Gio Lourenço

From a body at various times where memory reinvents itself, Gio Lourenço builds, based on the movements of Kuduro, a biographical itinerary where the body becomes an allegory of memory.
Kuduro appears in the 1990s, in Luanda, in the context of a civil war. The specific codes of this dance style, which expressed the Angolan daily life, reached Portugal through the bodies and cassettes of those who transited between these two countries. It is at this time that the creator becomes a kudurista, the dance steps, the music and the aesthetics of this style, established a codified language that allowed him to maintain a connection to Angola, where he was born and lived until he was 5 years old, when he move to Portugal. Boca Fala Tropa proposes an identity territory displaced from a concrete geography -the transit between Angola and Portugal- starting from the Kuduro movements to cross elements of individual memory, and its inevitable fictions, with elements of collective memory.

About Gio Lourenço

Gio Lourenço was born in Angola in 1987.

He is a resident actor at Teatro GRIOT and has worked, among others, with directors Zia Soares, Rogério de Carvalho, Nuno M Cardoso, Guilherme Mendonça, Bruno Bravo, António Pires and João Fiadeiro. He took the Theater and Animation Course at CERCICA and attended CEM through a grant from the Centro Nacional de Cultura.

His creation “Preta” was selected to be presented at the Holland Pavilion at the 17th Venice Architecture Biennale, rescheduled for 2021. Also within the scope of the same Bienal, he developed, for the Holland Pavilion catalogue, the project “Memória Botânica”, in partnership with photographer Sofia Berberan.

In television he participated in series such as “Equador”, “InspectorMax”, “Ele é Ela”. As a dancer he participated in several music videos. In cinema, he participated in the short films “Filmes e Telemóvel” by Adriano Luz, “Verdade Inconveniente” by Pedro Sebastião and Paulo Cuco, in the documentaries “O Lugar que Ocupas”, directed by Pedro Filipe Marques, and “TEMPESTADES, Ensaio de um Ensaio”. The one by Uli Decker, “A PEDRA” by Ana Lúcia Carvalho, in the feature film, “A Ilha dos Homens”, by Jorge António, and was the protagonist of the short film “Arriaga”, by Welket Bungué.