With her award-winning work MONGA, Brazilian director and performer Jéssica Teixeira embarks on her first European tour, including two performances at Sophiensæle.

In MONGA, Teixeira continues her investigation into the politics of the body on stage. Drawing on personal and historical references—such as Julia Pastrana, a 19th-century Mexican woman exploited in freak shows, and the “werewolf-woman” acts popular in 1980s Brazilian circuses—Teixeira weaves a powerful solo that confronts the audience’s gaze with rawness, vulnerability, and defiance. MONGA is not a re-enactment of circus acts or documentary theatre; rather, it is an attempt to reclaim the image and reimagine it through one’s own body—a poetic reckoning with the spectacle of difference and the violence of being seen as “other.”

While dancing, singing, and acting, Teixeira embodies what has been cast aside—mirroring fear, laughter, and discomfort back at the viewer. She evokes Julia Pastrana not to sensationalize her story, but to forge new imaginaries, new ways of relating to bodies that resist categorization. With humor and tenderness, MONGA dismantles the myths that keep us estranged from one another.