The Bull and the Ballerina

A choral work in which Filipa Sáragga illustrates and Teresa Avillez Ereira writes. The illustrator merges her artistic sensibility with the Iberian cultural tradition linked to the breeding of bulls and horses. The story contrasts two ways of living in the world that, The story contrasts two ways of living in the world that, although opposite, ultimately prove to be complementary.

She dances with the air; he with the earth. The illustrations — large-format paintings by the author herself — fill the pages with intense colours and silhouettes in motion, transforming the story into a visual choreography of art, identity, and life. The bullfighter and the ballerina compose a metaphor about the balance between delicacy and strength, emotion and discipline, art and life.

The proceeds from the work are entirely dedicated to the Association Land of Dreams and Salvador Associations.

Preface by Marcelo Rebelo de Sousa, President of the Republic of Portugal.

A story of love, even passion, along with the Lusitanian tradition, the emotion of bullfighting, and a mixture of the childlike and the adult, both in imagination and in the illustrations.

Everything exists in an unusual yet stimulating symbiosis of suffering, with redemptive meaning and joy in the essentials of everyone’s life. —That is, in hope!

Hope is, furthermore, the key word of the entire text. And the supreme motivation of a generation that — in the eloquent expression of D. José Policarpo — seeks to transform the crisis it shares with the entire nation into courage.

That is why it rightly deserves to be called the generation of courage!

Celorico de Basto, 5 of June 2011
Marcelo Rebelo de Sousa