Recasting Transnationalism Through Performance - Theatre Festivals in Cape Verde, Mozambique, and Brazil-Palgrave Macmillan UK (201

Studies in International Performance
Published in association with the International Federation of Theatre Research

General Editors: Janelle Reinelt and Brian Singleton
Culture and performance cross borders constantly, and not just the borders that define
nations. In this new series, scholars of performance produce interactions between and
among nations and cultures as well as genres, identities and imaginations.
Inter-national in the largest sense, the books collected in the Studies in International
Performance series display a range of historical, theoretical and critical approaches to the pan-
oply of performances that make up the global surround. The series embraces ‘Culture’ which
is institutional as well as improvised, underground or alternate, and treats ‘Performance’ as
either intercultural or transnational as well as intracultural within nations.
Titles include:
Khalid Amine and Marvin Carlson
THE THEATRES OF MOROCCO, ALGERIA AND TUNISIA
Performance Traditions of the Maghreb
Patrick Anderson and Jisha Menon (editors)
VIOLENCE PERFORMED
Local Roots and Global Routes of Conflict
Elaine Aston and Sue-Ellen Case
STAGING INTERNATIONAL FEMINISMS
Matthew Isaac Cohen
PERFORMING OTHERNESS
Java and Bali on International Stages, 1905–1952
Susan Leigh Foster (editor)
WORLDING DANCE
Karen Fricker and Milija Gluhovic (editors)
PERFORMING THE ‘NEW’ EUROPE
Identities, Feelings and Politics in the Eurovision Song Contest
Milija Gluhovic
PERFORMING EUROPEAN MEMORIES
Trauma, Ethics, Politics
Helena Grehan
PERFORMANCE, ETHICS AND SPECTATORSHIP IN A GLOBAL AGE
Susan C. Haedicke
CONTEMPORARY STREET ARTS IN EUROPE
Aesthetics and Politics
James Harding and Cindy Rosenthal (editors)
THE RISE OF PERFORMANCE STUDIES
Rethinking Richard Schechner’s Broad Spectrum
Silvija Jestrovic and Yana Meerzon (editors)
PERFORMANCE, EXILE AND ‘AMERICA’
Silvija Jestrovic
PERFORMANCE, SPACE, UTOPIA
Ola Johansson
COMMUNITY THEATRE AND AIDS
Ketu Katrak
CONTEMPORARY INDIAN DANCE
New Creative Choreography in India and the Diaspora
Sonja Arsham Kuftinec
THEATRE, FACILITATION, AND NATION FORMATION IN THE BALKANS
AND MIDDLE EAST
Daphne P. Lei
ALTERNATIVE CHINESE OPERA IN THE AGE OF GLOBALIZATION
Performing Zero
Peter Lichtenfels and John Rouse (editors)
PERFORMANCE, POLITICS AND ACTIVISM
Carol Martin (editor)
THE DRAMATURGY OF THE REAL ON THE WORLD STAGE
Carol Martin
THEATRE OF THE REAL
Christina S. McMahon
RECASTING TRANSNATIONALISM THROUGH PERFORMANCE
Theatre Festivals in Cape Verde, Mozambique, and Brazil
Yana Meerzon
PERFORMING EXILE, PERFORMING SELF
Drama, Theatre, Film
Lara D. Nielson and Patricia Ybarra (editors)
NEOLIBERALISM AND GLOBAL THEATRES
Performance Permutations
Alan Read
THEATRE, INTIMACY & ENGAGEMENT
The Last Human Venue
Marcus Tan
ACOUSTIC INTERCULTURALISM
Listening to Performance
Denise Varney, Peter Eckersall, Chris Hudson and Barbara Hatley
THEATRE AND PERFORMANCE IN THE ASIA-PACIFIC
Regional Modernities in the Global Era
Maurya Wickstrom
PERFORMANCE IN THE BLOCKADES OF NEOLIBERALISM
Thinking the Political Anew
Evan Darwin Winet
INDONESIAN POSTCOLONIAL THEATRE
Spectral Genealogies and Absent Faces
Forthcoming titles:
Adrian Kear
THEATRE AND EVENT
Studies in International Performance

