All Beasts Dance exposes the companionship and labor that orbit music in Pedro Costa's filmography. This audiovisual essay features three diptychs made up of six films by the filmmaker: Down to Earth (1994) and Bones (1997); Horse Money (2014) and Where Does Your Hidden Smile Lie? (2001); Blood (1989) and Vitalina Varela (2019), allowing a transversal and relational reading between the first and last feature films produced to date.
Pedro Costa's films present themselves as traumatic and mnemonic through imagistic reverberations becoming intimately connected. In this synchronic quality the same element portrayed which appears in different states sets the tempo of a distinctive filmography, as we can recognize in the painting that begins the film Horse Money (2014) and the closed window with the inscription Catita that Ventura crosses in Vitalina Varela (2019); or the beet on the lap of Vanda in In Vanda's Room (2000) and the beet picked from the ground by Vitalina in Vitalina Varela (2019). A temporal, rhythmic, circular and emergent representation thus stitches together Pedro Costa's films. Recognizing this structuring quality of Costa's filmography, this essay highlights interactions of conjugality, companionship and labour that precede or follow rhythmical moments. As in the relationships of power denounced by Pedro Costa in his filmography, music presupposes and exposes a relationship of production and dependence between those who play or sing and those who dance to it - between those who own the factory and those who work in it.

Quem pode toca, quem não pode dança (portuguese idiom)
(Those who can: play, those who can't: dance)

Through music, Costa removes Cape Verdean immigrants from their status as workers and, momentarily, turns them into producers and creators. However, if in Horse Money (2014), Ventura and Benvindo sing and the song Alto Cutelo (1976) by the Tubarões expresses the working conditions of these immigrant workers, in Vitalina Varela (2019) only the water falling on the poorly built roof by Vitalina's husband represents a musical event. In the absence of music in Vitalina Varela (2019) Pedro Costa reveals another function of music: of condemning, through the eyes of women, the men who sing it. The men who own their labor power and produce and reproduce songs can leave, as the man who played the violin for Mariana did in Down to Earth (1994). Between the expression of the men's suffering, the music also represents that they broke and consented to capitalist exploitation when it allowed them to live their own misery comfortably among men. (Ranciére, 2023)