As I have done in recent years, this July (2025) I returned once again to Almada, drawn not only by the calibre of its annual festival, one of Portugal’s most significant theatrical events, but also by the atmosphere it cultivates: warm, relaxed, and almost familial in its sense of coexistence.
In contrast to larger, often
impersonal festivals with their endless parallel events and hurried transitions
from venue to venue, the Almada Festival offers a markedly different
experience. Here, one feels at home. The experience is more embodied, more
communal, and,
in a subtle yet clear sense, quietly anti-systemic. There is no imperative to engage in relentless
networking, business cards at the ready, pressure to "see
everything." Instead, there is time, time to watch, to listen, to feel, to
reflect, to write, to encounter the city and its people.
For me, this constitutes a form of cultural
resistance: an alternative to the dominant festival logic of overproduction and
consumption, what we might describe as the “festival-as-supermarket” model.
Under the artistic direction of the
energetic Rodrigo Francisco, the Almada Festival has organically embraced a
philosophy of community, not merely as a thematic or managerial motif,
but as the core of its artistic practice. Its programming does not cater to any
particular aesthetic ideology or social elite, nor does it play into the
dichotomy of "experts" versus "the masses." Instead,
through its inclusive framework, it opens aesthetic proposals to a wide-ranging
public, aiming not simply to disseminate the art of Dionysus, but to cultivate
spectatorship itself, exposing audiences to a plurality of theatrical quality languages
and stylistic vocabularies.
One particularly emblematic gesture
is the festival’s annual invitation to audiences to vote for the performance
they would most like to see return the following year. This is not merely
symbolic; it re-enacts a genuine form of co-curation, an authentic dialogue
rather than a token gesture of “participation.”
Staged in Restraint, Anchored in
Emotion: Marius (Directed
by Joël Pommerat)
The first performance I attended was
Marius, drawn from Marcel Pagnol’s emblematic Marseille Trilogy,
directed by Joël Pommerat and staged on the main stage of the Teatro Municipal
Joaquim Benite.
The plot is relatively straightforward, some
might even call it predictable: a young man (Marius) is torn between the dream
of escape and the pull of romantic love. Life unfolds in a small café owned by his
father, César, near the Marseille harbour, a place of routine, familiar
encounters, philosophical banter, quarrels, and laughter. It serves as a
communal hub, a kind of agora or informal tribunal, where everyday lives
are continuously staged and restaged. For Marius, who longs to become a sailor
and flee toward the unknown, the tightly composed and almost claustrophobic stage
design by Éric Soyer becomes a metaphor for entrapment.
Into this enclosed world enters
Fanny (Elise Douyere), Marius’ great love. Yet, as is often the case in
narratives of departure, it is the dream, rather than the love, that ultimately
prevails. Marius departs secretly at night, chasing the freedom promised by the
sea, forsaking the stability and emotional security his relationship offers.
Pommerat’s direction adopts an
everyday, almost anti-theatrical rhythm, one that allows silences, hesitations,
and tentative confessions to generate atmosphere. The staging resists melodrama;
emotional charge emerges organically through dialogue, through the cadence of
the local dialect, through understated humour tinged with melancholy, and through
small, restrained gestures: a glance, a touch withheld, two bodies falling in
love without ever fully closing the physical distance between them. Particularly in the scenes with Fanny, the physical
detachment intensifies the spoken word, as the absence of bodily expression
lends weight and space to language itself to perform its acoustic
“physicality.”
A striking aspect of this production
is its origin in carceral space. Marius was first developed and staged
in a high-security prison (2014–2017), with most of the current cast composed
of formerly incarcerated individuals. Only the actress playing Fanny is a
trained professional. This choice lends the production not only a profound social
resonance but also a form of raw authenticity. Even the occasional performative
imperfections or technical inconsistencies do not weaken the work’s power; on
the contrary, they enhance its credibility and emotional depth.
As noted earlier, thematically, Marius
does not tread new ground: the sea as desire, love as dilemma, the conflict
between duty and longing, father and son, these are familiar tropes. One might
even be reminded of Eugene O’Neill’s sea plays, written during roughly the same
period as Pagnol’s trilogy. Nor is the portrayal of Fanny, patient,
compassionate, self-sacrificing, foreign within the representational codes of
early 20th-century patriarchy.