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Recasting Transnationalism
through Performance
Theatre Festivals in Cape Verde,
Mozambique, and Brazil
Christina S. McMahon
Theater and Dance, University of California – Santa Barbara, USA
© Christina S. McMahon 2014
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To
Mary McMahon and Ruth Warneke, strong women
and matriarchs
and
Mom and Dad, wise counselors and nurturers
and
Anne-Marie and Becky, siblings and confidantes
and
Kolya, Matthai, and others from their generation
yet to come . . .
This page intentionally left blank
Contents
List of Illustrations viii

List of Abbreviations x
Series Preface xii
Acknowledgments xiii
1 Introduction – Global Casting Calls: Performing

(Trans)National Identity on Festival Circuits 1
2 Mapping Festivals: Cape Verde, Mozambique,
and Brazil in the Lusophone World 35
3 Recasting the Colonial Past: History, Imagination,
and Fantasy on Festival Stages 68
4 African Women on Festival Circuits: Recasting
Labor Roles and Female Sexuality 97
5 Adaptation and the (Trans)Nation: Creolized Shakespeare,
Intercultural Cervantes 130
6 Toward a Conclusion: Forum Theatre in Festival Venues 164
Notes 183
References 205
Index 222
vii
List of Illustrations
1 Manuel Semedo Tavares stands in front of the morgado

(landowner) house in Engenhos village, Santiago Island,
where he has worked as a guard since 1956. Photo by the
author. 75
2 Edimilson Sousa plays peasant farmer ‘Bita,’ a strike leader
inspired by the actor’s extended family’s experiences with
agricultural exploitation in Engenhos. In OTACA’s Tchom di
Morgado. The 2004 Mindelact International Theatre Festival,
Cape Verde Islands. Photo: João Barbosa, courtesy of the
Mindelact Association. 77
3 Sandra Horta dramatizes the oral history of Matilde Tavares
in ESTE’s Mãe Preta, a tribute to Cape Verdean mothers
who have struggled to feed their children during times of
drought. The 2005 Mindelact International Theatre Festival,
Cape Verde Islands. Photo: João Barbosa, courtesy of the
Mindelact Association. 85
4 A sign hanging outside the restaurant Filha da Mãe Preta
(the Black Mother’s Daughter) along Porto’s Douro River in
northern Portugal. Photo by the author. 86
5 Kongolese prophetess Kimpa Vita conveys her visions
about returning a Kongo king to power. Anabela Vandiane
in Elinga’s Kimpa-Vita: A profetisa ardente. FESTLIP 2009,
Rio de Janeiro, Brazil. Photo: Rogério Resende, courtesy
of Talu Produções. 91
6 Bety Fernandes and Rosy Timas wrap themselves up in a
long white piece of mesh resembling a wedding veil in Raiz
di Polon’s Duas Sem Três. Photo: João Barbosa, courtesy of
the Mindelact Association. 112
7 Elliot Alex plays a barman tempting a desperate
Mozambican woman Deolinda, played by Yolanda Fumo
(R), to become his restaurant’s official taster, while her
Conscience, Isabel Jorge (L), looks on in disapproval in
M’Bêu’s O Homem Ideal. FESTLIP 2009, Rio de Janeiro,
Brazil. Photo: Rogério Resende, courtesy of Talu Produções. 123
viii
List of Illustrations ix
8 Nuno Delgado (the Fool) interacts with the head of Fonseca

Soares (Lear) in GTCCPM’s 2003 production of Rei Lear.
Photo: Luís Couto, courtesy of the Mindelact Association. 142
9 Nuno Costa and Marco Freitas rehearse a scene from Pirámo
e Tisbe in the forest in Solaris’s Sonho de uma noite de verão, a
Crioulo-language version of Midsummer Night’s Dream. The
2005 Mindelact International Theatre Festival, Cape Verde
Islands. Photo: João Barbosa, courtesy of the Mindelact
Association. 148
10 Actors from Luarte and Agerre Teatroa play Dom Quixote’s
friends and neighbors in Dulcinéia e o cavaleiro dos leões.
Teatro Avenida, Maputo, Mozambique. Photo: Agerre
Teatroa, courtesy of Maite Agirre. 155
11 Actors from GTO-Guinea-Bissau play feuding families
in Nó mama: Frutos da mesma árvore. FESTLIP 2009,
Rio de Janeiro, Brazil. Photo: Rogério Resende, courtesy
of Talu Produções. 173
List of Abbreviations
CEDIT Centro de Documentação e Investigação Teatral do

