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2025 | AUDIÇÃO

When you return to where you were once happy, you find the echo of voices like ghosts.
Almost two decades after being forced to abandon the space of the Armazém at the Miguel Bombarda Hospital, Teatro Praga is invited by Teatro Nacional D. Maria II to temporarily reoccupy it for a performance, as part of the company’s 30th anniversary celebrations. However, times have changed, and interventions on the building and the city have transformed both the context and the architecture. Likewise, Teatro Praga is no longer Teatro Praga. This return without return is the starting point for their new performance: Audição.
In this creation, Teatro Praga makes itself heard for what it was and what it is: a collective that is simultaneously inside and outside an idea of theatre, seeking a specific kind of resistance in its relationship with places, bodies, and disciplines. Teatro Praga will always step into the wrong performance, and Audição is therefore a casting where only mistakes are possible, because what is being looked for does not exist. With no age limit, physical requirements, or professional expectations, this audition is bound to go wrong — and that’s exactly the point. It is in the mismatch between expectation and present, between past and future, that this Audição takes shape.

a Teatro Praga performance
performed by André e. Teodósio, Ângelo Castro, Cláudia Jardim, Diogo Bento, Inês Vaz, Joana Barrios, João Duarte Costa, José Maria Vieira Mendes, Júlio Mesquita, Paula Diogo and guests
original music Alex D’Alva Teixeira
lighting design Daniel Worm d’Assumpção
costume design Joana Barrios
mascot Miss Suzie
wardrobe support Tita Mendes
set design support Joana Sousa
communications Inês Lampreia
executive production Rita Pessoa
production direction Teresa Miguel
residency support O Espaço do Tempo
support from Infraestruturas de Portugal (Sala do Rei)
special thanks Paulo Julião
co-production Teatro Nacional D. Maria II, Teatro Municipal de Matosinhos Constantino Nery, and Teatro Praga

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2024 | Re: Antigone

Seriously, I’m dead. I’m really dead.
Dead, dead, dead. I’m dead. I’m dead. I’m dead. I’m dead.
Absolutely dead. Dead from dead.
Deadly dead. Dead dead dead.

Antigone, immortalised by Sophocles, has been the protagonist of dramatic plays for centuries, from Kleist to Anouilh, from Cocteau to Júlio Dantas or António Pedro, as well as an artistic inspiration, from the visual arts to opera, and philosophical (Heidegger, Steiner, Lacan, Butler, Zizek, Kilomba, Honegger, etc.). Loaded with metaphors and categories, Antigone has been massacred by concepts carrying ideas of “good”, “justice”, “emancipation”, “utopia” or “desire”.

Re: Antigone is the opposite of this because it is not a challenge to the past but to the present. Or a reply to a past made up of unanswered questions, like an exchange of emails with no hope of return. A show that doesn’t try to produce anything, but makes its presence felt, saturates and disconcerts, in order to irritate. This means that RE: Antigone reacts to the allegory or the capture of the figure of Antigone for the benefit of updates, but also that it responds to an Art of “messages” and “about” by asking for a little time to be without being.

Re: Antigone kills Antigone, in every way she can think of, to give her the death she never had the right to.

A show by Teatro Praga

Created by: André e. Teodósio, J. M. Vieira Mendes

With: André e. Teodósio, Inês Vaz, Maria João Vaz, Paula Diogo, Paulo Pascoal

Set design: Tiago Alexandre

Light design: Joana Mário

Original Soundtrack: Miguel Lucas Mendes

Executive producer: Rita Pessoa

Production manager: Teresa Miguel

A co-production: São João National Theatre, Belém Cultural Centre Foundation

Acknowledgements: Pedro Faro, Filipe Heath, Isabel Moreira, Joana Sousa, Centro Auto Alfragide

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2024 | Let’s Make a Song!

Tribute to José Barata Moura by Alex D’Alva Teixeira

What is music made of? Are life and art different things? In 2021, as part of the Filo-Lisboa Festival at Teatro São Luiz, Teatro Praga premiered the children’s show Fazer uma Canção. The premise was simple: to talk about a philosopher, his life and musical work, paying tribute to him and singing his songs. Written by André e. Teodósio and performed by Alex D’Alva Teixeira, the result couldn’t have been more beautiful. We wander through the childhood songbook of the philosopher José Barata Moura, through his life story combined with the life story of Alex D’Alva Teixeira, who, from the Festival da Canção to his local parish, has sung everywhere. In between, we learn how to make a song. What is this fungagá anyway?! We sang ourselves hoarse. Making a song is a lesson in music, philosophy, politics and love. A tribute to a fundamental composer in the history of music for children through a contemporary musician like no other.

Music: Alex D’Alva Teixeira;
Texts: André e. Teodósio;
Set design: Teatro Praga;
Lighting design: Joana Mário
Co-production: Teatro Praga, A Casa da Cultura – Município da Marinha Grande and São Luiz Teatro Municipal

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Length: 40 min.
M/6

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Bookings: producao@teatropraga.com

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2023 | BRAVO 2023!

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2023 | ÃO

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2022 | The Rite of Spring

A Teatro Praga’s performance with the collaboration of the Metropolitan Orchestra.

Following the Shakespeare/Purcell trilogy presented between 2010 and 2019, Teatro Praga returns to the large-scale stages in partnership with the Metropolitan Symphonic Orchestra to present Stravinsky’s ballet, The Rite of Spring, originally choreographed by Nijinsky. Given that this piece is a milestone in the history of the performing arts, and bearing in mind its symbolic significance, Teatro Praga’s The Rite of Spring carries on the will to bring history to the stage and to understand its echoes today. A celebration of the planet and the place we inhabit, which degenerates into a sacrificial ritual, will serve as guiding principle to reflect upon the inextricable blend of existence, favouring a history of mutual influences. The strength of life, of spring, is also the strength of abandoning and renouncing to all sorts of bodies.

Bookings: producao@teatropraga.com

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2021 | FATHERS & SONS

Continuing the dichotomy between autobiography and the creation of a fictional universe, Penim – who is intending to become a parent through the challenging process of surrogacy – seeks to nourish the debate on parenting and family, involving not only theatergoers but also the media, academia and civil society, expanding Fathers & Sons to a dimension that goes beyond the mere personal story.

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Text and Staging Pedro Penim

Interpretation Ana Tang, Bernardo de Lacerda, David Costa, Diogo Bento, Hugo van der Ding, Joana Barrios, João Abreu, Pedro Penim and Rita Blanco

Trouble Olívia

Staging Assistant Bernardo de Lacerda

Scenario Joana Sousa

Costumes Joana Barrios

Vídeo Jorge Jácome

Light Design Daniel Worm d’Assumpção

Sound Miguel Lucas Mendes

Choreography Support Luiz Antunes

Master seamstress Rosário Balbi

Construction of doll António Vieira Imaginações Reborn

Production Management Daniela Ribeiro

Production Alexandra Baião

Digital Communication Mafalda Jacinto

Promocional photos Carlos Pinto

Co-production Teatro Praga, Teatro Nacional São João and São Luiz Teatro Municipal

Support Griffehairstyle, Hospital de Bonecas

Thanks to Alessandro Valera, André e. Teodósio, Cláudia Jardim, Cláudia Semedo, David Motta, Freddy, Jacinta, Joana Lopes, Joana Manuel, José Maria Vieira Mendes, Lúcia, Mariana Vieira, Mark Lowen, Mimi, Olívia, Pedro Batista, Sophie Lewis, Tiago Bartolomeu Costa e António Vieira / Artista Reborn – Imaginações Reborn

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Length | 2h15 min.
M/16

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2021 | INFO MANIAC

In 2005, André e. Teodósio and J. M. Vieira Mendes met to create a show they called SUPER GORILA. If in 2005, in that performance, an artist asked the audience to help him blow up everything (the room, history, himself, beginnings, middle and ends), in 2021, the same artist is only interested in an unconditional dismantling.

INFO MANIAC is a remembrance in times of Plague, a voyage that goes from the histrionics who performed in Ancient Rome to the sound of the flute, to the quantum knowledge of our present. A one-man-show with a human who is rethinking his figurative entity in a day that contains every day and time.

An actor on stage speaks about himself, revealing everything, and reveals himself to be everything but him! To do so, he resorts to the repertoire of his experiences: poems, choreographies, recipes, stories and magic potions, as well as a kind of retrospective glossary of Teatro Praga’s work.

Moving on in disorder, INFO MANIAC is a guerrilla manual for modern times, it is an excuse for being-in-relation, a performance that thinks about everything in order to give and occupy space and time. And in the secret, we will know that we know nothing, but that the Everything knows everything about us.

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Duration: 56 min. aprox.
Age Limit: +16

a performance by André e. Teodósio / Teatro Praga

Text André e. Teodósio e José Maria Vieira Mendes

Light Design Daniel Worm

Soundscape Miguel Lucas Mendes

Installation Bruno Bogarim

Photo by Carlos Pinto

Artistic Residency O Espaço do Tempo, Montemor-o-Novo

Support Polo Cultural das Gaivotas | Boavista / Câmara Municipal de Lisboa

Coproduction A Oficina / Centro Cultural Vila Flor, Teatro Viriato e Centro Cultural de Belém

Thanks to Ana Tang, Jazzy.pt, Joana Barrios, Paula Sá Nogueira, Pedro Faro, Rui Horta, Rita

Bookings: producao@teatropraga.com

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2021 | MacBad

Text and creation Cláudia Jardim, Diogo Bento and Pedro Penim
Cast Cláudia Jardim and Diogo Bento

Game Design Filipe Baptista

Master seamstress Teresa Louro

Promocional Photography Alípio Padilha
Production Management Daniela Ribeiro
Production Alexandra Baião
Co-production LU.CA – Teatro Luís de Camões and Oficina / Centro Cultural Vila Flor

Thanks to Beatriz Carneiro, Catarino Campino, Maria Sequeira Mendes, Mariana Sá Nogueira, Rita Telhada, Ricardo Santos Costa, Ruben Maia

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Length: 75 min.
M/6

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Bookings: producao@teatropraga.com

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2020 | SUPERNATURAL

SUPERNATURAL is a performative film that talks and listens, that interferes and seeks out those who are beholding it. Its desire is to abandon the screen, to take a look at those who look at it, and listen to them, but also to be smelled and seen beyond what is being seen. This film is like voice or reason, aesthetics or human cuisine, i.e., it is a way to escape out of the prison of the “natural” contingencies by focusing its attention on the activity of the experience itself.

There are two ways of dealing with the “natural”: refusing it or expanding it. SUPERNATURAL expands, because it wants to occupy and then overcome and hyperbolize. In this expansion, the natural no longer exists, it loses its definition taking the place of the changing image of which the world is made.

SUPERNATURAL is a transcendent experience occurring outside of the body, of all bodies, but particularly of one’s own. It is like a super-power and, in this movement, it focuses on the image, a sensitive existence one intends to speak with. That is why this performative film aspires, in a speculative gesture, to activate an effect, a hypothetical relaxation, a sensory experience for those who are off the screen as if they were on it.

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Residencies

1st – Funchal / Madeira, 25 January to 1 February 2020

2nd – Funchal e Calheta / Madeira, 18 to 31 October 2020

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SUPERNATURAL is a project by Teatro Praga for Dançando com a Diferença, created in collaboration with its interpreters and the film director Jorge Jácome.

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+ info: Dançando com a Diferença

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2020 | INVERTED LANDSPACES

Inverted Landscapes, an exhibition-performance by André e. Teodósio/Teatro Praga that will be presented at Galeria Kunstraum Botschaft – Camões Berlim, a coproduction with Fundação EDP | MAAT and Embaixada de Portugal – Camões Berlim.

Starting from a connection between Lisbon and Berlin, Inverted Landscapes recovers the life of two figures of Portuguese performing arts, who change geographical destinations in search of the same artistic goal: Ruth Aswin, a German, who came to dance in Portugal in the 1930s, and her student, Valentim de Barros, who flees to Berlin in search of work and freedom. Inverted Landscapes is thus a tribute to the uprooting link that was common to the two artists of the historiography of these two countries, as well as to the attentive perception of two ways of living that have always had more history than geography.