And yet, Pommerat’s direction holds the
viewer’s attention through emotional restraint and formal discipline. The
intensity is not on the surface, but it is there, quiet, unmistakable.
In a world driven by acceleration and
spectacle, Marius reminds us of the power of waiting, of deliberation,
of the understated.
Behind the Curtain, Beyond the Gaze:
Teatro Delusio (Familie Flöz)
At the open-air theatre of Escola
António da Costa, we watched Teatro Delusio by the internationally
acclaimed German ensemble Familie Flöz, a wordless performance imbued with the
atmosphere of silent cinema and the precision of corporeal theatre. Its
narrative centre is not the stage, but rather its backstage, that liminal zone
where the dream of theatricality collides with the muted, repetitive routines
of its unseen labourers, electricians, stagehands, ushers.
At the heart of the piece are three
theatre technicians, Bob, Bernd, and Ivan (played by Andre Angulo, Johannes
Stubenvoll, Thomas Van Ouwerkerk), who emerge as emblematic figures of a world
both invisible and essential. Through a sequence of slapstick-inflected
episodes, we follow their backstage frictions, aspirations, vanities, and
unspoken dreams. While the "front stage" dazzles with lights,
applause, and spectacle, the backstage unfolds as a silent tragedy, the tragedy
of waiting, invisibility, and failure, the tragedy of an unacknowledged life.
The three performers portray a total
of 29 characters, ranging from conductors and dancers to eccentric directors
and narcissistic stars. Their performance displays remarkable technical
precision, choreographic clarity, and performative dexterity in their seamless
transitions between roles, bodies, and tasks. This is physical acting par
excellence, where the mask, intricately designed by Hajo Schüler, becomes a
living surface, capable of transmitting fear, joy, awkwardness, and despair.
Rather than concealing, the mask reveals.
Using purely visual means, without a
single line of spoken dialogue, Teatro Delusio manages to explore themes
of human solitude, the yearning for recognition, jealousy, love, and
fulfillment. It is a dramaturgy of silence, where laughter and poignancy
coexist in a fragile equilibrium. One does not laugh at the characters,
but rather through them, recognising in their gestures the viewer’s own
minor failures, deferred desires, and the barely perceptible weight of
obscurity.
The absence of linguistic barriers
explains why Teatro Delusio has toured in 34 countries to this day.
Though meticulously structured, the performance might have benefited from a
slightly tighter dramaturgy, particularly in the final twenty or so minutes,
where the repetition of certain motifs risked narrative dilution. The birth
scene, for instance, felt inventive but dramaturgically unanchored, an idea
left unexplored.
Nevertheless, this is a profoundly hybrid
and meta-theatrical work where puppet theatre, mime, physical comedy,
slapstick, tragedy, and farce are woven into a fluid structure that dialogues
with the tradition of theatre within theatre. It is, in many ways, a
reflexive homage to theatre itself, and especially to the mask, both as material
object and as metaphor for identity, secrecy, duplicity, and existential
disappointment
Familie Flöz turns our attention to
the invisible processes of stage-making, evoking resonances with productions
like Ellie Dubois’ No Show (the Herald Award recipient at Edinburgh Fringe, 2017) in which the audience watches what does not
happen when a performance collapses before their eyes, or Constanza
Macras/Dorky Park’s Open for Everything (2012), which centres on
marginalised performers (from Roma communities), giving voice to those who
remain in the shadows. Most notably, it echoes Michael Frayn’s ageless Noises
Off (1982), an ingenious meta-farce that reveals the chaos behind the
scenes of a matinee performance.
In all these cases, gaze shifts from
centre to margin, from performance to infrastructure, from protagonist to
technician or outsider. What emerges is a commentary on theatrical visibility
and the politics of spectatorship: Who is seen and thus rendered a subject of
the gaze? And who remains unseen? What does it mean, literally and
metaphorically, to be offstage, in theatre and in life?
The
closing moments offer no catharsis, only a bittersweet image of a world
perpetually left behind. The characters remain there, in a space with no
curtain, no lighting, no applause, only their breath, and their gaze, fixed
upon an audience that does not see them.
The performance does not speak.
But it is loudly heard.