Mindelo (Theatre Documentation and Research Center of
Mindelo)
CPLP Comunidade dos Países de Lingua Portuguesa
(Community of Portuguese-Speaking Countries)
CSOs civil society organizations
CTO Centro de Teatro do Oprimido (Center for Theatre of the
Oppressed)
ESTE Estação Teatral da Beira Interior (Theatre Station of
Interior Beira)
FESTLIP Festival de Teatro da Língua Portuguesa (Theatre Festival
of the Portuguese Language)
FRELIMO Frente de Libertação de Moçambique (Liberation Front of
Mozambique)
FUNARTE Fundação Nacional de Artes (National Foundation of the
Arts)
GTCCPM Grupo de Teatro do Centro Cultural Português do
Mindelo (Theatre Group of the Mindelo Portuguese
Center)
GTO Grupo Teatro do Oprimido (Theatre of the Oppressed
Group)
IMF International Monetary Fund
NGO non-governmental organization
OMCV Organização das Mulheres do Cabo Verde (Organization
of Cape Verdean Women)
OTACA Oficina de Teatro e Comunicação de Assomada (The
Assomada Theatre and Communication Collective)
PAICV Partido Africano da Independência de Cabo Verde
(African Party for the Independence of Cape Verde)
RENAMO Resistência Nacional Moçambicana (Mozambican
National Resistance)
x
List of Abbreviations xi
SADC Southern African Development Community

SAPs structural adjustment programs
TO Theatre of the Oppressed
UCCLA União das Cidades Capitais Luso-Afro-Américo-Asiáticas
(Union of Luso-Afro-American-Asiatic Capital Cities)
Series Preface
The “Studies in International Performance” series was initiated in

2004 on behalf of the International Federation for Theatre Research,
by Janelle Reinelt and Brian Singleton, successive Presidents of the
Federation. Their aim was, and still is, to call on performance scholars
to expand their disciplinary horizons to include the comparative study
of performances across national, cultural, social, and political borders.
This is necessary not only in order to avoid the homogenizing tendency
of national paradigms in performance scholarship, but also in order to
engage in creating new performance scholarship that takes account of
and embraces the complexities of transnational cultural production,
the new media, and the economic and social consequences of increas-
ingly international forms of artistic expression. Comparative studies
(especially when conceived across more than two terms) can value
both the specifically local and the broadly conceived global forms of
performance practices, histories, and social formations. Comparative
aesthetics can challenge the limitations of national orthodoxies of art
criticism and current artistic knowledges. In formalizing the work of
the Federation’s members through rigorous and innovative scholarship
this Series aims to make a significant contribution to an ever-changing
project of knowledge creation.
Janelle Reinelt and Brian Singleton
International Federation for Theatre Research

Fédération Internationale pour la Recherche Théâtrale
xii
Acknowledgments
Behind this book are a multitude of individual voices and institutions

