Grupo de Teatro do Centro Cultural Português do Mindelo & Teatro de Marionetas do Porto

A civil servant wets his feet in a quiet, peaceful, deserted beach when an old, corpse-like, toothless beggar smelling of alcohol surprises him and grabs his shoes. His respectful and courteous attempt to get them back is met with indecipherable attitude on the part of the old woman, evolving from grumpy stubbornness to sadistic wickedness. The man is puzzled with what he sees as unmotivated cruelty on the part of a stranger, but the old woman is determined to force an “honest admission” of a previous insult. In an age oriented towards theatrics, where the game of media phantasies and hysterical colours with which one decorates everyday trivialities blurs the lines between “truth” and “lie”, does reason stand on either side, in the middle or nowhere?


The GRUPO DE TEATRO DO CENTRO CULTURAL PORTUGUÊS DO MINDELO was created on February 18, 1993, and is about to premiere its 60th production. It has been bestowing an unprecedented theatrical impetus on Saint Vincent, Cape Verde, presenting original plays, staging renowned national authors such as Arménio Vieira, Germano Almeida, Aurélio Gonçalves, Eugénio Tavares, Caplan Neves and Mário Lúcio Sousa, and adapting international playwrights. It was the first group ever to stage authors such as Shakespeare, Lorca, Molière, Wilde and Beckett in Creole. Besides staging plays, it also does training, having launched a great number of new actors who are already unanimously seen as the new generation in Cape Verdean theatre.

TEATRO DE MARIONETAS DO PORTO was born in 1988, and it is located in the Historic Centre of Oporto. The company’s theatrical practice reveals a non-conventional way of looking at puppets and an understanding of puppet theatre as a poetic and visual language reminiscent of contemporaneity. In 2013, the company opened the Porto Puppet Museum, which was dreamt by its founder, João Paulo Seara Cardoso (1956-2010), and in 2016 the Porto Puppet Centre/Quinta de Bonjóia, through which the company has carried out a significant social integration work with the local community.