A Classroom Against Oblivion: El
mar. Visión de unos niños que no lo han visto nunca (Concept Xavier Bobés
& Alberto Conejero)
This Spanish documentary-style
performance, El mar. Visión de unos niños que no lo han visto nunca
(“The Sea: As Seen by Children Who Have Never Seen It”), performed by Xavier
Bobés and Sergi Torrecilla, is based on the
true story of Antoni Benaiges, a teacher in a remote village school in Bañuelos de Bureba (Burgos) in 1936. It is rooted in
an act of historical remembrance and poetic reconstruction, a gesture of tender
resistance through memory and education.
The story begins in 1934, when
Benaiges, using his own savings, purchased a gramophone and a printing press
for his rural classroom, encouraging the children to express themselves
creatively. Two years later, his students produced a small booklet titled El
mar. Visión de unos niños que no lo han visto nunca, in which they
described how they imagined the sea, though none of them had ever seen it.
Benaiges promised to take them to the coast that summer. However, the outbreak
of the Spanish Civil War and his execution (July 25, 1936) at its onset rendered
this promise tragically unfulfilled.
The performance treats this
historical episode with emotional delicacy, ethical clarity, and narrative
restraint. Built around the aesthetics of documentary theatre and object
theatre, the piece deploys minimal theatrical resources. Objects do not simply support
the storytelling; they act as catalysts of emotion, charged relics that summon
the affective memory of a vanished world. Through the use of live cameras, the
children's perspective is expanded and brought into the visual field, layering
the adult narration with the imaginary gaze of childhood.
There is nothing ostentatiously
innovative about the staging. On the contrary, the production is deliberately unassuming,
almost “non-theatre” in its visual economy. It pivots around empathy, emotional
presence, and the quiet beauty of relationality. Though it occasionally borders
on melodrama, the performance maintains its composure, evoking emotion for the
right reasons. It creates a subtle oscillation in which the spectator feels at
times like the teacher, and at others, like the child.
On stage, the two performers, Xavier
Bobés and Sergi Torrecilla (wearing the red shirt), engage in a complementary
enactment of memory: Bobés through the material activation of objects, and
Torrecilla through the performative narration of texts drawn from the
children’s writings, Alberto Conejero’s script, and Antoni Benaiges’ own words.
Together, they articulate the dialectic between the “here-and-now” of
theatrical presence and the “there-and-then” of historical absence, thereby
bridging past and present with nuanced subtlety. With humility and clarity,
they share the story and the memories it holds, honoring the legacy of Benaiges
while elevating the values of hope, education, and human dignity, all conveyed through the fragile yet enduring
voices of children.
It is unsurprising that the piece
has been presented widely across Latin American countries. Originally premiered
at the Teatre Nacional de Catalunya in February 2022, it has since been
nominated for several Max Awards, including Best Play, Best Direction, and Best
Actor (Bobés) for its performance at Teatro Corral de Comedias.
To Move Is to Survive: Zugzwang
(Concept and Performance Le Galactik Ensemble)
Presented in the outdoor space of
Escola D. António, Zugzwang (2021) marks the second collective creation
of the French company Le Galactik Ensemble, following their earlier piece Optraken
(seen at the same venue the previous year). Borrowing its title from the chess
term zugzwang, a situation where any move leads inevitably to
disadvantage or loss, the performance transforms this concept into an explosive
physical allegory of human precarity and imbalance in a world of constant destabilisation.
Five acrobats encounter one another
in a volatile scenographic landscape, somewhere between workshop, construction
site, and laboratory. For sixty minutes, they compose a narrative of survival,
not through language or plot, but through somatic confrontation with risk. The
body becomes a storytelling device, contending with gravity, collision,
imbalance, and fear. Each movement appears to be dictated by an environment
that resists trust. The performers live, quite literally, in a constant state
of zugzwang.
The set design by Mathilde Bourgon, a
kinetic, fragile mechanical architecture, populated by rails, pulleys, ropes,
collapsing doors, and unpredictable surfaces,
plays a pivotal role. It is not a passive backdrop but an active
opponent, reactive, obstructive, sometimes deceptive. Visually, the piece
evokes the mechanical traps of silent cinema, yet it resonates with a distinctly
contemporary anxiety: the instability of
material systems and environments. The performers do not merely move upon it, they survive
within it.