in Cape Verde, Mozambique, Brazil, Portugal, and the US, all of whom
deserve more thanks than I can offer here. I am indebted to the artistic
directors of the three international theatre festivals at the heart of this
project for their enthusiastic support and the gift of their time over
the years: João Branco, Evaristo Abreu, and Tânia Pires. I would also
like to express sincerest thanks to the numerous artists in Cape Verde
and Mozambique who generously gave of their time in interviews and
opened up their rehearsals to me during my fieldwork trips. Your work
inspires and challenges me. This book is my love letter to you.
Special thanks to all those who granted me formal interviews both on
and off the festival circuit: David Abílio, José Mena Abrantes, Evaristo
Abreu, Maite Agirre, Elliot Alex, Zenaida Alfama, Leopoldina Almeida,
Tambla Almeida, Sabino Baessa, Serando Baldé, António Augusto
Barros, Arsenio Bettencourt, Jorge Biague, João Branco, João Paulo
Brito, Felix Bruno L. Carlos, Dinis Chembene, Ana Cordeiro, Claudio
Correia, Crisálida Correia, Henrique Mendes Correia, José Carlos
Lopes Correia, Alvim Cossa, Francisco Cruz, Nuno Pino Custódio,
Matilde Dias, José Domingos, Herlandson Duarte, Manuel Estevão, Bety
Fernandes, Josina Fortes, Francisco Fragoso, Narciso Freire, Claudina
Gomes, Elisabete Gonçalves, Ambrósio Joa, Isabel Jorge, Ana Malfada
Leite, Elmidou Lopes, Neu Lopes, Mário Lúcio Sousa, Rogério Manjate,
Jorge Martins, José Rui Martins, Joaquim Matavele, Gilberto Mendes,
Alverino Monteiro, Luci Mota, Paulo Neto, Atanasio and Casimiro
Nhussi, Anacleta Pereira, Tânia Pires, Mano Preto, Zaina Rajás, Moacyr
Rodriguis, Dany Santos, Edilta Silva, Paulo Silva, Victor Silva, Maria
Simões, Manuela Soeiro, Amélia Sousa, Edimilson Sousa, Albertina
Tavares, Manuel Semedo Tavares, Ney Tavares, Rosy Timas, Célia
Varela, Nilda Vaz, Armando Veiga, Milanka Vera-Cruz, Mirtô and Mirita
Veríssimo, Matchume Zango.
In Cape Verde, the Baltasar Lopes cultural center in Mindelo became
my home during summers 2004 and 2005 thanks to Toni Tavares,
Josina Fortes, Tambla Almeida, and their collaborators in Fou-nana
Projectos. Tambla Almeida was my talented Mindelact videographer.
As former overseer of the Theatre Documentation and Research Center
of Mindelo (CEDIT), Sílvia Lima helped with my archival work and
xiii
xiv Acknowledgments
became a spectacular friend to boot. During my two summers and year-

long research stay in Cape Verde (2007–08), I benefited from the guid-
ance, hospitality, and personal support of many individuals, including
Micaela Barbosa, Crisálida (‘Totinha’) Correia, Eunice Ferreira, Kesha
Fikes, Tania Oliveira, Deanna Reese, Victor Sancha, and Luisa Veiga.
To my three sets of adoptive Cape Verdean parents, Camilo and Edna
Gonçalves, Joanita and José Pedro Venícula, and Maria João and
Sr. Isodoro: thank you for opening your homes to me. I am so proud to
be your American ‘daughter.’ I was fortunate to have four extraordinary
research assistants at various stages in working on this book: Josy Rocha
in Cape Verde, Érika Ramos in Cape Verde and Brazil, Maria Atalia in
Mozambique, and Brian Granger at UC – Santa Barbara.
When I first developed this project as a doctoral dissertation at
Northwestern University, I received invaluable guidance from com-
mittee members Margaret Drewal and Brian Edwards, and especially
my adviser, Sandra L. Richards. Sandra, your wisdom continues to
guide every word I write. Thanks also to my external committee mem-
ber, Ellen Sapega at the University of Wisconsin – Madison, who has
remained integral to this project until the end.
Others who patiently read my proposals and chapter drafts and pro-
vided precious feedback over the years are Leo Cabranes-Grant, Tracy
C. Davis, Ann Folino-White, Jeff Hessney, Stephan Miescher, Stefka
Mihaylova, Jesse Njus, Ana Puga, Emily Sahakian, April Sizemore-
Barber, and Daniel Smith. Special thanks to Catherine Cole and Laura
Edmondson, two wonderful mentors who were instrumental in shaping
this book. At UC – Santa Barbara, I especially wish to thank the mem-
bers of my junior faculty writing group: Mhoze Chikowero, Ann-Elise
Lewallen, Xiaorong Li, and Teresa Shewry, who helped me transform
this project from dissertation to book. Carlos Pio carefully checked over
all of the Portuguese in this book – any remaining errors are my own.
There is not enough space to thank all of my magnificent colleagues
at UC – Santa Barbara, but I want to mention Leo Cabranes-Grant,
Suk-Young Kim, great advisers and friends, Ninotchka Bennahum,
and two very supportive department chairs, Simon Williams and
Risa Brainin. When I was finishing writing this book and tendinitis
and carpal tunnel syndrome set in, I was lucky enough to have some
excellent pinch-hitter typists and assistants: Kane Anderson, Angelina
Huy, and my dad, Thomas McMahon.
This research could not have been possible without financial support
from Fulbright-Hays, the American Society for Theatre Research, the
Academic Senate at UC – Santa Barbara, and Northwestern University’s
Acknowledgments xv
graduate school, Buffett Center for International and Comparative