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A performance by André e. Teodósio

Performers Ana Tang, Aurora Pinho e Paulo Pascoal

Exhibition André e. Teodósio / Bruno Bogarim

Costumes Joana Barrios

Vídeos Jorge Jácome

Photo Alípio Padilha

Production Manager Daniela Ribeiro

Produção Executiva Alexandra Baião

Support Cão Solteiro, OPART / Estúdios Victor Córdon,

Thanks to Dra. Ana Barata, Dra. Andrea Martins, Anísio Franco, Dr. António Laginha / Centro de Dança de Oeiras, Bernardo Rocha, Biblioteca da Fundação Calouste Gulbenkian, Bruno Horta, Cláudia Belchior, Dra. Dalila Correia, Fundação Mário Soares, Goethe – Institut Portugal, Inês Grosso, João dos Santos Martins, João Pacheco, Jorge Jácome, Junta de Freguesia da Misericórdia, Maria Luísa Carles, Pedro Barateiro, Pedro Faro,Pedro Marques, Rui Lopes Graça, Sandro Resende

Coproduction Teatro Praga, Fundação EDP | MAAT and Embaixada de Portugal – Camões Berlim

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Performance 11, 12 and 13 Sept 2020 at 6pm  (On the occasion of the Gallery Weekend Berlin)

Exhibition Opening 11 September at 6pm

Until 16th Oct 2020  // 3ª – 6ª – 11am -1pm / 2.30pm – 5pm—

+ info: Instituto Camões Berlim

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2020 | DOING IT

The actor and director Pedro Penim was invited by Francisco Frazão and Lola Arias to develop a lecture / performance for Mis Documentos cycle.

Mis Documentos is a concept idealized by Argentine playwright and director Lola Arias and has a minimal format: an artist on stage with their documents. One way to make visible researches that are sometimes lost in an unnamed folder on the computer.

In DOING IT, Pedro Penim confesses a secret passion that takes him very far across the sea of Internet. An innocent and obscure addiction that he never revealed before: his “island collection”. Pedro has been researching, collecting and systematizing information about several uninhabited and/or remote islands for a long time and this piece intends to stage a discourse that gives some clues about this interest in isolation, evasion and in the demarcation of space. In DOING IT, Pedro brings the spectators into the mind of someone who is constantly seeking and makes us think about our own obsessions. What do we do in secret on our computers when no one sees us?

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Curator Mis Documents Lola Arias

Conference-Performance Pedro Penim / Teatro Praga

Dramaturgy: Bibiana Mendes Picado

Support for artistic residency Victor Córdon Studios

Photos: Ana Viotti

Coproduction Teatro do Bairro Alto and Teatro Praga

+ info: TBA

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Duração | 45 min + 45 min
M/12

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2019 | XTRÒRDINÁRIO

Challenged by São Luiz to create a performance which would celebrate the theatre’s 125th birthday, it was thought adequate to go through the musical history of a theatre room that lived during silent film, to cinema as we know it today, that saw Antoine and Sarah Bernahardt, witnessed fires and reconstructions and was rebaptised three times. As any other work by Teatro Praga, we revisit history with a critical eye, which allows us to go beyond the ephemeral commemoration, thus being able to think about the role of theatre in its time and in the city we live in.

A performance by Teatro Praga (André e. Teodósio, Cláudia Jardim, José Maria Vieira Mendes e Pedro Penim)
Cast | André e. Teodósio, Cláudia Jardim, Diogo Bento, Jenny Larrue, Joana Barrios, Joana Manuel, João Duarte Costa, José Raposo, João Caçador e Tiago Lila
Dancers | Adriano Vicente, Ana Moreno, Guilherme Leal e Jenny Larrue
Musical participation | Fado Bicha
Musical Direction | João Paulo Soares
Musicians | António Santos (Trombone/Bombardino), Filipe Coelho (Trompete/ Fliscorne), Francisco Cardoso (Bateria/Percussão), João Paulo Soares (Piano), Nuno Fernandes (Baixo/Contrabaixo), Paulo Bernardino (Clarinete/Saxofone)
Choreography | Luiz Antunes
Scenography | João Pedro Vale & Nuno Alexandre Ferreira
Scenography assistant | Joana Sousa
Video (creation and edition) | André Godinho
Costumes | Inês Ariana e Nuno Braz de Oliveira
Master Seamstress | Rosário Balbi
Sound design | Miguel Lucas Mendes
Light design | Daniel Worm d’Assumpção
Director assistant | Óscar Silva
Prompter | Lídia Muñoz
Head of production | Andreia Carneiro
Production | Alexandra Baião
Video recording | Jorge Jácome
Support to creation | Centro Cultural Dr. Magalhães Lima, ESTÚDIOS VICTOR CÓRDON/RESIDÊNCIAS ARTÍSTICAS
Support | Griffehairstyle, Guerlain e Museu Berardo
Acknowledgements | Bruno Bogarim, Câmara Municipal de Lisboa – Divisão de Ação Cultural, Carlos Pinto, Francisco Benevides, Ion Rotaru Flori, Isabel Alves, João Tinoco, Maryne Lanaro, Mariana Sá Nogueira, Marcha de Alfama, Mário Rocha, Museu Bernardo and José Berardo, Nuno Feist, Nuno Ferreira e Sérgio Godinho.

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Length | 2h15
M/12

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2019 | TIMON OF ATHENS

A Teatro Praga show with the musical collaboration of Ludovice Ensemble.

From William Shakespeare’s and Henry Purcell’s Timon Of Athens.

APEMANTUS I love thee better now than e’er I did.
TIMON I hate thee worse.

In 2010, the Teatro Praga presented at the CCB’s Great Auditorium A Midsummer Night’s Dream, a show that started from a semi-opera by Henry Purcell, The Fairy Queen, which in turn started with a text by Shakespeare , A Midsummer Night’s Dream. Three years later, in the same auditorium, Teatro Praga returned to Shakespeare and Purcell, appropriating another English musical composition written to animate a Thomas Shadwell adaptation of a Shakespeare play: The Tempest or The Haunted Island. Six years after The Tempest and nine years after A Midsummer Night’s Dream, Teatro Praga completes what has always been thought of as a trilogy.

Timon of Athens is a musical composition of Henry Purcell, dated 1694, written at the invitation of Thomas Shadwell, who once again adapted the text of Shakespeare (The Life of Timon of Athens) and commissioned the young Purcell a “masquerade” ). The masquerade was a form of entertainment practiced between members of the court and quite in vogue in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. It involved music, dance, song and representation, with elaborate scenographies and sumptuous costumes. The masqueraders were usually members of the court and sometimes the king himself, accompanied by actors and professional singers.

If in A Midsummer Night’s Dream one sought the place of power once occupied by the monarch, and how the figure of the programmer or curator plays a central role in the definition of the art worth; if The Tempest turned to the artist, to whom he plays, and to the relation of this with the medium (public, theater, written); the third moment of the trilogy, which follows the format of the Theater of Restoration, should focus on the link between art and capitalism, moving towards a progressive abandonment of objects, concretization and sharing and approaching an individualistic, to generate capital without producing material. Timon of Athens from the Teatro Praga goes looking for the best way to end it.

Creation | Teatro Praga (André e. Teodósio, Cláudia Jardim, José Maria Vieira Mendes and Pedro Penim)
Direction Ludovice Ensemble | Fernando Miguel Jalôto
Text | José Maria Vieira Mendes
Cast | André e.Teodósio, Cláudia Jardim, David Mesquita, Diogo Bento, Joana Barrios, João Abreu, Marcello Urgeghe, Patrícia da Silva and Pedro Penim
Singers | Ana Quintans (Cupid [soprano]), Joana Seara (Nymph [soprano]), André Baleiro (Baucus [barítono]), Fernando Guimarães (Baucus Follower I [tenor]) and André Lacerda (Baucus Follower II [tenor]).
Orchestra | Stephen Mason (Trombeta), Joana Amorim (Flautas), Pedro Lopes e Castro (Oboé e Flautas), Andreia Carvalho (Oboé), José Rodrigues Gomes (Fagote e Flautas), Sabine Stoffer (Concertino/Violino solo), Patrizio Germone (Violino solo), César Nogueira (Violino), Flávio Aldo (Violino), Álvaro Pinto (Violino), Denys Stetsenko (Violino), Lúcio Studer  (Viola), Sofia Diniz (Viola da Gamba), Marta Vicente (Grande Viola da Gamba), Vinícius Perez (Tiorba/Guitarra), Fernando Miguel Jalôto (Cravo)
Artistic support | Vasco Araújo
Video (concept & edition) | André Godinho
Cameras | Cristina Pina, Eduardo Jorge
Scenography | Joana Sousa
Costume design | Joana Barrios
Master seamstress | Rosário Balbi
Sound design | Miguel Lucas Mendes
Light design | Daniel Worm d’Assumpção
Head of production | Andreia Carneiro
Production | Alexandra Baião
Video recording | Mário Negrão
Support | GriffeHairStyle, GUERLAIN
Acknowledgements | Afonso Palitos, André Sá Fonseca, Carlos Pinto, Céu Barrios, Bruno Bogarim, Cão Solteiro, Baião Family, Filipe Dominguez, Francisco Benevides, Helena Vaz Pereira, Irmã Lúcia, João Pedro Vale e Nuno Alexandre Ferreira, José Barros, Junta de Freguesia da Misericórdia, Mercedes and Álvaro, Michał Dobrucki, Miguel and Maria, Nuno Ferreira, Restart, Ricardo Casal, Ricardo, Rita, Jorge and David, Rua das Gaivotas 6, Rúben Santos, Rúben Silva and Vasco Araújo

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Length | 1h40
M/12

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2018 | WORST OF

It is not uncommon, over time, to hear the opinion that there is a chronic delay in Portuguese theater, when compared with other artistic mediums. WORST OF takes a look at the history of the national theater through the lense of this opinion. In order to that, a “best of” of Portuguese actors will give voice to complaints, with the help of examples that confirm the discouragement. WORST OF is a shitty celebration.

A performance by Teatro Praga

Texts by | Gil Vicente, Correia Garção, Almeida Garrett, Francisco Gomes de Amorim, Júlio Dantas, Alfredo Cortês, André Brun, Luís de Sttau Monteiro, Bernardo Santareno e J. M. Vieira Mendes
Cast | Cláudia Jardim, Diogo Bento, Márcia Breia, Patrícia da Silva, Pedro Penim, Rogério Samora, São José Correia e Vítor Silva Costa
Scenography | Joana Sousa
Costume design | Joana Barrios
Light design | Daniel Worm d’Assumpção
Sound design | Miguel Lucas Mendes
Video | André Godinho
Photography | Filipe Pereira / Teatro Nacional D. Maria II, Alípio Padilha
Director assistant | Pedro Barreiro
Wardrobe assistant | Andreia Mayer
Stage assistant | Tiago Barbosa, Victor Gonçalves
Head of production | Andreia Carneiro
Production | Alexandra Baião
Coproduction | TNDM II, Teatro Municipal do Porto – Rivoli

Support | Infraestruturas de Portugal, Antónia Rosa, Griffehairstyle, L’Oréal, Lux Frágil, Storytailors: João Branco e Luís Sanchez, Sumol + Compal, Teatradançando, Teatro do Bairro, Teatro Experimental de Cascais, Teatro Nacional de São Carlos, Vicente Trindad

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Duration | 2h10 (w/ break)
M/+12

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2018 | 2018

“2018″, a performance by Teatro Praga, reactivates some interrogations as a way to find alternative paths to the complex historiography of the performing arts.

Acknowledging that the presence of choreographers Fokine and Massine, the work of modernist plastic artists, the vitality of the dancer Nijinsky to the orientalising sound of Rimsky-Korsakov or Tchaikovsky unleashed a certain modernity in Portugal, “2018” establishes a formal distance by resourcing to the same artistic strategies from which it tries to distance itself.