For those unfamiliar with Le
Galactik Ensemble, it is worth noting that their work specializes in what they
call “situational acrobatics,” a form of real-time physical risk-taking, in
which safety is never entirely guaranteed and failure is always a possibility.
Nothing is wholly predetermined. The tension derives from this very volatility:
perpetual edge, where everything could go wrong, and often nearly does. It s
precisely at this threshold that theatricality emerges.
Humour plays a crucial role, not as
comic relief, but as a mechanism of resistance. It is the humour of despair and
survival. The figures on stage are not superhumans but clowns, fragile,
fallible, exposed. The grotesque, the comedic, and the existential coexist in a
performative poetics of insecurity. As in the work of Aurélien Bory’s Compagnie
111[1]
or Cirque Inextremiste,[2]
physicality here is not for spectacle, but a necessary language for
articulating the inexpressible.
The ensemble performs with
remarkable collective precision. There are no individual protagonists; the
group functions as a single, interdependent organism navigating a hostile
world. Acrobatics, choreographic tension, and acting discipline converge, not to
showcase virtuosity, but to reveal necessity. This is a dramaturgy of survival
rather than display.
Zugzwang offers no resolution. There is no comfort, no
catharsis. It presents a world that remains unstable, where every move carries
the risk of collapse, and yet... stillness is not an option. One must keep
moving, because to stop is simply to cease to exist.
Listening to Absence: A Sorrow Beyond Dreams (Directed by Teresa
Gafeira)
Staged in the experimental venue of
Teatro Joaquim Benite, this production by Companhia de Teatro de Almada is
based on Peter Handke’s deeply personal novella A Sorrow Beyond Dreams,
written in the aftermath of his mother’s suicide. The work resists
conventional, plot-driven dramaturgy, opting instead to trace the inner rhythms
of grief, and the writer’s struggle to render them communicable through
language.
Set in rural Austria between the two
World Wars, the narrative unfolds against the backdrop of Handke’s mother’s
life, her marriage, her disillusionment, her psychological collapse, and
eventual death by overdose. Handke offers no sentimental embellishments. His
narration oscillates between clinical observation and introspective inquiry, not
aiming to provoke emotion, but to understand: How does one do justice to a
life that disappeared in silence?
This very question forms the basis
of Teresa Gafeira’s directorial approach. The piece is delivered as a dual
vocal monologue, wherein two performers do not “act” but testify, functioning
as emissaries of an internal elegy. Their delivery is austere emotionally
contained, eschewing outbursts of sentimentalism in favour of restraint.
However, the absence of surtitles
made the work significantly less accessible for non-Portuguese speakers. Despite prior familiarity
with the source text, the live
experience lacked linguistic and emotional immersion. It became difficult to apprehend
how the words carried their weight, how silences sculpted their resonance, or
how the performers physically processed the inner landscape of grief.
While the vocal interpretation remained
faithful to Handke’s style, the visual and spatial potential of the stage was
left largely underutilized. The projected images functioned
more as atmospheric backdrop than dramaturgical interlocutors. As a result, the
possibility of a multimodal dialogue with memory remained underdeveloped. The performance lingered in a liminal space, powerful in
speech, but theatrically rather undercharged.
And yet, the ethical core of the
work remained intact. The performance did not “display” grief, it remembered
it. It whispered sorrow through language. That act alone carried immense
weight. Mourning was not an emotional identification but a form of justice
through articulation.
Handke does not ask the audience to
empathise but to reflect: How can theatre represent a life shaped by
silence? How does theatre speak when the other no longer can? In this
regard, the production aligns with other theatrical meditations on mourning, not
as pathos, but as remembrance of absence. From Samuel Beckett’s Krapp’s Last
Tape, where the voice of a cassette becomes the medium of grief, to Theodoros
Terzopoulos’ Antigone, where loss is rendered as somatic burden and
vocal repetition, theatre becomes not a mirror of life, but a ritual of memory.
Such performances do not scream.
They do not shock. They demand attention, silence, and time. They ask us to
listen to what is never fully said. And the very fact that they continue to
exist, and to insist, in an age of speed and information saturation, is itself
a political gesture of interiority. A quiet monument to theatrical dignity in
the face of erasure.