Studies, Kaplan Center for the Humanities, and Program of African
Studies. Thanks to Paula Kennedy at Palgrave Macmillan for her enthusi-
astic support of this project, Janelle Reinelt and Brian Singleton for their
deeply insightful editorial suggestions, Meredith Heller for her stellar
indexing, and to Kate Babbitt and Jo North for their sharp copyediting.
Portions of Chapter 3 appeared as ‘Mimesis and the Historical
Imagination: (Re) Staging History in Cape Verde, West Africa,’ in Theatre
Research International 33 (1) (2008): 20–39. Portions of Chapters 2 and 5
appeared as ‘From Adaptation to Transformation: Shakespeare Creolized
on Cape Verde’s Festival Stage,’ in Theatre Survey 50 (1) (2009): 35–66.
These are reproduced with permission from Cambridge University Press.
I owe my deepest gratitude to my family, whose unwavering sup-
port buoyed me through many obstacles and moments of self-doubt.
My parents, Thomas and Patricia McMahon, always challenged me to
‘try my wings’ and continue to inspire me every day. Regy Varghese
and Anne-Marie and Becky McMahon, thank you for an abundance of
unconditional love and for sibling bonding. To my other family, my
wonderful circle of friends in Santa Barbara (especially the ‘coven’), you
rooted me on every step of the way and kept me human (and sane) with
many happy times and meaningful conversations. And to my nephews,
Kolya and Matthai, you make me laugh and remind me what truly mat-
ters in life. I love you all.
1
Introduction – Global Casting
Calls: Performing (Trans)National
Identity on Festival Circuits
In September 1999, as a young, fresh-out-of-college Peace Corps

volunteer, I sat in the auditorium of the Mindelo Cultural Center
on São Vicente Island in Cape Verde, West Africa, eagerly awaiting
the first performance of that year’s Mindelact International Theatre
Festival. My intellectual curiosity about Cape Verde’s theatre festival
was ignited on my first visit to the island, and five years later I began
academic research on the topic. In 1997, the Mindelact festival had
billed itself as the link between the Cape Verde Islands and theatre
in the wider Lusophone (Portuguese-speaking) world. Over the years
that followed, its main-stage program highlighted theatre from Cape
Verde, Brazil, Portugal, Angola, Guinea-Bissau, São Tomé, and Mozambique,
among other countries. Mindelact was staging a burgeoning Lusophone
transnationalism.
This was a reality I could not escape during my first glimpse of
the festival in 1999. Just days before the festival started, the former
Portuguese colony of East Timor, which had been recolonized by
Indonesia in 1975, became a bloody battlefield. After the majority of
Timorese subjects voted for independence from Indonesia, Indonesian
troops and paramilitary groups retaliated with bellicose tactics that
left over 1,000 East Timorese dead. Artists at Mindelact 1999 took
the suffering of East Timor to heart, since the struggling nation was
a fellow member of the Lusophone international community. On the
opening night of the festival, a Cape Verdean theatre group began
its performance by unfolding a large banner requesting a moment
of silence for East Timor. The next night a Lisbon-based Angolan
theatre group made the same request of its audience, and a Portuguese
troupe later dedicated its production to East Timor. The festival direc-
tor, João Branco, who is Portuguese, wore a traditional Timorese scarf
1
2 Recasting Transnationalism through Performance
for the duration of Mindelact, chronicled the impact of the crisis on

