There are traditions that survive because they are protected, carefully placed behind glass, admired from a distance like artifacts from another age. And there are traditions that survive because they are lived, because they sweat, laugh, stumble, reinvent themselves, and continue to belong to ordinary people. The Sanjoaninas marches of Angra do Heroísmo belong to this second category. They are not museum pieces. They are living things.
Every June, when the long twilight settles over the city and the stones of Angra begin to glow beneath the lights of celebration, thousands gather along streets that have witnessed centuries of history. Music rises from every corner. Costumes shimmer beneath the night sky. The city becomes both stage and audience, performer and spectator. Yet what the public sees for a few fleeting moments on the night of June 23rd is only the visible part of a much larger story—a story of rehearsals, conversations, frustrations, friendships, and countless hours spent transforming individuals into something larger than themselves.
For more than a decade, choreographer Valter Peres has stood at the center of that transformation, guiding the Official March of the Sanjoaninas through the delicate dance between tradition and innovation. Listening to him speak about the marches is to understand that choreography, for him, is not merely a matter of movement. It is an act of community building. It is a form of collective storytelling.
A march, he reminds us, is not made of steps. It is made of people learning to breathe together. Perhaps no better definition of culture exists.
The true miracle of the Sanjoaninas is not that dozens of people can move in unison through the streets of Angra. The miracle is that people from different generations, different professions, different neighborhoods and experiences willingly surrender a portion of themselves to create something shared. For a few weeks every year, the boundaries that separate people in daily life begin to dissolve. A retired fisherman may stand beside a university student. A teacher beside a mechanic. A grandmother beside a teenager. They learn the same rhythms. They repeat the same movements. They become part of the same story.
In an age increasingly devoted to individual performance, there is something quietly revolutionary about such an exercise.
Peres understands this instinctively.
What has impressed him most over the years is not the increasing complexity of the choreographies or the growing scale of the event. It is the willingness of the participants to embrace risk. Every year demands something new. A different melody. A different costume. A different challenge. Yet instead of resisting change, the marchers have developed a remarkable confidence in the unknown.
That confidence is perhaps the hidden engine behind the success of the Sanjoaninas themselves.
For the festival has grown not because it repeats itself endlessly, but because it continually discovers new ways of expressing what has always been there.
The choreography begins long before the first rehearsal. It emerges from the music, from the poetry of the lyrics, from the colors of the costumes, from an image suggested by a phrase or a movement implied by a melody. If the song speaks of leaping over a bonfire, the march must leap. If the music invites celebration, the choreography must dance. Every movement becomes an extension of the narrative being told.
But beneath these artistic decisions lies a deeper philosophy.
Many communities speak of preserving tradition as though tradition were fragile. As though it might break if touched. As though change were its enemy.
Valter Peres offers a different vision.
“Tradition is not something static,” he says. “It is a bonfire.”
What a magnificent image. A bonfire survives only because new wood is continually added to it. Remove the possibility of renewal, and the fire dies. Feed it carelessly, and it burns out of control. The art lies in maintaining the flame while allowing it to grow.
The Sanjoaninas have mastered that balance.
The festival remains unmistakably rooted in the identity of Terceira. Its music, humor, communal spirit, and exuberant joy are deeply local. Yet every generation adds its own wood to the fire. New ideas. New artistic languages. New interpretations of what it means to celebrate Saint John in the twenty-first century.
The result is not a weakening of tradition but its renewal.
And perhaps that explains why the Sanjoaninas continue to grow while so many cultural traditions elsewhere struggle to survive. Because they have understood something fundamental: culture does not endure by standing still. It endures by moving.
At the end of every season of rehearsals, there comes a moment when the choreographer must let go. The endless corrections, the repeated instructions, the concerns about timing and movement, all give way to the reality of the street. The march leaves the rehearsal hall and enters the city. It ceases to belong to its creator.
It becomes part of the people once again.
For Peres, there is no anxiety in that surrender. No obsession with comparisons to previous years or to other marches. The work has already been done. What remains is the gift itself.
And perhaps this humility explains why his greatest reward is not artistic recognition but human connection.
This year alone, he worked with six different marches. What remains with him are not simply the choreographies but the relationships. The laughter. The shared effort. The friendships forged through repetition and collective purpose.
Long after the music fades and the costumes are put away, those human connections remain.
That may be the deepest lesson hidden within the Sanjoaninas. The marches are not ultimately about choreography. They are not even about spectacle. They are about belonging.
They are about the ancient human need to gather around the same fire and recognize ourselves in one another.
And as long as there are hands willing to add new wood to the flames, as long as there are voices willing to sing and feet willing to dance through the streets of Angra, that bonfire will continue to burn against the Atlantic night, illuminating not only a festival, but the enduring soul of a people.
Based on an interview published in Diário Insular-José Lourenço-director