“First as a dancer who dances 'the saudade', I felt the grandness and emptiness of such feeling at each fold made by my body.

Fate didn’t allow me to keep playing this role, and injured, I became a scenographer.

The director wanted to bring tsurus (origami birds) to the scene, so as to bond the folds in both paper and the bodies as a materialization of what life and time bring us. Starting from there, I sketched possible visual aspects for the scene.

In a suspended mobile, these birds, a symbol of hope and accomplishment of a desire, go down from the peak of the scene little by little. In a subtle and indistinguishable manner at first, they pass through, stop, fly, land, and compose a flock.

Using tsurus to talk about 'saudade' gave me the impression of building such feeling over a ballast of hope.

Therefore, this flock – white, neutral, pacific – dances along with the performers, while some red tsurus hide themselves amidst the audience.

Ultimately, they all shine in blue, the coldest of cold colors, thus representing the sensation of saudade. It’s the color of the sky, and also that of spirit and thought. It reassures and represents the night. A symbol of subtlety, ideal, and dream.

A bunch of time and birds, a bunch of 'saudade', it’s also a mountain of desires that, somewhere out there, allow the lacking part to also feel the grandness of our love."

(Ana Clara Joly)