Man as the first figure in a ballet, expression and abandonment of the choreographic vocabulary as a norm, the beginning of  a collaborative work, the fusion of popular with elite culture, nationalist interest, the construction of pieces of a single idea and the background painted as iconographic strategy, characteristics that are transversal to the work of the Russian Ballets, also structure the performance. But this time in an unpredictable way.

In “2018”, the background has drops and everything becomes the foreground. And in this unfettered space, the performers both borrow money and receive flowers as they question, whether they give space to sound or objects, either they dance or do the opposite or make room to other unproductive sensory aspects for the pleasure of doing so.

A performance by André e. Teodósio/Teatro Praga

Cast | Ana Tang, Adriano Vicente e Aurora Pinho
Scenography | Jody Paulsen
Sound design | Violet
Head of production | Andreia Carneiro
Production | Alexandra Baião
Support | CPAI, Presidência do Conselho de Ministros – Div. De Relações Públicas e Apoio ao Conselho de Ministros ( Drª Isabel Tadeu)

This performance took place within the exhibition programme “The Ballets Russes: Modernity after Diaghilev”

Organizing institutions | The Lisbon Consortium/Universidade Católica Portuguesa, Museu Nacional do Teatro e da Dança, Fundação Millennium BCP
Comissary | Isabel Capeloa Gil
Scientific comissary | Isabel Capeloa Gil, José Carlos Alvarez, Nuno Crespo, Paulo Campos Pinto
Curated by | Isabel Capeloa Gil, José Carlos Alvarez, Nuno Crespo

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Length | 60min
M/16

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2018 | JÂNGAL

The underground is alive, the air is full of metal, there is existence everywhere in this jungle we call JÂNGAL.
The place where this performance takes place is a mythological room made of earth’s various territories, where Teatro Praga will try to create new ontologies that no longer reflect the world nor mimic it, but instead try to speculate on it. In JÂNGAL we all have the right to enjoy the chaos, the horror and the urban jungle provided by an imagery of science fiction mixed with Gaia’s underground minerals and zombies. It’s like Beckett’s play Endgame: “We’re on Earth. There’s no cure for that”.
JÂNGAL opens a space of experiences, where we wonder over a soundscape and sensory atmosphere created by the Portuguese composer Violet and the great Portuguese Fado singer Gisela João. JÂNGAL inspires a feeling of tranquil passivity, it’s a holistic show that tries to stay with the trouble, accepting our mortality entwined in myriad unfinished configurations of places, times, matters and meanings.

A performance by Teatro Praga (André e. Teodósio, Cláudia Jardim, José Maria Vieira Mendes e Pedro Penim)
Cast | André e. Teodósio, Cláudia Jardim, Jenny Larue, Joana Barrios, João Abreu and a participation of a portuguese singer | Gisela João
Scenography | Bruno Bogarim
Costume design | Joana Barrios
Music | Violet
Light design | Daniel Worm d’Assumpção
Sound design | Miguel Lucas Mendes
Video | André Godinho
Head of production | Andreia Carneiro
Production | Alexandra Baião
Co-production | São Luiz Teatro Municipal / Thêatre de la Ville / Teatro Municipal do Porto – Rivoli.Campo Alegre
Photography | Alípio Padilha

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Length | 75min
M/16
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2018 | CONUNDRUM

CONUNDRUM is a spoken loop built from Walt Whitman and Emily Dickinson, Jussi Parikka, Grada Kilomba and computer manuals, that proposes fun and desire as an open-source structure, fundamental to get out of the frame.

CONUNDRUM is an intricate problem that is difficult to deal with; it is a question that has only a conjectural answer; it’s a riddle. In this performance, the dark path of loneliness evidences the daily in-between experience of being and living both as a ghost and a monster. A performer, metamorphosing fandoms, sings a song to a cute cat. The cat may be the political activist, an aggregated extension of the raw materials of earth that is able to melt itself with meatspace, disrupting the legitimacy of the preponderant. Space and sound become pleasure principle capsules for an affect that’s transforming itself.

CONUNDRUM thinks on subjectivity, community, politics and struggles involving ecological and queer agendas.

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2017 | ( )

Throughout its work, the collective Praga has critiqued identity from various and different perspectives, not only in relation to its principal artistic medium – the “theatre” – but also in relation to ideas of person, body, doing or object. “( )” is a durational performance that provides continuity to this activity, now in the framework of the system of visibility of the museum.

The museum space, despite its multiple possibilities, tends towards the structured as a reservoir of ontological confirmation, thereby contributing to convergence towards oneness. In this space – that carries with it contemporary diagnosis that portrays the museum as an institution of capture and formation – that is self-naturalised as a safe-space, and that converges toward oneness, throughout “( )” the performers activate experiences of other spaces, times and modalities, appropriating the colonial insult and spawning new non-figurate sculptures and transverse abstractions that are as real as anything else.

“( )” is a place of desired landscapes, of other body-objects and their relations. It concerns non-normativity as a possibility. A poem of waiting, a position to which all non-preferential forms are relegated, in which a tourist presentation is exploited so as to claim invisibilities, experiences, changes and ephemerality. In “( )”, the poetics of un-being, of unbecoming, and residual hermeneutics engender truths, ontological provinces, and fields of knowledge that have been disqualified due to there unconsolidated approaches.

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A performance by Teatro Praga / André e. Teodósio
Cast | Ana Tang, Aurora Pinho, Joana Barrios, Paulo Pascoal
Objects | Teatro Praga / Bruno Bogarim
Head of production | Andreia Carneiro
Production | Alexandra Baião
Photography | Alípio Padilha
Acknowledgements | Pedro Barateiro, Bárbara Falcão Fernandes, Vasco Araújo, José Nunes e Cátia Pinheiro, Pedro Antunes, Salomé Lamas, Joana Gusmão, Jorge Jácome, Mariana Sá Nogueira, Joana Dilão, João Pedro Vale e Nuno Alexandre Ferreira, Pedro Gomes, Pólo Cultural das Gaivotas | Boavista

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Length | 5h
M/16

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2017 | BEFORE

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2017 | SPRING AWAKENING, TRAGEDY OF CHILDHOOD

Spring Awakening, Frank Wedekind’s well known play written in 1891, deals with a group of adolescents in conflict with a conservative and moralistic society. The cruelty and love among pairs, the generation conflict, suicide, despair, are some of the main themes chosen by the interpretative tradition of this text.

By invitation of Centro Cultural de Belém, Teatro Praga returns to a classic of dramatic literature in order to inscribe, in a text and on the theatrical canon, those who are excluded by a so called representative theatre. We intend to work the lyrical expressionism of a shapeless adolescence, with its own language that tries to get away from a logic that divides reality in cynical and sincere or poetic and rational. Our approach will try to look beyond dualisms and build a reality that tackles invisibility and puts one in contact with a certain strangeness.

Spring Awakening will be occupied by a puberty that deceits “nature”, that refuses the subjection of one body to another, the construction of identities, and takes hold of an emancipatory rite that tries to defy all traditional standardizations. A place where it is required for several languages to coexist, where references are lost and reconstructed, where despair is life and suicide means victory. It is a performance that follows a demand of a humanity to be invented.

A performance by | Teatro Praga
Text | Frank Wedekind with translation by José Maria Vieira Mendes
Cast | André e. Teodósio, Cláudia Jardim, Diogo Bento, Patrícia da Silva, Pedro Zegre Penim e com Cláudio Fernandes, Odete Ferreira, João Abreu, Mafalda Banquart, Óscar Silva, Rafaela Jacinto, Sara Leite e Xana Novais
Light design | Daniel Worm D’Assumpção
Set design | Bárbara Falcão Fernandes
Original score and Sound design | Miguel Lucas Mendes
Costume design | Joana Barrios and Mestre Costureira Rosário Balbi
Photography | Alípio Padilha
Head of production | Bruno Reis, Andreia Carneiro
Production assistant | Alexandra Baião
Executive production | Bernardo de Lacerda
Co-produciton | Teatro Praga, Centro Cultural de Belém, Teatro Nacional São João e Teatro Viriato
Artistic residency and premiere | 23 Milhas – Casa Cultura Ílhavo

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Length | 2h10
M/16

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2016 | ZULULUZU

From the life and work of Fernando Pessoa.

Life is what we make of it. Travel is the traveller. What we see isn’t what we see but what we are.
Fernando Pessoa, “The Book of Disquiet”

This performance uses an imagery inspired by a somewhat obscure chapter of the life of Fernando Pessoa, Portugal’s leading literary figure, mostly renowned with “The Book of Disquiet”: his arrival as a young man in Durban, South Africa in 1896 where he spent the first years of his life. ZULULUZU is a neologism that intends to connect two common places: an idea of Portugal (Luzu) and one of South Africa (Zulu).

Teatro Praga takes advantage of the cooperation between two cultural clichés to attack a cliché of the theatrical institution: the black box. In ZULULUZU the theatre building is used as a scape-goat for a discourse against all discourses, which claims a space for those who are left out, the forgotten stories and characters, the victims of “the way things are”, those who become invisible in front of a black wall. The performance takes hold of a post-structuralist, feminist and gender theory vocabulary and applies it to its own life. ZULULUZU is not a performance against the black box, it is just recognizing the building, demanding visibility for its architecture and normativity, and ultimately for ZULULUZU, a performance on the life and work of Fernando Pessoa.

ZULULUZU announces the end of the “apartheid” of ideas, genres and forms – a strange declaration of queerism, a manifesto in favour of an immaterial object, a performance that does not rest in anyone’s memory and where the exoticism gives way to an endoticism. If “I have in me all the dreams of the world”, as Pessoa wrote, ZULULUZU wants the whole world and its infinity.

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Artistic direction and text | Pedro Zegre Penim, José Maria Vieira Mendes and André e. Teodósio
Cast | André e. Teodósio, Cláudia Jardim, Diogo Bento, Jenny Larrue, Joana Barrios, Maryne Lanaro, Gonçalo Pereira Valves, Pedro Zegre Penim
Scenography | João Pedro Vale & Nuno Alexandre Ferreira
Costume design | Joana Barrios
Master seamstress | Rosário Balbi
Original score | Xinobi
Light design | Daniel Worm d’Assumpção
Sound design | Sérgio Henriques
Production | Bruno Reis
Executive producer | Sara Garrinhas
Communication | Clara Antunes
Photography | Alípio Padilha
Acknowledgments | Aida Tavares, Alexandra Pinho, Alex D’Alva Teixeira, Ana Brito, Ana Carina Paulino, Ana Lúcia Cruz, André Godinho, António Mega Ferreira, António Gouveia, Aviva Obst, Calixto Neto, Carlos Pinto, Catarina Homem Marques, Chloé Siganos, Christophe Lemaire, Clara Riso, Companhia Nacional de Bailado, Cristina Correia, Cristina Piedade, Damaris Muga, Diana Lopes, Ela, Elisabete Azevedo, Giftor Neville, James Muriuki, Joana Gomes Cardoso, João Macdonald, Jody Paulsen, Maria João Sigalho, Mariana Sá Nogueira, Mark Lowen, Marta Neves, Nelson André / Traços Interiores, Patrícia Azevedo, Patrícia da Silva, Paula Nascimento, Paulo André, Paula Sá Nogueira, Paulo Pascoal, Pedro Rapoula, Rosário Balbi, Rui Horta, Rui Tavares, Sébastien Capouet, Selin Gerit, Simore, Sónia Baptista, Syowia Kyambi, Teatro Cão Solteiro, Tiago Bartolomeu Costa, Tiago Coelho, and an infinite thank you to our co-producers, theatre directors, supporters, and all creators who’ve taken part of this proccess, our families, Richard Zenith, João dos Santos Martins, and Luísa Taveira
Co-produced by | São Luiz Teatro Municipal (Lisbon), Théâtre de la Ville (Paris), ÍKSV – Ístanbul Tiyatro Festivali (Istanbul), Teatro Municipal do Porto – Rivoli (Porto), Casa Fernando Pessoa (Lisbon), Institut Français au Portugal
Support to the première | ÍKSV Camões – Instituto da Cooperação e da Língua, Portuguese Embassy in Turkey
Support to the artistic residency | Pólo Cultural das Gaivotas | Boavista, O Espaço do Tempo