A Language of Gesture, A Geometry of
Motion: Quatro Cantos num Soneto and The Look (Choreography
Fernando Duarte and Sharon Eyal)
Fernando Duarte’s Quatro Cantos
num Soneto undertakes an ambitious project: to translate Luís de Camões’
sonnets into the language of dance, capturing not only their semantic content
but also their rhythm, texture, and contemplative depth through bodily gesture.
Rather than illustrating the poetic text, the choreography treats it as a score
for corporeal expression. The dancers of the Portuguese National Ballet (Ana
Lacerda, Inês Amaral, Isabel Galriça, and Paulina Santos) do not narrate; they
transcribe. Their movements become elliptical stanzas, undulations, and
gestures that evoke musical interpretation more than dramaturgical action.
The sonic landscape, enriched by
precise vocal recitations of the sonnets, intensifies the performances’s multisensory
atmosphere. The result is less a conventional dance narrative and more a case
of "poetry in motion." However, this multilayered approach risks
fragmenting the spectator’s experience. The continual interplay of speech,
sound, and movement situates the piece in an intermediate space, neither pure
dance theatre nor lyrical portraiture, demanding sustained attention, openness and
patience from the viewer.
Absent is a dramaturgical climax. The
work foregoes linear progression and emotional crescendo. Instead, it offers introspection,
poetic silence, and an invitation to contemplative observation of the body as a
vessel of language.
This is a piece that resists facile
visual consumption. It does not seek to move the audience emotionally but to
attune it. It is an “anti-spectacle,” an embodied reminder that silence, too,
possesses rhythm.
The Look
Immediately following was The
Look, choreographed by Sharon Eyal and originally created in 2019 for the
Batsheva Dance Company. Inspired by Mahatma Gandhi’s quote, “Nobody can hurt me
without my permission” (Time Out/Israel, Feb. 24, 2019), this masterful
work delicately balances group movement with individual expression, and
mechanical synchronization with organic flow, maintaining an exquisite tension
throughout. The dancers, dressed identically, move en masse, as if
forming a single body, yet never surrender their individuality to the anonymity of the collective. Each body
retains its uniqueness.
Whether moving as solitary units or
as coordinated formations, their ceaseless motion and repositioning releases an
atmosphere that is hypnotic, mesmerizing, and almost trance-like, an effect
intensified by the cold, geometrically regulated lighting. Movement patterns
unfold in relentless cycles: mechanical repetitions that mirror the steady
pulse of the human body. These motions are intricately shaped and sometimes
provoked by Ori Lichtik’s precise and nuanced musical score. Together, they
create a physical rhythm where the dancers’ bodies transcend their materiality,
taking on the quality of fleeting shapes or abstract concepts rather than solid
forms.
Compared to Eyal’s other works, such
as the emotionally charged Love Chapter II (2017) or the hybrid 2
Chapters Love (2022), The Look adopts a rather more formalist and
abstract choreographic language. While Love Chapter II and 2 Chapters
Love emphasize raw emotion and narrative complexity, The Look strips
movement down to its essential elements. Here, the dancers function more as
vessels of energy and repetition, articulating phrases in an algorithmic dance
vocabulary of movement.
The Look stands as a significant addition to Sharon Eyal’s
artistic corpus. Structurally rigorous and aesthetically entrancing, it probes
the very essence of “looking,” of perceiving movement as meaning. The gaze of
the dancer becomes inseparable from the gaze of the spectator. This very sense
of disciplined sensitivity was realized by the dancers of Companhia Nacional de
Bailado. They did not “perform” the choreography; they embodied it. Without
exaggeration or unnecessary embellishment, they delivered a performance of
unity and aesthetic discipline. Their aim was not to impress, but to
articulate, as a single organism, the expressive potential of the work.
Broken Images, Breathing Bodies: Extra
Moenia (Conception and Direction Emma Dante)
My recent visit to the Almada
Festival concluded with Emma Dante’s polyphonic performance Extra Moenia
(Latin for Outside the Walls), which once again confirmed her unique
theatrical method: a choral mosaic of bodies and voices, in which the traditional notion of plot gives way to the
dramaturgy of coexistence.
