Six shows to see at the Almada Festival

The opening performance of the festival is a French one. Qui Som? by Baro d'Evel, which marks the return of the Franco-Catalan company to Portugal, after having performed Falaise in 2022. The company is renowned for creating shows that defy categorization: a dynamic fusion of circus, dance, theater, music, visual arts and comedy. This piece, which was shown at the last Festival d'Avignon, is the first part of a triptych in which ceramics function simultaneously as material and as action. The dancers will perform alongside musicians, acrobats, clowns and even a ceramist, in a creation that combines all these arts in a surprising or, at the very least, unconventional way.

There are children who have never seen the sea and a teacher who promises them: “This summer, we will see it together.” Thus begins El mar – Visión de unos niños que no lo han visto nunca , a delicate documentary theatre show that recounts the true story of a primary school teacher who decides to create a newspaper with the students of a small Spanish village in 1936. Directed and performed by Xavier Bobés and Alberto Conejero, the play reconstructs the experience of the young teacher who, in a rural school in Burgos, encourages his students to write about their dreams and visions of the sea — a sea that they have never seen, but which they will describe with great imagination. With photographs, gramophones, press clippings and relics on stage, more than reconstructing a forgotten episode in history, the play is a tribute to pedagogical utopia and the freedom to imagine.

This is one of the great returns to the Almada Festival, that of the Italian Emma Dante, who is responsible for closing this edition, eleven years after having shown The Macaluso Sisters here. In Extra Moenia , there is no traditional plot or protagonists. The director builds the show based on the improvisations of each actor on their characters, creating a choral narrative that follows 14 ordinary people: figures without great dramatic arcs, inspired by Sicilian daily life. They are railway workers, migrants, soldiers, lovers, a religious family, women on the run and victims, who pass through trains, squares, churches and bars. Emma Dante invites us to walk with the normal, the excluded, to dance with the invisible — and, let us hope, not to leave the theatre indifferent.

A seemingly banal encounter on a Christmas Eve in Paris turns into a spiral of violence. It is from this real episode that the French writer Édouard Louis builds History of Violence , an autobiographical novel adapted for the stage by Thomas Ostermeier for the historic Schaubühne in Berlin, and which is now being released at the Almada Festival.

This German-language production brings to the stage the vulnerable and political body of the author, who, upon publishing his second book in 2016, established himself as one of the greatest of a new generation of French authors. The show, directed by the German director, is more than a transposition of the book: it is a political gesture that exalts on stage the themes that Louis has explored throughout his work — inequality, exclusion, identity, power. Here, the violated body becomes a territory of dispute (the violence is not just physical: it is systemic, institutional, everyday), and intimacy a battlefield.

History of Violence is a raw narrative, an artistic formulation of a traumatic experience, in which individual testimony becomes a collective mirror. And it reminds us that, behind every statistic, there is a story that continues to hurt.

In A More-Than-Perfect Goodbye , Peter Handke tells what he knows, or what he thinks he knows, about his mother’s life and death, before, in his words, “the apathetic muteness, the extreme muteness” of sadness takes hold of him forever. The Almada Theatre Company (CTA) is bringing this text by the Austrian Nobel Prize winner to the stage, in a production by Teresa Gafeira. The author tells his mother’s story, but ends up doing more than that, because his mother’s story is part of the history of Central Europe: Handke addresses the rise of Nazism, the Second World War and the suffering that followed. What does it mean to be an Austrian woman in the post-war period?

A Mala Voadora joins Comédias do Minho for an incursion into Aristophanes’ masterpiece, a comedy with a strong critical sense in relation to the “evils of Athens”.

The story is based on the power of persuasion that a man — Pistetero — exerts over birds, guiding them to carry out his intentions. Birds from the fields, mountains, trees, rivers, swamps and oceans — all are led by Pistetero to build a city suspended in the sky. This city will challenge Olympus, eventually defeating it and taking its place, while Pistetero, transformed into a bird, assumes the role of the greatest deity, replacing Zeus.

Between fable and political commentary, As Aves brings together birds, humans and gods to reflect on power in a show with a strong musical component and moments of dance.