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performance spoken in Portuguese, Zulu, English, French, German and Spanish, subtitled in English / French / Portuguese according to the place of presentation

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Length | 75min
M/12

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2015 | I AM EUROPE

I’m a dog shit ashtray
I’m a shrugging moustache, wearing a Speedo tuxedo
I’m a movie with no plot, written in the backseat of a piss-powered taxi
I’m an imperial armpit, sweating Chianti
I’m a toilet with no seat, flushing tradition down
I’m socialist lingerie, I’m diplomatic techno
I’m gay pastry and racist cappuccino
I’m an army on holiday in a guillotine museum
I’m a painting made of hair on a nudist beach eating McDonald’s
I’m a novel far too long
I’m a sentimental song
I’m a yellow tooth waltzing with wraparound shades on.
Who am I?
I am Europe.
Chilly Gonzales

I AM EUROPE is a cycle composed of three different performances that weren’t initially thought of as a trilogy. Only when rehearsals were already under way for the last piece, Tear Gas, did the three shows exchange energy and momentum. I decided to call them I AM EUROPE, the title of a song by Chilly Gonzales that manages to achieve what I am attempting to create with this cycle: to build up and exhibit an identity that lies halfway between the (debatable) label of the “Judeo-Christian tradition” of Europe and my own biography. This is a recurrent process in my work, to channel the tension between the universal and the domestic, between mystery and reason (George Steiner say that Europe is a Tale of Two Cities that invoke”the tension between Greeks and Jews”, the tension between the legacies of Athens and Jerusalem). I AM EUROPE is the depiction of an anthropomorphic map of Europe in three different tempos.

Tear Gas (2015)
Israel (2011)
Eurovision (2005)

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2015 | TEAR GAS

My my! At Waterloo Napoleon did surrender.
Oh yeah! And I have met my destiny in quite a similar way.
Abba

For George Steiner, the “idea of Europe” is a “tale of two cities”: Athens and Jerusalem. Through the “best of times” and the “worst of times”, the imperatives of reason from our Greek heritage and the imperatives of faith and revelation proclaimed in the Torah flow together into one central trunk (A single European? A hero?). This trilogy is completed in Greece, a place I began to visit at the height of the conflicts caused by the economic and social crisis. I haven’t been there to engage in Dark Tourism, nor am I trying to create social-political theatre. I’ve been to Athens to cry. I’ve been to Athens for voluntary encounters with tear gas.

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Text and conception | Pedro Zegre Penim
Cast | Cláudia Jardim, João Duarte Costa, Pedro Zegre Penim
Musical direction and Piano | João Paulo Soares
Choreography | Sónia Baptista
Light design | Daniel Worm d’Assumpção
Make-up | Jorge Bragada
Seamstress | Rosário Balbi
Photography | Alípio Padilha
Video | André Godinho
Production | Cristina Correia, Elisabete Fragoso
Co-production | Culturgest

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Length | 1h20
M/12

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2015 | O NOME DA ROSA

A theatrical marathon.

Rosa Mota has accompanied all my childhood and adolescence. I clearly remember seeing her on television, as she won several Olympic Marathons of Los Angeles [1984] and Seul [1988] and feeling the patriotic enthusiasm around “Rosa” through the euphoric reactions of adults. I believe that patriotism after April 25th Revolution was rebuilt and regenerated thanks to the international charisma of characters such as Rosa or Fernando Gomes.

Another important axis of the work is the word META (goal, mark) which in Portuguese means the end of the race, and in Greek refers to self- referentiality: the concept about itself. I wanted to link the concrete place within Rosa’s sport universe to a place in my own creative universe: a symptom of the most recent artistic creation, which is its tiredness of the meta (-language).

The Name of the Rose refers to a novel by Umberto Eco. In the last chapter of the book, Adso, an old man, looks at his past and comes to the conclusion that the memories we care for only remind us of things we lost and that no longer exist. He brings light to this thought with a proverb in latin that goes like: stat rosa pristina nomine, nomina nuda tenemus, meaning: the ancient rose still remains in the name, we have nothing but names.

This performance looks back to the history of Rosa Mota, but aims to make of this glorious past a path to the opening of meaning in the present, at the time of the show. It will never be a linear narrative and biography. It will always be a Rose within a Rose within a Rose, which in the end will cut the Goal.

Pedro Zegre Penim

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Text | Pedro Zegre Penim and Hugo van der Ding
Cast | Rosa Mota, Mariana Magalhães, Pedro Zegre Penim, Hugo van der Ding, Joana Magalhães, Mafalda Banquart, Xana Novais and Luísa Osório
Light design | Rui Monteiro
Video | Jorge Quintela
Photography | José Caldeira
Production | Elisabete Fragoso
Co-production | Teatro Praga / Teatro Municipal do Porto – Rivoli

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Length | 90min
M/12

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2014 | TABUROPA

International cooperation project TABUROPA, endorsed by European Union’s Culture Programme, invited 4 companies from Portugal, Germany, Belgium and Poland to explore the notion of Tabu in national and european cultures throughout 18 months.

During the Research Phase, the portuguese performers worked under choreographer Arco Renz (kobalt.works, Belgium) in Warsaw, while André e. Teodósio (Teatro Praga) directed the performers from german company futur-3 in Brussels. The results of this process were explored through the Rehearsal Phase, in which the four groups prepared their original performances for the absolute premiere at Sommerblut Festival in Cologne in May 2014.

On the Coming Home Phase, Teatro Praga produced the rerun of INCUBADORA, by Arco Renz with the portuguese group, at Galeria Quadrum in Lisbon, in December 2014, and of SHHHHHHHOW, by André e. Teodósio with the performers from futur-3 and guest Paula Sá Nogueira, at Goethe Institut in Lisboa on March 2015, as well as the Follow-up meeting that closed this project.

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Participating institutions | Teatro Praga, Kobalt Works, Futur-3, Association of Culture Practitioners

EINTOPF

Director | Agnieszka Blonska (Association of Culture Practitioners)
Cast | Angel Kaba, Marielle Morales, Sayaka Kaiwa, Igor Shyshko (kobalt.works)
Research country | Germany

INCUBADORA

Director | Arco Renz (kobalt.works)
Cast | Rita Morais, Nuno Leão, Ricardo Teixeira, Sónia Baptista (Teatro Praga)
Research country | Poland

NO RETURN

Director | André Erlen (Futur3)
Cast | Dominika Biernat, Dawid Żakowski, Sean Palmer, Joanna Wichowska (Association of Culture Practitioners)
Research country | Portugal

SHHHHHHHOW

Director | André Teodosio (Teatro Praga)
Cast | Anja Jazeschann, Bernd Rehse, Tomasso Tessitori, Pietro Micci (Futur3)
Research country | Belgium
Artistic management | André Erlen
Photography | Meyer Originals
Production | Sommerblut Kulturfestival e.V.
Project management | Gregor Leschig, Rolf Emmerich
Production management Germany | Armin Leoni, Judith Heese
Production management Poland | Anna Katarzyna Regulska-Lokanga, Joanna Wichowska, Magdalena Sobolewska
Production management Belgium | Ine Vander Elst
Production management Portugal | Elisabete Fragoso

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2014 | TROPA-FANDANGA

2014 was an important year in Portugal because it was the 40th anniversary of the end of the colonial wars in Angola and Mozambique and the end of the dictatorship of Salazar. It was also, as elsewhere in Europe, the centenary of the declaration of the First World War in 1914. The term “tropa-fandanga” signifies in Portuguese “the beggars”. The word also evokes both an army in rags (the fandanga troops) – which the revues from 1915 to 1920 ridiculed… Or the great war revue which was also part of the golden period of English music-hall (What a Lovely War by Charles Chilton) or in Germany (Hoppla, We’re Alive! by Toller). The first Portuguese revue was called “the revue of the year 1851”. It looked back over the year, in burlesque style, with caricatures of famous people and current affairs. From 1851 to the Carnation Revolution in 1974, we can follow the history and evolution of the country through songs and acts. It was a popular genre in Lisbon where the four theatres of Parque Mayer, which put on two or three shows a day, were always packed. The form stabilised very quickly and stayed the same for over a hundred years: a rigid structure with street talk, songs and comical sketches, and for the high-point of the show, a fado. In the final years of the Salazar dictatorship, the Portuguese Review was the only place in the country where you could make fun of the regime. The revues continued of course after the 25th of April. The principle was still the same but the themes had changed, like the parties in power.

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Texts | Pedro Zegre Penim, José Maria Vieira Mendes, André e. Teodósio, Cláudia Jardim, Diogo Bento, Diogo Lopes, Joana Barrios, Joana Manuel and João Duarte Costa
Direction | Pedro Zegre Penim, José Maria Vieira Mendes and André e. Teodósio
Cast | José Raposo, André e. Teodósio, Cláudia Jardim, Diogo Bento, Diogo Lopes, Filipa Cardoso, Joana Barrios, Joana Manuel and João Duarte Costa
Fado attraction | Filipa Cardoso
Corps du ballet | André Garcia, Jenny Larrue, Travis Walker and Vicente Trindade
Musicians | João Paulo Soares (piano), Vasco Sousa (acoustic bass, viola), Francisco Cardoso (drums), Ruben da Luz (trombone), Maria João Cunha (acordeon), Tiago Morna (portuguese guitar)
Set design | José Capela
Screen design | Barbara Says…, João Pedro Vale and Nuno Alexandre Ferreira, Pedro Lourenço and Vasco Araújo
Costume design | Joana Barrios with costumes from the TNDM II archives from Flávio Tomé and Cláudia Faria, Jasmim de Matos, Juan Soutullo, Octávio Clérigo and Rafaela Mapril and costumes from Marcha do Alto do Pina 2013 by Carlos Mendonça
Lighting design | Daniel Worm D´Assumpção
Sound | Sérgio Henriques
Original score | Sérgio Godinho
Orchestrations and piano | João Paulo Soares
Choreography | João dos Santos Martins
Staging assistant | Cátia Nunes
Props coordination | Susana Pomba
Production | Elisabete Fragoso, Catarina Mendes
Communication | Mafalda Carvalho
Photography | Susana Pomba
Co-production | Teatro Nacional D. Maria II, Maison de la Culture de Bobigny – MC93
Co-presentation | Teatro Municipal do Porto – Rivoli and Campo Alegre and São Luiz Teatro Municipal

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Length | 2h45
M/12

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2013 | THE TEMPEST

In 2010 we performed the debut of A Midsummer Night’s Dream in this auditorium at the Centro Cultural de Belém, based on the eponymous play by Shakespeare and the semi-opera The Fairy Queen by Henry Purcell. Another work by Purcell, The Tempest or The Enchanted Island, also has links to a Shakespeare play, as a comic version of The Tempest which was a resounding commercial success during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. A viewer recounted his impression on the play’s debut thus: “The theatre was completely full, the King and court were all present, and the play was the most ingenuous that I have ever seen.”

We are taking this lost piece as our starting point, along with all of the others that have existed (or not existed), throwing ourselves into the tempests. Featuring the same elements as A Midsummer Night’s Dream (music, video, actors, singers and visual artists), but arranged in a different way, this musical, with music inspired by Purcell and composed and arranged by Xinobi and Moullinex, is a continuation. The Tempest is, therefore, adrift, like an island that is actually a boat, looking for the unknown place from where it set sail. It is searching for the right colour (although there is no sense of right), the correct room (although there is no correctness), another performance (although there is no other), and the tempest (who?). Without an aim and without means. Searching just for the sake of it.

