4 minute pitch video

Ballast

Performance (concept proposal)

2026 —

"A fascist worked out today. Have you?" 
"Your ultimate gym motivation: a weak working class is easier to control!" 
— from left-wing gym influencers on Instagram

I started going to the gym a few years ago — a cheap chain, 19,99€ a month — very reluctantly. I had always seen it as a place where one went to become a normative capitalist template. My back pain decided otherwise. What I found was unexpectedly fun and tender, and one of the most genuinely mixed social spaces I had ever been part of: overwhelmingly migrants of all backgrounds, trans people, blind people, very different social classes. A space that flattened some hierarchies.

I also go to raves regularly, and more recently to street protests. I feel I have no alternative. Demonstrations come with an overwhelming sensation of collective presence: one body among many bodies, all in it together, fully there, walking and chanting as one. My body recognized that feeling from raves. The rave, it turned out, had been a rehearsal for the demonstration without my knowing it. And so had the gym. I often see the same people at all three. We never speak, but we recognize each other in an intentional stare, across whatever distances of origin or language or life. There is something in that stare worth building a performance around. That performance is Ballast — a piece for gym goers on treadmills, protest songs, and the force that connects all three.

A rave, a football match, a large funeral, a political rally — the same force moves through all of them. I no longer see the current crisis as a failure of education. It is a crisis of affect. This piece lives there: in the body as the site where politics happens before it becomes language, and around the question of what that force is and how it can be aimed toward solidarity rather than violence.

The gym is already a political site: where bodies are trained, surveilled, and ranked, and where some bodies are permitted to be strong and others are not. The muscular body has been historically claimed by fascism and communism alike. The treadmill was invented in 1818 as a British prison punishment device — designed to break bodies through purposeless labour, abolished as inhumane, and reappeared a century later as a tool for self-improvement.

When Acordai, the iconic Portuguese antifascist choral piece, was censored in 1945, the political police called it "a clear provocation to the revolt of the working classes." They were right to be afraid. A protest song is a technology for producing collective subjects, not a cultural artifact. The songs in this piece belong to whoever needs to sing them. In 2022, one of the first acts of Italy's hard-right prime minister was to declare raves illegal, recognising them as a place where the collective presence of bodies produces something that cannot be fully controlled or predicted by the state. Politics is beyond words.

Does every collective "us" produce a "them"? Can singing and collective movement produce an embodied political understanding capable of resistance? These are not questions this piece answers squarely. But it enters them.

The piece

Six flat gym treadmills, in two tight rows of three, occupy the centre of the space. It’s the only set. Six performers, Recruited from local gyms through open calls and direct invitation. They must be part of gym culture and know it from the inside. The cast should reflect the actual demographic diversity of the mainstream gym. They are always moving. Each treadmill rotates on an axis, the group's configuration slowly shifting. 

Behind, a full-width projection of AI videos made specifically for this: slow, closer to video art. Walls of fire, water, light, debris, architecture. Never illustrative. 

The audience surrounds them on three sides, close enough to hear their breath.

From the constant hum of the machines, music builds: drone-based, heavy, at moments reaching the intensity of techno, immersive and ecstatic. The sound is specifically directed and composed for the piece by Luís Pestana.

The movement is a dialogue between bodies and machines: continuous, Sisyphean. Drawn from viral treadmill videos: military workouts, fashion walks, parades, advertisement. They fall, jump, walk. The material is developed in a collaborative process with the performers. Density shifts: at moments all treadmills are occupied, and at others one or two performers remain while the empty machines keep running.

Long stretches of music and movement. At moments, a composite voiceover speaks in an unattributed first person — about desire, survival, body image, attraction, visibility, humiliation, lookmaxxing, botox, incel culture, sexuality, the algorithm. It is always deeply human. And also fun. Sometimes embarrassing. The text is assembled from my own experience, the performers' stories, and the field research of Belgian sociologist Renaud Maud, who has spent five years interviewing gym users. At the end of the page I’m including an example of a composite voice that I recenty built.

Then the words lead to song: the performers join a cappella protest songs from multiple traditions, songs being sung in the streets right now. Protest songs have no defined aesthetic because they are contextual and alive. No nostalgia and no virtuoso: a radio, a megaphone, the exhausted performers. Song as technology, not artifact. I’m including more info on this at the end of the page.

