Ladrões de Almas (Portuguese for ‘Thieves of Souls’) is a dance show based on a tale by Herberto Hélder, entitled Lugar Lugares, from the book Os Passos em Volta and some close testimonials. These testimonials are fragmented memoirs, adapted and recreated by co-authors and interpreters of this show where absent people become present and where one lives showing spaces within eachother on a trip throughout time. Inner time, time as a passage, the time in the stories and the timeless time of souls... what are souls? Where are they? In hangers? Shoes? In beings that, although absent, this show summons upon?

In Ladrões de Almas, the idea of saving someone, or something, is by saving ourselves and salvation is salvific.

"Once upon a time, there was a place with a small hell and a little heaven, and people walked around from one side to another, and they found us, them, hell and heaven, and they took them as their own, and they were theirs indeed. People were small, but noisy. And they said: it is my hell, it is my paradise. […] Sometimes they woke up in the middle of the night and clutched frantically. I'm scared, they said. And then they would make love quickly and wash themselves, and they would say: good night, good night. This was a part of their lives, and was one of the (touching) regions of their humanity, and what is human is terrible and has a kind of palpitating and ambiguous beauty. "

HERBERTO HELDER

In Os Passos em Volta; Lugar Lugares