The truth is that the search is just as artificial as the performance or the boat or the island. It is an off-performance (or a show-off, perhaps), like sand thrown in the eyes; in other words, an experience. And a pretext to repeat tempests. However, we do not know what came first – the pretext or the outcome. Yet as The Tempest invents its own critique, the order does not matter, just like everything else. They are all accidents, just like this text that you are reading. Accidents after accidents, sentences after sentences announcing their content, promising the end (which does not exist).

And by the way, if people were to ask you, you could say that The Tempest was the performance that never happened, the discourse of a group that does not feel comfortable with the idea of an object in art, who believe that performances are to be seen as cognitive experiences and nothing more than a chance to short-circuit the world and the things within it. You could claim to have witnessed the description of a performance, without the original performance itself. “That is what they always wanted to do, but they are still unable to do it.” You could say something like that. Or you could say nothing at all, because the performance has already said it all. After all, the performance is over. The performance never existed. The end.

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A performance by Teatro Praga
Based on William Shakespeare’s The Tempest and Henry Purcell’s The Enchanted Island
Text and creation | Pedro Penim, André e. Teodósio, J.M.Vieira Mendes
Original score | Xinobi & Moullinex
Musical arrangements | Carlos Clara Gomes
Cast | Joana Barrios, Diogo Bento, André Godinho, Cláudia Jardim, Diogo Lopes, Patrícia da Silva, André e. Teodósio, Vicente Trindade, Daniel Worm d’Assumpção
Vocal director | Rui Baeta
Soloists | Rui Baeta (Baritone) and Sandra Medeiros (I Soprano)
Choir | Ana Margarida Encarnação (II Soprano), Cristina Repas (Mezzo-soprano), João Francisco (Tenor)
Video | André Godinho
Set design | Bárbara Falcão Fernandes
Light design | Daniel Worm d’Assumpção
Light assistant | Marta Fonseca
Choreography | Vicente Trindade
Historic costumes | António de Oliveira Pinto
Costume design | Joana Barrios
Guest artists | Vasco Araújo, Catarina Campino, Javier Nuñez Gasco, João Pedro Vale
Video team | Joana Frazão, Salomé Lamas
Photography | Paulo Martins, Alípio Padilha
Boom operator | Nuno Mourão
Sound design | Jorge Imperial
Production | Elisabete Fragoso, Filipa Rolaça

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Length | 100min

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2013 | OLD AGE

In Old Age, a text by J.M. Vieira Mendes, the actors, before starting, have already retired. People with pasts, showing wrinkles where we can’t see them. The nearest horizon is death, but melancholy is comedy and despair is laughter. In this play the plot is the pretext to thicken the “Who am I?” or “What does it mean to reach the old age?” Or even “Do I say I am old because I am old or am I old because I say I am old?”

From this text, Teatro Praga came to a show in which its old age is put to test. How will it be in 40 years? Speculating the answer adds mater to a closed concept.

Old Age is time and elderness, knowledge and forgetfulness, arthrosis and pilates. But it is also today and was yesterday. It’s a construction to do with known words. An inevitability to fulfill. A reinvention within the invention. A communication in hiccups. It is, ultimately, the possibility to say, with today’s bodies and the future’s hair: Old Age is here and today.

This show doesn’t inaugurate a new age. It merely continues. We are all in the same story. We are all in the same boat.

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Text | André e. Teodósio, Cláudia Jardim, Diogo Bento, Diogo Lopes, J.M. Vieira Mendes, Patrícia da Silva, Pedro Penim
Cast | Cláudia Jardim, Diogo Bento, Diogo Lopes, Patrícia da Silva, Pedro Penim
Light design | Daniel Worm d’Assumpção
Set design | Bárbara Falcão Fernandes
Photography | Susana Pomba
Production | Elisabete Fragoso, Catarina Mendes
Co-production | Teatro Viriato, Teatro Praga

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Length | 55min
M/12

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2011 | SUSANA POMBA

What’s in a name? That which we call a rose
By any other name would smell as sweet.
Shakespeare, Romeo and Juliet

History has a full repertoire of names: Nikolai Gogol, Antony and Cleopatra, Hedda Gabler, Gianni Schicchi, among many others.

Are they just literary products or have they already become vital organisms? I never met them and yet they are always in my mind. In TOP MODELS, as a way of not forgetting, I decided to record anonymous names, to turn my friends into protagonists of things left to tell. I don’t know if they will remain in history, but they will have an identity card and pay their fees. Susana Pomba is the first text of a long cycle to come.

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Text and Direction | André e. Teodósio / Teatro Praga
Assistant | Sofia Seno
With | Joana Barrios, Diogo Bento, The End of Irony and PAUS
Set design | Bárbara Falcão Fernandes
Music | PAUS
Mixtape | Miguel Bonneville
Light design | Daniel Worm d’Assumpção
Photography | Susana Pomba
Production | Cristina Correia
Co-production | CCB

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Length | 1h20
M/12

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2011 | EGOSISTEMA

Volo in te, et in semine tuo Imperium mihi stabilire.
Says Christ to D. Afonso Henriques, according to Priest António Vieira

CCB is inside out and invites me to do a performance. I start to wonder and suddenly I realize that all of us are inside out.
They suggest me: – Wo Es war, soll Ich werden.
So many foreign, so many languages! 😛
The World is not what it is… therefore is worth spending some time on reviewing the subject by playing a spiral-vertiginous-game: “Who is who?”
It’s going to be like returning to the 80’s but with less hair spray.
EGOSISTEMA will be a redefining game of Nature’s laws.

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Text and direction | André e. Teodósio
Cast | André e. Teodósio, André Godinho, António Gouveia, Catarina Campino, Cláudia Jardim, Joana Manuel, João Martins, Patrícia Silva, Paula Sá Nogueira, Rita Só and Sara Correia
Set design | Bárbara Falcão Fernandes
Photography | Susana Pomba
Production | Cristina Correia
Co-production | Centro Cultural de Belém

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2011 | ISRAEL

Love is always a page written in Hebrew.
Portuguese Proverbs

This performance is a love letter to Israel. Yes, it’s professedly problematic: a declaration of love to an entity many see as a contemporary monster. An actor is seated in front of his computer, his face projected onto a big screen. It is difficult to tell who he is talking to with such intimacy, who is he swearing at, who is making him cry and laugh. Is it the audience? Is he talking to himself? To his lover? Is he exposing is troubled love life in front of our eyes? Israel, a nation in the form of a fiction, takes on a human face, like someone one has to endure. Voltaire wrote that one has to choose between countries where you sweat and countries where you think. In Israel (the country and the performance) you do both.

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A performance by Teatro Praga

Text | Pedro Zegre Penim
Creation and interpretation | Pedro Zegre Penim and Catarina Campino
Light design | Daniel Worm d’Assumpção
Production | Cristina Correia, Elisabete Fragoso
Photography | José Frade
Co-production | Teatro Maria Matos

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Length | 80min
M/12

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2010 | OIL AIN’T ALL, JR

“The war movie is the movie paradigm of today. The Spielberg’s Saving Private Ryan, for example, in which is represented the infinite horror, the carnage and absurd violence. The prospect of Spielberg is that war is an incomprehensible nightmare, a pathetic waste of human lives. But it seems to me that of what we should not lose sight is that behind the Second World War, and the D-Day invasion, was the heroism of an objective and ethical struggle, and that there are causes and ideals worth dying for . This reflects, in fact, a very strong trend in contemporary ideological discourse, to consider those who are willing to risk their lives in the name of a cause or purpose as irrational fanatics.

For what would you be willing to risk everything?

It is this central concern of Westerns in general – to what extent you would have the courage to risk his life?

So I think we should not in any way treat the western as a kind of an american ideological fundamentalism. Rather, it seems to me that we need today more and more of a heroic attitude. In this context, what should follow the deconstruction and the acceptance of radical contingency should not be a universal ironic skepticism, in which you engage in something you should be aware that you’re never committing fully – no. We should rather restore the sense of absolute commitment and courage to risk.”

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A performance by Teatro Praga

Text | José Maria Vieira Mendes
Cast | Cláudia Jardim, José Maria Vieira Mendes, Patrícia da Silva, Pedro Penim and Rodolfo Teixeira
Collaboration | Gabriel Abrantes
Assistance | Bárbara Falcão Fernandes and Joana Barrios
Light design | Daniel Worm d’Assumpção
Production | Cristina Correia and Pedro Pires
Co-production | Centro Cultural de Belém
Photography | Pedro Celestino

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Length | 60min
M/12

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2010 | A MIDSUMMER NIGHT’S DREAM

A performance by Teatro Praga with Músicos do Tejo.

From A Midsummer Night’s Dream by William Shakespeare
and The Fairy Queen by Henry Purcell.

Why theatre when all you want to think about is Summer and Love? Why bother us with the hottest issues when all you want to think about is Summer and Love? Why should we unsettle? Why should we worry about inscribing ourselves?  Why should we dominate the contemporary lexicon? Why that much irony and multi-reference? Why so many hours spent on the Internet hoping not to drop the zeitgeist? Why go on downloading so much? Why should we make ideological and aesthetic enemies? Why should we burn our eyelashes reading Badiou’s benjamins? Why intensify wrinkles and white hair? When all we want is Summer and Love?
MIDSUMMER NIGHT’S DREAM wants to provide enjoyment and relaxation.  We’ll all be on and won’t even remember those who’re off. We’ll treat you like a Prince and you’ll love each moment. Let’s feel the air passing by like a soft breeze and let’s forget about meeeeeeeeeeeeee… It’s like inviting someone for dinner and avoiding ‘’certain topics’’ so that nobody gets bored and the conversation can flow. It’s like driving on the freeway to Algarve, Baroque music playing on the radio, your friend sitting beside you and kissing your neck… and here we go into the future, where a party awaits us, a fashion cocktail and an astronomical bill which will be paid when the Winter arrives.
With the restoration of the monarchy in 1660, Charles II authorized two theatre companies for himself and his brother, the Duke of York. From that point on, and influenced by what was being done in France, under Louis XIV, the theatre of machines was born: spectacular and exuberant, excessive, megalomaniac and with a magnificent epilogue in THE FAIRY QUEEN, by Henry Purcell.
Starting with Shakespeare’s MIDSUMMER NIGHT’S DREAM, Purcell composes music for a show whose second version (1691-92) was filled with special effects, an expensive and extravagant performance which, despite its success, ended up in a financial fiasco.
A giant water fountain and six monkeys dancing are mentioned.
Teatro Praga will relive those times. MIDSUMMER NIGHT’S DREAM is a celebration in the pursuit of happiness and a tribute to power to the sound of Purcell and with a contemporary flavour, our flavour.

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“Midsummer Night’s Dream” was reenacted by Balleteatro students in 2017, at Coliseu do Porto.

