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MADEIRA Dance: OPEN CALL AUDITION for Dancers perform at Pan-Pacific Festival
April 18, 2025, @ 5:35 pm - 6:35 pm HST
OPEN CALL AUDITION for Dancers!
Friday, April 18th
FREE Audition
5:35-6:35 pm
Audition for a scholarship to this performance series. A full scholarship and 50% discount rate will be granted to two dancers.
Classes: April 25 – June 13, 5:35-6:36 pm
Members can sign up FREE, as long as they commit to attending the full 8 weeks
Non-Members: $195 for 8 Madeira Dance Committed Performance Classes
Open Call Audition • Jessica will select 2 winners
First place – 100% scholarship to participate in Committed Performance Class
Second place – 50% scholarship to participate in Committed Performance Class
Performance date(s): weekend of June 14 or 15, 2025
MADEIRA – A Call to Move, Remind, and Connect Across Oceans
Step into a story that began long before you—and continues through you.
MADEIRA, a brand-new piece choreographed by Jessica Eirado Enes, invites you to embody a powerful journey of movement, memory, and migration. Created especially for Still & Moving Center students to perform at the Pan Pacific Festival 2025 in Honolulu this June, this piece draws on the deep cultural connections between the Portuguese island of Madeira and the Hawaiian Islands—linked across time and tide through music, migration, and the legacy of the ukulele from Portugal.
Whether you’re a seasoned dancer or just starting out, your movement, your story, and your presence are what will bring this piece to life. You’ll explore Portuguese folk rhythms, the power of the elements of nature, and the legacy of cultural exchange—all through a beautifully choreographed contemporary lens.
Come dance with us. Be part of something meaningful. Sign up today to carry the story forward.
Jessica Eirado Enes
Jessica Eirado Enes is an Italian-Portuguese Contemporary Dance performer and choreographer whose career has danced across continents, from Europe to the United States as far as Hawai’i, for over a decade. Her path has led her to collaborate with companies such as Not Standing/Alexander Vantournhout (Belgium), Black Label Movement (US), and My Homeless Lover (Italy/Belgium), which she co-directs with Edward Oroyan.
In Jessica Eirado Enes’ newest work, MADEIRA, created specifically for the students of Still & Moving Center to perform at Pan Pacific Festival 2025, Jessica and her dancers explore the compelling relationship between the volcanic island of Madeira in Portugal and the Hawaiian Islands – distant in geography, yet mirroring each other in spirit. Rugged cliffs, fertile soil, the whisper of the wind through lush canopies, and the ever-present song of the waves bind them across oceans. But their bond deepens through a shared story – one of migration, music, and quiet revolution.
On August 23, 1879, aboard the English ship Ravenscrag, three Portuguese emigrants—Augusto Dias, Manuel Nunes, and José do Espírito Santo – arrived in Honolulu Harbor with a three-year contract to work on the plantations. Cabinetmakers and musicians, they carried with them a small stringed instrument known as the machete and the skills to play and craft it. They could not have foreseen the legacy they were about to seed: a four-stringed wonder that would leap into the heart of Hawaiian culture and echo far beyond, becoming what we now call the ukulele—the “jumping flea”.
In MADEIRA, eight dancers move to early ukulele music, channeling the raw energy of the elements—earth, water, wind, and fire—that define both island landscapes and their ancient relationships to nature. Jessica’s choreography draws from the pulse of Portuguese folk dances, stitched together with memories of her avós (grandparents) spinning and stomping at village festivals in the mountains north of Braga, Portugal.
It is said the machete first came from Braga as the braguinha to Madeira, Portugal, and onto Hawai’i. So one of the Hawaiian ukulele’s earliest ancestors came from Braga. How apt that Jessica – a fairly newcomer to Hawai’i, has predecessors from Braga, Portugal – just as the ukulele has!
This piece is a journey—through memory, myth, and migration. A crossing of oceans and eras. A dance of hands that built, strings that sang, and islands that, though far apart, hum in harmony.
Get to know a bit more about Jessica by watching a snippet of her dancing in these videos.
Jessica’s showreel of three performances:
https://vimeo.com/381404621/767a3e4cd2
Jessica’s latest professional dance creation: IVY – My Homeless Lover.
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This post is also available in: 日本語 (Japanese)