festival participants for a local newspaper (Branco 1999), and noted
the significance of the fact that the final day of Mindelact coincided
with the day an international peacekeeping force finally left for East
Timor (Horizonte 1999). At that festival, Lusophone theatre artists used
embodied performance and strategic silences to invoke Lusophone
solidarity.
Beyond its transnational implications, Mindelact 1999 also illustrated
how an international theatre festival can host a heated debate about a
country’s emerging national identity. The opening production that year
was Tabanca Tradiçon (Tabanca Tradition), staged by the visiting Cape
Verdean troupe Ramonda. It was a fairly straightforward reenactment
of Tabanca, an elaborate Afro-Christian street festival that is celebrated
each year on the group’s home island, Santiago. At the climax of the
production, the large cast recreated a street procession of a Tabanca
festival that featured an array of costumed characters – kings, queens,
brides, and soldiers – who played drums, blew on conch shells, danced,
and engaged in call-and-response singing. Despite the vibrancy of the
performance, it did not correspond with the expectations of Cape
Verdean spectators from the host city of Mindelo, who generally expect
to see formal theatre productions with carefully delineated dramatic
plots performed at Mindelact. As I will discuss later in the chapter, the
regional politics and cultural values of the audience in the venue simply
did not match those of the performers onstage. Consequently, many
spectators from Mindelo grew impatient with the actors’ incessant
marching across the stage and left the theatre. As the actors set off
on yet another go-round, I heard a nearby Cape Verdean audience
member say, ‘Outra vez?’ (Again?). Those who remained offered only
a polite smattering of applause when the actors took their final bows.
By deserting the performance space, these national attendees staged a
strong objection to both the format of the performance and its cultural
content.
Globalized theatre venues: The conundrum of

community-building
Mindelact 1999 had become a conduit for impassioned cultural

dialogues about community-building in both transnational and
national terms. Later, when I began to research international festivals
academically, I realized exactly how anomalous an occurrence that was.
At one level, international theatre festivals epitomize the enhanced
Performing (Trans)National Identity on Festival Circuits 3
interconnectedness of cultures that characterizes our age of global

circulation (Fischer-Lichte 2010; Graham-Jones 2005; Harvie and
Rebellato 2003; Rebellato 2009). Yet such festivals also pose significant
obstacles to meaningful intercultural exchange. Because they often rely
on government and corporate sponsors, international festivals mirror
the neoliberal condition that defines today’s economy.1 They are thus
caught up in the demands of the global arts market. For example, at the
Edinburgh Theatre Festival in Scotland, government grants subsidize
productions that showcase facile versions of ‘national’ culture in order
to promote cultural tourism. At the Edinburgh Festival Fringe, which
is sponsored by corporations, productions send their casts into the
streets to compete for audience members in a perfect example of free
market trade (Knowles 2004). As a result, festivals such as these and
the Festival d’Avignon in France have been disparaged as ‘supermarket[s]
of culture’ (Wehle 2003: 27). Moreover, theatre festivals court high-
profile productions based on canonical Western works (and the middle-
to upper-class spectators willing to buy expensive tickets to see them),
opening festivals to charges of elitism. Even theatre festivals on tiny
West African archipelagos cannot escape the whims of the global arts
market, which seems bent on evacuating theatre of its dialogic potential.
The structure of the international festival does not help matters. It
demands that theatre productions become detached from their places
of origin and circulate to new audiences who are largely unfamiliar with
the local connotations and nuances the actors portray (Fricker 2003),
opening theatre to a host of misreadings. This is especially precarious
for non-Western productions that are vulnerable to being interpreted as
exotic (Knowles 2004). Although festival organizers may try to prevent
such misreadings by soliciting theatre specifically designed to circulate
(Fischer-Lichte 2010; Maurin 2003), such productions are often visually
stunning but politically impotent. Lacking both substantive content
and a rootedness in the lived experiences of local audience members,
these theatre productions are what Peterson (2009) calls ‘a kind of
global nothing’ (114).
Even small international festivals, such as the Mindelact festival and
the Festival d’Agosto in Mozambique, have fallen into this trap. Since
most of the spectators at these festivals speak Portuguese, the produc-
tions they have hosted from non-Lusophone countries have the kind of
visual or audible panache that does not rely on a text to speak to audi-
ences. For example, both festivals have featured the Trottino Clowns of
France, who perform Chaplin-inspired physical comedy, and Bernard
Massuir of Belgium, who specializes in body-produced rhythms and
gibberish words sung a cappella. Mindelact 2005 highlighted the French-