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Cast | André e. Teodósio, Cláudia Jardim, Diogo Bento, Joana Barrios, Joana Manuel, Patrícia da Silva and Rodolfo Teixeira
Soloists | Ana Quintans (Soprano), Rossano Ghira (Counter Tenor), João Sebastião (Tenor) and Nuno Dias (Bass)
Olisipo choir | Elsa Cortes (Soprano), Luísa Tavares (Contralto – July 3), Lucinda Gerhard (Contralto – July 4), Diogo Cerdeira (Tenor), Armando Possante (Bass)
Three fairies | Leonor Robert, Rafaela Albuquerque and Rita Fonseca
Film crew | Carlos Eduardo, Cláudia Morais, Francisco Moreira, João Martins, Leonor Noivo, Nuno Morão and Tiago Oliveira
Guest artists | Ana Pérez-Quiroga, Catarina Campino, Javier Núñez Gasco, João Pedro Vale, Leo Ramos, Miguel Viegas, Rogério Nuno Costa, The End of Irony (Diogo Lopes, Ivo Silva, Miguel Cunha, Rita Ricardo Morais and Teixeira) Vasco Araújo and Vincente Trindade
Musical director | Marcos Magalhães
Video director | André Godinho
Light design | Daniel Worm d’Assumpção
Sound design | Ricardo Guerreiro
Set design | Bárbara Falcão Fernandes
House | Filipe Carneiro (Triplinfinito)
Costume design | Carla Cardoso
Production | Bruno Coelho, Cristina Correia and Sara Maurício
Assistance | José Nunes
Tejo’s musicians | Álvaro Pinto (Violin-concertmaster), Xu Na(Violin I), Raquel Cravino (Violin I), Denys Stetsenko (Violin II), Zófia Pająk (Violin II), Raquel Massadas (Viola), Lúcio Studer (Viola), Paulo Gaio Lima (Cello), Xurxo Varela (Viola da gamba), Filipa Meneses (Viola da Gamba), Duncan Fox (Violone), Carolino Career (Bassoon), Luís Marques (Oboe I), Andreia Carvalho (Oboe II) Antonio Quítalo (Trumpet I), Bruno Fernandes (Trumpet II), Hugo Sanches (Theorbo), Ricardo Pedro Leitão (Theorbo), Joaquim Lopes (Percussion), Marta Araújo (Clavier I), Marcos Magalhaes (Clavier II)
Photography | Alípio Padilha

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Length | 2h20
M/6

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2009 | DEMO

An order of São Luiz Teatro Municipal

São Luiz Teatro Municipal invited Teatro Praga to make a show on India and Teatro Praga proposed to make a musical. Demo is a musical inspired by India, but where India remained we no longer know. Perhaps in the mythology of the birth of a nation, which puzzled us (mother in law and another’s wife, married with uncles and daughter of nephews), or even in the proliferation of arms of a goddess, in the differentiation of classes, the dimension of India’s democracy, in the excess of its population. India finds itself in the form of the show and not registered, as in a portrait or documentary. We were not there. No. We have not spoken with “them.” No.

India was used as a code to read Europe. The “other” as a mirror to see ourselves, which is an ancient method, a common place that served as a pretext for a lot of travelling. We read Moravia and Pasolini, and not Tagore, we saw Fritz Lang and not Ray.

Demo has a narrative. It’s a love story. We do not tell it very well, because those days are gone. And also because it is not possible to tell when you do not know very well what there is to tell. We managed to mix. Estonia with Iceland, Bulgaria with Spain, English with German and we find ourselves reading cycles, those that repeat themselves forever and ever: solution, failure, solution, failure.

But we have a protagonist. We named her Savitri. She comes from the waters where the crocodiles live. And she proposes, sorry, she imposes an order. Maybe all she has is a political dream, a demonic and megalomaniac dream. Or maybe she just wants to travel: “In heaven we have our Indias, to get there is to save oneself, that we all sail is what it takes.” (Father Manuel Bernardes, The last days of man.)

We built the show from fragments and completed it with the american musicians and performers Kevin Blechdom and Christopher Fleeger, and the Estonian musician and performer Andres Lõo. We wrapped philosophical, ethical, social and cultural questions in candy-paper-chansons. The candy is for everyone: colorful and palatable, but hard to crack and lethal to the teeth. It is democratic, demented and destructive.

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A performance by Teatro Praga with original music by Kevin Blechdom, Christopher Fleeger and Andres Loo

With André e. Teodósio, André Godinho, Andres Lõo, Carlos António, Christopher Fleeger, Cláudia Jardim, Joana Barrios, Joana Manuel, Kevin Blechdom, Luís Madureira, Miguel Bonneville, Patrícia da Silva, Pedro Penim and Rita Só
Guest star | Rão Kyao
And the collaboration of Vasco Araújo
Crocodiles | André Campino, Diogo Bento and mulher bala
Light design and technical direction | Daniel Worm d’Assumpção
Video | André Godinho
Vocal support | Luís Madureira
Choreographic assistance | João Galante
Nora Nova costume | Fernanda Pereira
Ilse Koch costume | João Figueira Nogueira
Costume design | Teresa Louro and Rosário Balbi
Execution of the head of Tim O ‘Leary | Jorge Bragada
Photography | Susana Pomba
Production | Cristina Correia, Joana Gusmão and Pedro Pires
Co-production | S. Luiz Teatro Municipal
Support | O Espaço do Tempo, DEVIR, O Rumo do Fumo, Goethe-Institut Portugal

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Length | 1h40
M/12

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2009 | PADAM PADAM

A disaster performance.

Padam Padam is probably a show inspired by the disaster cinema and was interested in recalling the year zero. It is also a show dedicated to the animals. And the storms. A show that is considering how it will be. How can it be. To find new diseases because after all, if a person where the different bacteria and viruses multiply is feeling bad, on the other hand the mentioned bacteria and viruses feel remarkably well.

Let us begin by the middle: Padam Padam is a disaster performance. We stole the name from films that fantasize with the end of the world or visit the monster or the alien invasion. We have supported us in a hypothetical structure, cinematic ghosts of arguments, but let’s not go beyond five people seated in a tiny space where they are exposed to the elements and experience ideas such as family or community, the words and names but also some love, utopias and travel.

To help “written press”, we could say that we tell of a sunny day when a family decides to leave for the weekend. A restless and inconsistent family. And as the day progresses, the dark clouds approaching, the stroms release and there are meteorites colliding with the structures on the planet. The survivors, the family left in the morning, they are wandering in the wilderness of ruins and corpses. Looking for some old routines, others betting on new ideas.

Padam Padam is a show dedicated to the animals. A show that is considering how it will be. How can it be. . To find new diseases because after all, if a person where the different bacteria and viruses multiply is feeling bad, on the other hand the mentioned bacteria and viruses feel remarkably well.

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A peerformance by Teatro Praga

Text | José Maria Vieira Mendes
Cast | Cláudia Jardim, Diogo Bento, Marcello Urgeghe, Patrícia da Silva and Pedro Penim
Narrator | Luis Miguel Cintra
Collaboration | Vasco Araújo
Light design and technical direction | Daniel Worm d’Assumpção
Video | André Godinho
Photography | Ângelo Fernandes and Susana Pomba
Graphic image (Poster) | Mulher Bala
Waltz teacher | Paula Fonseca
Production | Cristina Correia, Joana Gusmão and Pedro Pires
Set design assistance | João Gonçalves
Assembly team | PréForma
Co-production | Centro Cultural de Belém, Próspero
Associated structures | Théâtre National de Bretagne (Rennes, France), Théâtre de la Place (Liège, Belgium), Emilia Romagna Teatro Fondazione (Modena, Italy); Schaubühne am Lehniner Platz (Berlin, Germany), University of Tampere (Tampere, Finland)
Sponsors | Teatro Viriato, O Espaço do Tempo

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Length | 90min
M/12

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2008 | TURBO-FOLK

An order of the São Luiz Teatro Municipal as part of the cycle “Outras Lisboas”.

Serving Teatro São Luiz’s cycle “Outras Lisboas” for a debate on immigration in Lisbon, and being assigned to the Teatro Praga the specificity of Eastern European immigrants, Turbo-Folk (title derived from the serbian musical concept coined by Rambo Amadeus denominating a style of traditional music with a “up-rooting pop”) appears as an inevitable community show that in the wake of Aeschylus’ Persians, (un) freeze Eastern European and West relations ie those old issues, once consciously devalued, they return with all the force of the Zeitgeist. Using data from the “other side”

“(…) simply said to want to commend the fact that Carlos Fino, in his reportings from war, has always reflected an extraordinary respect and understanding for the culture that is the “other side”. I remembered that just maybe the Aeschylus’ tragedy ”Persians” was pleased with Carlos Fino (I venture this opinion without knowing it).”

Frederico Lourenço

The show Turbo-Folk is the third part of an epic trilogy about the ” Aesthetic Power”*, launched by the show Discotheater [Festival Alkantara] which was followed by O Avarento ou A Última Festa (Miser ou The Last Party) [TNSJ].**

Turbo-Folk commits an attack: a fresh political start through aesthetics. As immigration is a serious problem to be solved at a political level, it is also a good metaphor for many other issues pertinent to the act of communication and sharing community, the desires and problems in the relationship of humans with each other. The self-empowerment.

It is not enough to point the finger at policies, not enough to embellish the immigration status by assigning it as a category shared by all individuals, not enough to go outside victimized, not just say that the problem resides “the other”, because the human being is always one step away from falling into the abyss in this aeschylian persian rug.

Thus, Turbo-Folk is a revolution of the landless, an estonian percussionist semi-lost and a solo show of a ukrainian lyrical singer.

Turbo-Folk is a celebration of immigrants.

Turbo-Folk is the performativity that counts, not the object (by the way, the performative troika is: Jean-Luc Godard, Rambo Amadeus, and Slavoj Žižek).

In Turbo-Folk “homo faber aestheticus” gladly drifts in any bloody river.

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A performance by Teatro Praga

Cast | Ana Só, André e. Teodósio, Andres Lõo, Cláudia Jardim, Diogo Bento, Inês Vaz, Patrícia da Silva and Pedro Penim
Singers | Larissa Savchenko and Luiza Dedicin
Collaboration | André Godinho, Catarina Campino, Javier Núñez Gasco, José Maria Vieira Mendes, Rogério Nuno Costa and Vasco Araújo
Three gold teeth dressed by | Mariana Sá Nogueira
Light design | Daniel Worm d’Assumpção
Set design assistant | João Gonçalves
Production | Joana Gusmão and Pedro Pires
Co-production | São Luiz Teatro Municipal
Photography | José Frade
Promotional photo | Steve Stoer
Graffiti | Rodrigo Craveiro

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Length | 90min
M/12

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2008 | PÚBLICO-ALVO

Stop pulling my lead or I’ll bite your fuckin’ lef off!
in Dog, by Steven Berkoff

If the “return to Nature” was never possible, there is no point in pretending that some times we are in the open air and others we’re not. Let us celebrate then, once more, the land that man tread upon, in the quest of Amazon’s unkind lumbermen, of the merciless icelandic harpooners or the resistant inhabitants of the Low Countries, and let us perform one more mass in the name of Dr. Frankenstein (the new Dyonisos) because “God gives nuts, but he does not break them”.

Let us simulate, in a space halfway between the airport, the station and the stadium, the mythic (because it is extinct) fight between Physis and Anthropos, between Nature and Man.

The actors are chosen. Disaster is inevitable. The target audience just dare show up.

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Co-creation | André e. Teodósio, Cláudia Jardim, José Maria Vieira Mendes, Patrícia da Silva and Pedro Penim
Production and communication | FIMP, Pedro Pires and Joana Gusmão
Light design and music | Teatro Praga
Photography | Susana Neves

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2008 | CONSERVATORY

Got to write a classic
Got to write it in an attic
Adrian Gurvitz, Classic

To make a conservative show, make a classic out of ourselves, give birth to a monster, impose an identity, build a greenhouse where we can keep all this and show all this, closed walls, acclimatized room, no danger of getting infected, a thing of our own, plants for others to see. An absolute interior, comfortable, conservative and adequately decorated, a space which is big enough to keep us all inside. Or almost. But what comes after? What happens when it brims over? Are you staying or are you leaving? Do you belong or don’t you belong? Is your palace like mine?

The point of departure for this show emerges from a text by Peter Sloterdijk addressing the ‘cavernous’ allegory of the greenhouse: conservatory is also a synonym in English for greenhouse, a place where we keep what we want to preserve.

If the conservatory is a place where objects and human beings can conserve themselves and survive, distant from all alterations and changes (except for ageing and its natural results), our Conservatory is a place where texts and actors can conserve themselves and survive, distant from all alterations and changes (except for ageing and its natural results). If a conservatory can become an evolved organization, under the form of a public or private establishment, destined to safeguard and promote the teaching of cultural values such as music, dance and theatre, our Conservatory is an organization that allows itself to evolve, under the form of a semi public/semi-private space, destined to safeguard and promote the teaching of Theatre.

The term conservatory is largely used to designate an artificial phenomenon of protection, but it is equally applied to designate a natural spontaneous context that is able to fulfil, without human intervention, a function of preservation – for instance, the isolation of an island during the drift of the continents as being able to create a natural conservatory of living species.

