A Cantadeira

A CANTADEIRA is Joana Negrão, born in Setúbal (Portugal) in 1983, whose musical career is linked to Portuguese oral tradition music and who has been charting a solid course in a field that is characterized, on the one hand, by research into traditional oral tradition songs and, on the other, by the introduction of contemporary motifs into these ancestral sounds. Contemporary motifs and new songs that reflect the feeling of the present with the pulse of traditional instruments. Joana Negrão has materialized this work in projects such as Dazkarieh and Seiva, and now she's going solo with A Cantadeira. She keeps everything she's done to date in a nutshell, but using only her voice recorded on several layers and traditional percussion instruments such as the Adufe, the Pandeireta and also the Portuguese Bagpipe.

A CANTADEIRA is a Woman, a Mother, a Singer, a Gaiteira, an Adufeira and she seeks inspiration in the women of yesteryear and today, in our mothers, aunts and grandmothers who, with their voices, cradled us, welcomed us, raised us and left us their strong and emotional feminine legacy. She performs solo in a show in which the voice is the guiding thread for ancestral and current soundscapes.

In 2024 she released her first album, Tecelã, in which Joana Negrão seeks to keep musical traditions alive, but also to reinvent them by creating new traditions and new songs with the legacy of the old ones. It's an immersion in the voice to bring back the identity of the Portuguese singers and the ancestral tradition of the songs, but at the same time blend in with what the artist feels today and with the issues and dilemmas of her days as a woman, mother and artist.
Using the voice as a primordial element and the constant recording of layers of overlapping voices recorded live and in real time, A CANTADEIRA women voices.