The result of a joint commission from BoCA and Teatro do Bairro Alto, “Os Rapazes da Praia Adoro” is a new work that opens a unique dialogue between two artists from Portugal and Spain, and between two artistic fields, theatre and painting.

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In the paintings of João Gabriel we catch glimpses of ghosts wandering on the beach. In the pieces of playwright and stage director Alberto Cortés, words and bodies find each other and reveal themselves like landscapes. Out of this encounter emerges a vision of two male bodies, one Portuguese and one Spanish, who meet on a beach halfway between Lisbon and Madrid, precisely 312.45 kilometres from each city. This beach, named Praia Adoro, becomes a kind of odyssey, a hole in space-time and a queer paradise.

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On Praia Adoro, these two bodies come together, merging in the intimacy offered by the hidden corners of nature’s cruising spaces. They come together to find each other, their sexual encounter an intimate act seeking to settle outstanding debts between two countries that exist with their backs turned. Taking as a reference point the intimacy found in the audiovisual archive of 70s and 80s pornographic films that inspires João Gabriel’s paintings, words overlay these bodies to imagine a different form of gay contact, one imbued with tenderness and poetry. New ways are posited of understanding sex between men, perhaps as a current need for it to be a healing act. Because that is what they desire.