So, Conservatory is also a performance resulting from the natural drift of theatre that tries to create a natural conservatory of the species.

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Co-production | Festival Alkantara
With | André e. Teodósio, Cláudia Jardim, Joana Barrios, Patrícia da Silva, Pedro Penim and Simão Cayatte
Light design | Daniel d’Assumpção Worm
Production | Joana Gusmão and Pedro Pires
Support | Espaço do Tempo, DEVIR

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Length | 90min

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2007 | HAMLET

To dance or not to dance… It’s not a question…

Two actors rehearse the creation of a performance aimed for children. How should you tell stories to kids? And more precisely, how should you tell a dramaturgical and literature classic to the younger crowd? Over the table there is a purse, from which objects pop out and quickly become the characters of a story.

Hamlet is played by an apple, Gertrude takes the form of dental floss, Claudius an hidrating cream and Ofelia, a vitamins tablet. After an hour, Hamlet is reborn from out of the purse, which resembles Mary Poppins’: smaller than the dreams it keeps inside.

This performance suggests a challenge to discover and perform different theatrical “scenes” for Hamlet‘s plot. Two actors tell a Shakespeare story to the children, guiding them (and distracting them) through the narrative and inviting them to an active participation.

The play ends with a trip to the stage, where a party will take place, with lights, music, costumes. With the help of the audience, Hamlet will be retold.
Each day, a different performance is created by the young group of spectators, from this Shakespeare’s play.

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Created by | Cláudia Jardim, Diogo Bento, Pedro Penim
Cast | Cláudia Jardim, Diogo Bento
Dramaturgical Support | Maria João da Rocha Afonso
Head of production | Andreia Carneiro
Executive production | Alexandra Baião
Photography | Alípio Padilha
Co-production | Teatro Maria Matos

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Length | 130 min
M/6

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Bookings: producao@teatropraga.com 

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2007 | MISER OR THE LAST PARTY

A five acts comedy.

A new Miser by José Maria Vieira Mendes: revisiting a paper of 1668, in the prospect of conflict between two generations, in which Moliere is only for the skeleton: the author starts the original structure and lets breachs, breaks, loose parts, mixing languages and styles, to develop a reflection on the conflict between the generation since April 25th and her parents’ generation. A new version of the piece, free-avoidance, or writing what is already like to read the original work.

In Miser – possible stage for endless claims and hysterical political and aesthetic as the distribution of power within the same generation (that of “Jonah” did 25 years in 2000), panoptic surveillance of contemporary cities (discipline and mutilation), new vs. old, the absence of mother, the perils of a calculative world, the transcendental power vs. cartesian social norms, the reduction of the human to a monetary value + quantification as knowledge, the house as a representation of the modern economy and blah blah blah – deny any possible linear reading, and tried to deconstruct and “screw up” the text as less as possible. This can be seen (by those who know us or by those who have some expectations) as a sly/little innovative maneuver classicist representation  vs. presentation). In this case we will say, viriliana path, which is a matter of perspective.

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Text | José Maria Vieira Mendes, a partir de O Avarento (L’Avare, 1668), de Molière
Co-creation | André e. Teodósio, Cláudia Jardim, José Maria Vieira Mendes, Marcello Urgeghe, Martim Pedroso, Patrícia da Silva, Paula Diogo, Pedro Penim, Rogério Nuno Costa, Romeu Runa e Sofia Ferrão
Cast | André e. Teodósio, Cláudia Jardim, Marcello Urgeghe, Diogo Bento, Patrícia da Silva, Paula Diogo, Pedro Penim, Rogério Nuno Costa e Romeu Runa
Light design | Daniel Worm d’Assumpção
Head of production | Pedro Pires
Production assistant | Joana Gusmão
Photography | João Tuna
Video | André Godinho
Collaboration | O Espaço do Tempo / Centro Cultural de Belém
Co-production | Teatro Nacional São João

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Length | 2h30

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2006 | QUARTETT

What remains when ideologies die?

A man and a woman are playing games of sexuduction. A new terrorism – an emotional one – without mediated space or meetings for a security council, but where there are attacks, refugees and usurpations, too. There’s no good or bad people here, there’s only dangerous liaisons.

This performance is born out of broken pieces of emotional terrorism.

What remains when ideologies die? Who’s the boss? Who wants to be in charge? The best way to find the victim is to look for someone with blood in her hands. Blood is no longer the proof for the crime, the murderer attacks from a distance, while the victims dirty their hands in order to stop the bleeding.

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Co-creation | Cláudia Jardim and José Gonçalo Pais
Light design | Teatro Praga with Daniel Worm d’Assumpção
Graphic design | Triplinfinito
Production | Pedro Pires
Co-production | CENTA, Teatro Praga

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2006 | DISCOTHEATER

A “durational” performance.

DISCOTHEATER is a show that starts when the others end.

DISCOTHEATER is a show between History and the Zeitgeist. Between theories and facts. Between art, tradition and authority. Between correct and incorrect art. Between improvisation and skill. Between romantic sacrifice and painful triumph. Between ” Wahn und Witz ” (illusion and presence of mind). Between the dionysian and the apollonian.

The ongoing “discotheatrelization”. An assembly line of images and explosives tears of mastery. A “phantasmagoria” A “discoteatral” non-place populated by teachers who call themselves as such. Everything and everyone waiting for the light. From “Aufklärung” (enlightenment).

These days, the demand of the new stems from a consciousness that has lost its standing before the real, a quixotic drift. An impractical mastery. A desire that does not exist. A thing that doesn’t exist. Therefore, a trigger to further. And if we remember that dry leaves have fallen from a web, that there had been a storm of food on stage, that there were three thousand guests to see an empty gallery, that horses have stormed the scene, that there have been prepared hot meals served by actors-musicians, who have already built a labyrinthine landscape where viewers had to find their way, that there already has been a floor-bed filled with red carnations, what will leave us? Only to continue.

In DISCOTHEATER we feel “like we’re inside a dream. We had a wonderful dream, that we barely dare to think, because we are afraid to see it disappear. That is precisely our mission: to interpret and secure dreams. There will be nothing more than that. Let us tell you our morning dream. And we hope to wake up at the same time.” We want it to be like this.

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Co-creation and interpretation | André e. Teodósio, Cláudia Jardim, Diogo Bento, Maria João Machado, Nelson Guerreiro, Patrícia da Silva, Pedro Penim and Vasco Araújo
Light design | Daniel d’Assumpção Worm
Production | Pedro Pires
Photography | Ângelo Fernandes and José Luís Neves
Video | André Godinho
Collaboration | Isabelle Schad
Support | O Espaço do Tempo

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Length | 70min
M/12

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2005 | EUROVISION

Beaux messieurs, belles dames: musique au programme / Chanteurs, à vos gammes, que le meilleur gagne / Les frontières sont ouvertes / Que déclarer si ce soir c’est la fête?

Telex, Euro-Vision

Is there such a thing as a European Identity? Can we understand each other if we speak so many different languages? This “two-man show” looks at these questions and instead of answering them, confronts the audience with more questions, in an ironic performance that, in keeping with its subject, is multilingual and uses many elements drawn from different artistic areas. To pin down Europeanness they chose as inspiration the biggest kitsch event of the common cause, the Eurovision Song Contest, where the representatives of different nations with different cultures, languages, ways of life and standards of living join in a parade of uniform tastelessness.

Europe starts with the birth of its ordinary languages and with the reaction, often alarmed, towards the eruption of the mentioned languages, start the critical culture of Europe, provoking the fragmentation drama of languages and starts to reflect about its own destiny of Multilanguage civilization. Suffering the effects of fragmentation, Europe tries to come up with a solution: looks backwards and tries to find again the Adamic language, and looks forward focusing on the construction of a language of reason as perfect as Adam’s language.

Umberto Eco
Searching for the perfect language

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Text | Pedro Penim
Creation and Interpretation | Pedro Penim and André e. Teodósio
Light design | Daniel Worm d’Assumpção
Production | Pedro Pires, Elizabete Fragoso, Cristina Correia
Inicial version in collaboration with | Rogério Nuno Costa and Martim Pedroso
Co-production | ZDB / Transforma AC
Photography | Ângelo Fernandes, Lab8

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Length | 60min
M/12

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2005 | SHALL WE DANCE

Shall We Dance is a series of short performances that occurred 5 times, from 2003-2008. A member of Teatro Praga would invite someone from the “outside” for an artistic collaboration. Shall We Dance is the fuel for exploring complicities, a surgery made by two people in order to find out different readings and accept new compromises. The performances have been made in collabroration with the following artists: Alexander Kelly, Daniel Worm d’Assumpção, Joaquim Horta, José Gonçalo Pais, José Maria Vieira Mendes, Maria João Machado, Marta Furtado, Nelson Guerreiro and Nuno Carinhas.

SHALL WE DANCE 2
2005

Co-creation | Patrícia da Silva and Nelson Guerreiro
Support | O Espaço do Tempo

• Super-Gorila

Co-creation | André e. Teodósio and José Maria Vieira Mendes
Cast | André e. Teodósio
Special collaboration | Pedro Olivença
Light design | André e. Teodósio and José Maria Vieira Mendes
Assembly | Luís Bombico and João Leonardo

• Hidden Track

Co-creation | Carlos Alves

SHALL WE DANCE 3
2006

Co-production | CENTA

• Quarttet

Co-creation | Cláudia Jardim and José Gonçalo Pais

• Our Party People

Co-creation | Sofia Ferrão and Maria João Machado
Light design | Teatro Praga with the collaboration of Daniel Worm d’Assumpção
Graphic design | Triplinfinito
Video | André Godinho
Production and communication | Pedro Pires

SHALL WE DANCE 4
2007

Co-production | Culturgest

• Off The White

Co-creation | Paula Diogo e Alexander Kelly
Collaboration | Christopher Hall, Tracey Doxey and Mário Costa

• Geografias e Tratados

Co-creation | Sofia Ferrão and Nuno Carinhas
Cast | Carlos Alves

• Hunting Scene

Co-creation | Cláudia Gaiolas and Daniel Worm d’Assumpção
Light design | Daniel Worm d’Assumpção
Video | André Godinho
Production and communication | Pedro Pires
Costume design | Miss Suzie
Collaboration | Pedro Carmo and DJ Alx

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2005 | SUPER-GORILA

This show started in an adolescent.

We are sad and that’s ok. We’re always sad.’ There are stories that aren’t told anymore. There are things, which are wrong. There are words, which are not said. There are no reasons and there isn’t a direction. We don’t find an enemy or a guilty one. It happens a lot and everything in simultaneous. It is difficult to be still and it is also difficult to talk and to remain silent. We don’t know when it started or when it’s over, or when they are together and they are divided.

We search for it in time and we go after the string that was lost. But the memory is weak and the will is little.

This show started in an adolescent.

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Creation | André e. Teodósio and José Maria Vieira Mendes
Graphic design | Catarina Campino and Javier Núñez Gasco
Production | Cristina Correia
Co-production | Espaço do Tempo, Teatro Praga
Running time | 40m
Language | Portuguese (with subtitles, if necessary)

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Length | 40min
M/12

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2005 | AGATHA CHRISTIE

Perhaps it is difficult to speak of this show, or at least as much as the past, because there is once again the trying to do a job that does not have a successful narrative and yet be efficient at all levels and at the same time proposes to return the narrative from a story, but without going through the narrative psychology. All-time bomb.

Agatha Christie requires two different times: the time of “Whodunnit?” Where the narrative prevails, and the victory of delirium (where, paradoxically, the order is established), where there’s characters and action sequences, and pop songs (malgré tout) narratives sequences. Each item with its integrity, its limits and its own development. Everything takes its place in the whole. Each party uses its content, its tone, its pace and its formal qualities, creating a meta-pattern, a super-object.