Extra Moenia is not a conventional performance. It
is a living body in motion, a collective choreography of everyday gestures and
fractured social realities. Fourteen performers from Dante’s company Sud Costa
Occidentale awaken within a set resembling a makeshift shelter. As they dress
and begin to move through the performance space, they confront a world beyond the
safety of its walls, a world marked by crisis, war, destitution, and
displacement.
The rhythm of the performance constantly
shifts. Scenes alternate like snapshots: a railway station, a marketplace, a
congregation in prayer, a beach turned into a site of shipwreck. Dante composes
a palimpsest of contemporary wounds, embodied by emblematic figures: a refugee
from Ukraine, a migrant from Congo, an Iranian woman removing her veil, a conservative
family, a group of football players from Palermo. Each character carries
trauma, but each also contains a sliver of hope.
Aesthetically, the narrative evokes
the logic of social media: brief, rapidly shifting images that allow no time
for sustained reflection. Thematically, war, displacement, patriarchy, and
ecological collapse are introduced more as reference points than as subjects of
in-depth exploration. This fragmentation risks aesthetic overload but
simultaneously reflects with accuracy the disorienting experience of
contemporary social disintegration.
Dante’s primary tool is the body, not
the idealized, but the socially worn body that bears tension, fear, and desire.
A body that does not enact roles but reveals its political weight as a record
of violent coexistence, a container of memory, and a site of survival. The tone
oscillates between the satirical and the tragic, from the noisy market scenes
and station announcements to monologues about rape, war, and displacements. The
finale, featuring a "sea of plastic," is visually and emotionally
powerful. It symbolizes a collective shipwreck, a space where the body becomes
an archive of trauma.
At times, the multiplicity of themes
results in aesthetic saturation. The accumulation of images and messages leaves
little room for reflective engagement; nothing fully settles. The rapid pace of
the performance allows little space for depth or contemplation. In a way, the
direction seems primarily concerned with creating a kaleidoscope of
impressions, with inclusivity as its dominant image.
Despite the fragmentation and
underdeveloped elements, the performance as a whole manages to transcend the
limitations of its elliptical narrative. It draws the audience into a
theatrical experiment that breathes with History, a collective ritual devoid of
heroics or final applause, yet filled with bodies that persist. And in an era
marked by aesthetic fatigue, that very persistence becomes a vital necessity.
Epilogue: Listening to the Present
This year’s festival, with its 20
productions, local and foreign, each with its own style, managed as a whole to
shape a diverse ensemble that powerfully highlighted urgent issues concerning
contemporary theatre: how can human experience be conveyed in an age of
acceleration, instability, and global rupture, where the world seems to
collapse under the weight of its own contradictions? How can contemporary
theatre speak again in a voice that is neither obsolete nor overloaded, but
capable of listening to the present and articulating possibilities for the
future?
From the sparse, introspective study
of the body as a medium of language in Quatro Cantos num Soneto and The
Look, to the fragmented, overwhelming polyphony of Extra Moenia, the
precarious balancing act of Zugzwang, and the sharp-witted comedy Les
Gros Patinent Bien—Cabaret de Carton by the French company Compagnie Le
Fils du Grand Réseau, created by Pierre Guillois and Olivier Martin-Salvan,
where the only stage props were dozens of cardboard boxes, the performances did
not merely depict reality; they sought to reconstruct it, interrogate it, and
resist it. They offered no easy answers, no closure and no comfort. Instead,
they acted as mirrors and warnings. They invited vigilance, critical attention,
and an openness to complexity.
Perhaps this is the essential quest:
to sustain our relationship with theatre not as an escape, but as a
confrontation, a space of reflection, conflict, and creation. A space where
light and darkness, past and present, art and life breathe together. A space
that still believes in the necessity of meaning.
Note: Originally published n European Stages, vol. 21 (Dec. 1, 2025)
[1] This is a Toulouse-based performance company founded in 2000 by
director and scenographer Aurélien Bory. The environment plays a
significant role in storytelling. It is an active force. See Plan B
(2003), Plus ou moins l'infini (2005), Sans objet (2009), and
Plexus (2012), among other works.
[2] Cirque Inextremiste is a French contemporary circus company founded
in 1998 by director and performer Yann Ecauvre. It blends physical theatre,
circus arts, street performance, and often risk-taking acrobatics. Extrêmités
(2012), Extension (2014), Exit (2017), Warning (2022),
are among their most notable productions.
