Early memories

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Ponta Delgada High School, Christmas 1967.

 

The first-grade children walked to the gymnasium of this high school.

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Here, around 3 pm, the magic happened: a spectacular show on stage. The highlight was the Midnight Waltz, accompanied by 10 little ballerinas.

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It was a simple school performance, but in my memory it remains the most wonderful show of all time, magnificent, brilliant, in a majestic hall.

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When I returned there some years later, during my adolescence, I found it to be an old, sad, and lackluster gymnasium. It probably never had any grandeur.

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Could it be the magic of theater?

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In my memories, there are other Portuguese-style revue shows, rare in a small town in the middle of the Atlantic.

 

Television compensated by broadcasting plays during leisurely evenings, some recorded in theaters, others reconstructed in studios, without losing the timeless flavor of the theater.

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It was theatre viewed from a living room armchair, on winter nights, with a blanket over your knees and wind and rain outside.

 

It was there that I saw, to my surprise, at the age of 17, "Waiting for Godot" by Samuel Beckett.

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On trips to Lisbon in the 80s and 90s, I would take the opportunity to see several theater performances in a row:

 

• Mário Viegas in various shows;

• Rui de Carvalho in Natália Correia's "Encoberto";

• Filipe La Féria, still at Casa da Comédia;

• Raul Soldado in "There is oil from Beato";

• Eunice Muñoz in "Mother Courage and Her Children" by Bertolt Brecht, 1986, Lisbon;

• Alexandra Lencastre in Chekhov's "The Seagull" in 1992;

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The allure of theatre remained.

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In 2005, Rita Guerreiro da Cassefaz brought the challenge:

A show whose ending depended on audience participation: interactive theatre. Thus, the first of three plays about Tomé , the character who wanted to be a real person, was born.

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In 2004, Rita Guerreiro launched a new challenge: theatre aboard a bus, traveling along the roads of Monsanto Park in Lisbon, Portugal.