The theme of guilt is generally handled by Agatha Christie in ”Ten Little Niggers,” destroying a basic convention of police (which is also one of the fictions of modern society): the determination of guilt, this place visible to all the evil that redeemed. The cop classic glossed ad nauseam this theme: the suspects may be many, all will have reason to kill, but in the end, one is the criminal (even when the “guilty” match two or three empirical subjects). Beyond the epistemological trust that the explanation of the mystery always transmits this determination of the guilty never fail to bring a sense of tranquility. In the words of Abel Barros Baptista:

“Once decided the question ‘Who was to blame?” All problems will dissipate and each in his own life.”

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Co-creation and cast | André e. Teodósio, Carlos Alves, Cláudia Gaiolas, Cláudia Jardim, Diogo Bento, Patrícia da Silva, Paula Diogo, Pedro Penim, Sandra Simões and Sofia Ferrão
Light design and technical direction | Daniel Worm d’Assumpção
Production direction and communication | Pedro Pires
Co-production | Culturgest, Teatro Praga
Graphic design | Triplinfinito
Photography | Ângelo Fernandes and Sofia Ferrão

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2004 | FIVE STARS

5***** is an hour for celebration, of evocation of old ghosts and new provocation of news ones.

5 ***** is a show that involves the history of portuguese theatre and Teatro Praga (which celebrates, in 2005, 10 years of activity), confering, naming, giving advice in the form of prescriptions on how to build 5 *****, a show that continues its obsession with Nietzschean nihilism (and Artaud, why not), the postmodernism of Derrida, and the search for language and meaning of Steiner, plus Montaigne, Benjamin and Castoriadis which exchanges the said by the unsaid, the laughter by crying, the truth by false, exchange the names themselves, self-questioning, which relies on things without knowing the background story, which opens every day, all the time, more songs, costumes, smoke, smoke a lot (the eternal portuguese dilemma)…

5***** is an hour for celebration, of evocation of old ghosts and new provocation of news ones.

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Co-creation and interpretation | André e. Teodósio, Carlos Alves, Cláudia Gaiolas, Cláudia Jardim, Paula Diogo, Pedro Penim, Pedro Pires, Patrícia da Silva, Sandra Simões and Sofia Ferrão
Light design | Pedro Domingos

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2004 | TITLE

Título (Title) provides the public a choice: to pay or not pay. The choice is decisive in defining the role of each in the show: every place you choose, every angle, every movement and every spoken word are subject to an exhaustive stamp of true or false. Fiction and document are located here, in the same dimension.

The show called Título (Title) is a series of “fake parts” who do not intend to “retract” and that inevitably will be lost trying to find meaning in objects that doubt themselves. Questions that come to replace the security by false gods old and new gods explains Arno Gruen*, means a release of “old submissions” with “new authorities.”

Título (Title) intends to give evidence of the truth in a minefield of lies. Want to label projects simultaneously impregnated veracity of articles as false as the Ming jars of 300 stores.

Stepping these anti-personnel mines is as exciting as inappropriate or vain.

It seems that this show called Título (Title), as these tautologies and contradictions, is purely formal, meaningless and says nothing about the world. But it is also considering its status as spectacle essential, as are the tautologies in the field of logic, which states the laws without which thought and discourse are inconsistent.

If the tautological statements like: “My name is name” are necessarily true a priori and the opposite (a contradiction) is a logic preposition necessarily false when applied to three-dimensional theatrical convention they all shuffle and confront this falsity space par excellence, as a rule, is situated at the antipodes of perception and understanding of hyper-realist cinema.

*False Gods, Arno Gruen, Peace Media Publishing Ltd., 1997 Lisbon, translation by Lumir Nahodil.

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Co-creation and cast | Carlos Alves, Catarina Campino, Cláudia Jardim, Javier Núñez Gasco, Patricia da Silva and Pedro Penim
Production and communication | Pedro Pires
Photography | Sofia Ferrão and Hélio Mateus
Support | O Espaço do Tempo

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2004 | ON THE TABLE THE KNIFE

In a ring, and in constant turmoil, parade many different questions.

Axes / After Whose stroke the wood rings, / And the echoes!…
“Words,” Sylvia Plath

Sobre a mesa a faca (On the table a knife) is a co-produced show by the companies and Cão Solteiro and Teatro Praga, which features a collaborative effort and a clash of identities and, continuing the recent work of both companies, is a work that is both as an essay both visual/vital, of open reading.

In a ring, and in constant turmoil, parade many different questions: what is public and what is private? What is mine and what is yours? We will fight? Who will survive? Who will have more power? Will someone annihilate anyone? A universe transparent or reflective? What is truth and what is lie? Who are you and who am I? Is it real or invented? They are looking at me or are you looking at you? I am a microbe on the knife? And the table, the world? And I, and me (cue the music)…

Must: There is no table. There is no knife. There is no tendency to set the show according to a simple rule or in a single scene or activity. It’s not about anything. It’s about all. There is only one place where you can talk. Do not talk only to the audience. Do not talk. Speak.

There to be: The characters finally are welcome. There is the trash of the world. There are hands that are raised in favor of attention. There are second skins for protection. There’s a city. There’s the city and its texts. There are artists and their texts. There are talks/interviews. There is individual recognition from a structure of “hostage of the other.” And the city stands. And the city crumbles. There’s the anthem of America. There is money, big money. There is death without blood. There are wounds with blood. There is a dog with fever, barking plagues. There are voices from beyond. There is the here and now. And nothing else.

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Co-creation and interpretation | André e. Teodósio, Carlos Alves, Marcello Urgeghe, Paula Sá Nogueira, Pedro Penim and Sofia Ferrão
Supporting drama | Manuela Correia
Costume design | Mariana Sá Nogueira
Set design | Nuno Carinhas
Seamstress | Teresa Louro, Palmira Abranches and Natália Ferreira
Production and communication | Pedro Pires
Co-production | Cão Solteiro
Graphic design | Triplinfinito

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2003 | PRIVATE LIVES

A decisive gesture of launching dices decides the price of the ticket. The distribution of four parts by the six actors is an offered Russian Roulette, on tray, to the public. It will be Serendipity, Book-Crossing, Random Order, Nietzsche (!) and Love (!!?) birds of a feather? A bag with a white ball and a black ball called chance.

It is for it to rule, for each day the chance of some 72 possible combinations that we know exist in this show. But we already warn that the exponential is infinite, and that the hand that rocks the dice cup is the hand that will determine the course of events.

From Noël Coward we still do not know if we like. We never understood in which part of the gray and infinite zone ranging from the intellectual dandy to the futile queer he is situated. In this slippery territory, in this swamp, which will operate the building and part of the piece and of the show. It is here that the cool and efficient Noël Coward’s universe suffers a blow of fate: the staging (actors and audience) of this show will never be more than one product sample and the assumption of the results. And nobody shifted its consequences.

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Nomination
WINNER | “Decade Theatre 2003” Prize | Clube Português de Artes e Ideias | categ. Best Director and Best Actress

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Text | Noël Coward
Translation | Carlos Falcão
Co-creation and interpretation | André e. Teodósio, Carlos Alves, Cláudia Jardim, Paula Diogo, Patrícia da Silva, Pedro Penim and Sofia Ferrão
Styling | Sofia Aparício
Executive producer | Pedro Pires
Graphic design | Paula Veiga

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2003 | SUDDENLY ME

The reconstruction of a death.

This involves the reconstruction of a death.
Writing from The Night and the Laughter by Nuno Bragança, this piece brings up the freezing of a moment and revisit a past: a sweep by permanent visual memory of someone.
This reconstitution is also synonymous with reconstruction. Reconstruction of a wreck or an empty space. Reconstruction of a life or a moment of decision and decisive. A reconstruction deconstructed and deprived of continuity. A reconstruction made of opportunities and of vampire advantages of locations, stories, viewers, writers and performers.

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Awards
HONORABLE MENTION | ACARTE / Madalena Perdigão 2003 prize

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Text | Pedro Penim, from The Night and the Laughter by Nuno Bragança
Set design | Pedro Penim
Cast | André e. Teodósio, Cláudia Gaiolas, Cláudia Jardim and Tiago Matias
Production director | Maria João Fontaínhas
Executive producer | Ana Rita Osório and Pedro Pires
Photography | Sofia Ferrão
Co-production | C ª Teatro de Sintra / Transforma AC

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Length | 60min
M/12

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2002 | MONTH IN THE COUNTRY

For Turgueniev, Um mês no campo (A month in the country), refers to the stay of Belyaev in the Islaev’s property, but for us, Teatro Praga, also meant a month of residence, experimentation and confrontation in CENTA in Vila Velha de Ródão.

The proposal was an unusual spectacle, which differed from day to day, with no markings and which took our passage in a natural environment for a battlefield (the theater).

The work we have done from this classic russian theater of the nineteenth century assumed a relationship with a kind of weird, the countryside, engine of a casuistic experience around successive trips in love.

We supported ourselves in the legacy of the author and reflected on the possibility of void and nihil, and, stretching over the rope, put on stage the “safe value” of the interruption, the exchange between object and subject of art, pleasure and the opposite drive of a text written more than a century ago, that we brought to reality and to sensitive life of the actors and co-creators.

Winner project of the “Decade Theatre 2003”, by Clube Português de Artes e Ideias in the Restitution category.

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Text | Ivan Turgueniev
Translation and version | Pedro Penim, from the english translation by Richard Freeborn (A Month in the Country, ed. Oxford University Press, 1991) and France’s Denis Roche, reviewed by Françoise Flamand (Un mois à la campagne, ed. Gallimard, 1995)
Co-creation and cast | André e. Teodósio, Carlos Alves, Cláudia Jardim, Patrícia da Silva, Pedro Penim and Sofia Ferrão
With the collaboration of Cláudia Gaiolas, David Dias, Hugo Sovelas, Ivo Serra, Pedro Martinez and Sandra Simões
Video and light design | Paul Simões
Graphic design | Elsa Guimarães
Production and communication | Pedro Pires
Photography | Sandra Ramos and Sofia Ferrão

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2001 | DEEP DELAY

In 2001 I was invited by Jorge Silva Melo to think of a text and a performance for the event A Table and Two Chairs. I wrote and co-directed a text about the city or the cities. I always though of Lapland as a starting point and a homonymous song by the Finnish singer Monica Aspelund as a way to put my writing into practice.

The result is a series of sketches, that are more or less “lounge”. A cosmopolitan “féerie”, that mixes London, Paris and Rome with long Winters in Crimea or Tirana, Halloween nights at Virginia Beach and fast trips through “Avenida da República” in Lisbon. It is all accompanied by what I consider to be the manifestation of the divine in a city: power cuts.

Since I didn’t have any record by Burt Bacharach at the time, I thought a lot about Tony de Matos and Vodka Martini and I dedicated one of the sketches to both of them. More or less “lounge”. For me and Cláudia it was conditio sine qua non that this had to be a happy performance on a happy city. And that’s what it is.

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“Profundo Delay” was reenacted by Ana Tang and Paulo Pascoal in 2017, during ACREÇÃO – reenactments cycle of portuguese performances.

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Co-creation and cast | Cláudia Jardim and Pedro Penim
Text | Pedro Penim
Executive production | Pedro Pires
Technical responsibility | Paulo Simões
Photography | Sandra Ramos

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2017 | ROMEO & JULIET

Inspired by William Shakespeare’s classical play, the performers tell the story of this ill-fated romance, while baking a cheesecake named after the two main characters. The blood of the lovers is guava jam, the sword fights are performed with spatulas and a bite of a Rich Tea biscuit can be a delicious alternative to a broken heart. After the success of Hamlet sou eu and GrandaPinta, Teatro Praga are returning to Teatro Maria Matos with a surprising interpretation of Shakespeare’s classic play.

Text and creation | Cláudia Jardim, Diogo Bento and Pedro Penim
Cast | Cláudia Jardim and Diogo Bento
Head of production | Andreia Carneiro
Production | Alexandra Baião
Co-production | Teatro Praga, Maria Matos Teatro Municipal, Teatro Municipal do Porto, Teatro Viriato and Centro de Artes de Ovar
Photography | Bernardo Gramaxo

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Length | 75 min
M/6

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Bookings: producao@teatropraga.com