The lighting oscillates between the clinical brightness of a gym and the near-darkness of a rave. Precise, cinematic, surgical. The same body can look like an advertisement or like forensic evidence. 

What this piece is reaching for is a specific experience. One that is immersive, physical, and slow, but also ecstatic, politically pressing, formally rigorous, and deeply researched, historically and sociologically. Elements will repeat and fold and return. I'm not making this piece from the outside: I'm already at the gym, at the rave, and at the protest.  I'm after the kind of experience that changes how you sense yourself in relation to others, that makes you feel your own generative role in what happens in a room. It doesn't resolve contradictions. I believe that making that energy visible is one of the things art can still do that nothing else can. The treadmills keep running. So do I.

2 to 3 hours.

Artistic direction and concept

Carlos Azeredo Mesquita

Choreography, voice, and dramaturgy

Catarina Miranda

Musical direction and composition

Luís Pestana

Vocal and choreographic co-creation and interpretation 

[to be defined; 6 gym goers]

Set, video, costumes design

Nuno Maio

Light design

Teresa Antunes

Sociological research assistance

Renaud Maud

Technical design and engineering

Waaze and Sérgio Coutinho

Producer

João Brojo

Selection of protest songs I consider using

This list is illustrative and in progress. The final repertoire will be built through more in-depth research and what the performers themselves bring. We are actively looking for songs from traditions not yet represented: something from punk or hardcore, or something that arrived at protest use accidentally or ironically, like a pop song or a football chant. The boundaries of what is as a protest song are part of what the piece is investigating.

Acordai (Wake Up)

is an antifascist song composed in 1945 by Fernando Lopes-Graça, in the tradition of a cappella Portuguese peasant choral music. He believed the dictatorship was about to fall. However, that took another thirty years, and during that time it was banned but remained well alive underground. It is still widely sung today. It was my entry point into protest songs. Here in a beautiful version sung by a Dutch choir

Bella Ciao

is dedicated to the partisans of the Italian resistance against Nazi and fascist occupation, with probable origins in 19th-century protest folk songs. It has since been translated and adopted by numerous protest movements across the world. In Kashmir, India, women writing and singing their stories of resistance elevated it to almost an anthem in the region. Here sung by Kashmir women in the Kashmiri language

Noha and Latmiya

are related styles of lamentation chant in the Shia Muslim devotional tradition, performed to mourn the martyrdom of Imam Husayn, grandson of prophet Mohamed, at the Battle of Karbala in 680 CE. Led by a single reciter in call-and-response with a group, and performed in synchrony with chest-beating, they can sound strikingly close to contemporary electronic music. It’s common across the whole Arab world. Rooted in grief for the unjustly killed, they are becoming in recent years, as the situation in the Middle East deteriorates, indistinguishable from political protest. More examples on the video above.

Wehrt euch, leistet Widerstand (Resist, Fight Back)

is a German anti-fascist protest canon chant, whose melody dates to at least 1580. It later became a folk children's song with lyrics in many languages. Since the 1970s, the same melody has carried protest lyrics in German. In the last few years it has returned, sung at massive anti-AfD demonstrations in many cities.

The Hanging Tree (from The Hunger Games, 2014)

was composed for a protest scene in the mainstream dystopian film. It quickly crossed into reality, becoming a protest anthem in Thailand, Hong Kong, Myanmar, and Ferguson, and continues to circulate on social media in association with protests in Serbia, Germany, and elsewhere. The journey from fiction to street had a long history: for example the Serbian national anthem began as an aria in an opera, became a protest song in support of the king, and eventually became the anthem of a nation. 

Ausländer Raus (Foreigners Out)

is a xenophobic chant set to the melody of L'Amour Toujours ("Love Always”), the 1999 eurodance hit by Italian DJ Gigi D'Agostino. Since late 2023 it has spread virally across Germany and Austria, sung at beach bars, carnival parades, and football stadiums. I have a recording of it made from my house in Porto, late at night, when I heard a group of tourists (?) sing it from Ponte Luís I. I felt like I was going to cry. I don’t think I will use it, but it is a clear example of the diversity of protest songs, and how they can be used in the other direction.