Brazilian company Dos a Deux’s mimed theatre spectacle Saudades em
Terras d’água (Nostalgia in Water-Ridden Lands), fresh from its successful
run at Avignon. While these productions certainly entertained festival
crowds, they did not provoke substantial cultural debates. As Knowles
(2004) notes, such productions mainly generate discussion amongst
festival attendees about theatre itself – technique, form, and aesthetics –
rather than about social issues. Paradoxically, then, while international
theatre festivals seek a utopian ideal of ‘bringing people together for
cultural exchanges,’ the problems inherent in decontextualization, arts
markets, and theatre productions that readily circulate actively work
against that goal. How can theatre retain its knack for staging social
debates and forging genuine cultural connections amid the frenzied
circulation of people, money, and artistic products that defines our
global era?
One way to answer this complex question is to analyze international
theatre festivals that either by design or default support specific
transnational communities. Since community-building is one of their
primary goals, these festivals often prioritize dialogic spaces (work-
shops, roundtables, and social events that facilitate post-performance
discussions) over artistic showmanship or even ticket sales. This
book tracks a Portuguese-language performance circuit through key
festival sites in Cape Verde, Mozambique, and Brazil, focusing on
theatre productions that seem to have retained their interventionist
potential even in the context of the festival framework. One of the
festivals I discuss takes a hardline approach to Lusophone intercâmbio
(cultural exchange). The Festival de Teatro da Língua Portuguesa of
Brazil (FESTLIP; Theatre Festival of the Portuguese Language), which
has been held nearly each year in Rio de Janeiro since 2008,2 restricts
participation to theatre troupes from the Portuguese-speaking countries
of Angola, Brazil, Cape Verde, East Timor, Guinea-Bissau, Mozambique,
Portugal, and São Tomé. Other festivals I analyze in this book have
been less dogmatic about language. In 1997, the Mindelact festival
in Cape Verde became international by positioning itself as a prime
venue for Lusophone artistic exchange, but it later dropped the focus
on Lusophone theatre from its statutes. The Festival d’Agosto, which
was held sporadically in Mozambique between 1999 and 2005, never
defined itself as Lusophone. Yet since Cape Verde and Mozambique’s
local theatre-going communities are Portuguese-speaking, the fes-
tivals have featured a preponderance of theatre companies from
Lusophone countries on their programs. Thus, all three festivals have
actively drawn together theatre artists and spectators united by a

common language, one that is often marginalized at other international
festivals such as Edinburgh, Avignon, or even the Grahamstown Arts
Festival in South Africa. When festivals interpellate a specific language
community, artists and their productions typically have more to say to
each other and to spectators because of a shared colonial history and
common cultural and linguistic references. By privileging theatre from
a discrete set of nation-states joined by a common language, theatre
festivals in the Lusophone world may thus avoid some – if not all – of
the pitfalls of a global arts market and create spaces for genuine (and
often contentious) cultural debates.
This book shines a spotlight on the work performers do in festival ven-
ues to bring about these debates. While recent performance scholarship
on festivals concedes that theatre festivals can facilitate real cultural
dialogues despite the commodity fetishism and elitism that commonly
envelop them, the question of how cultural interventions take place in
festival markets is open for debate. For example, Knowles (2004) sug-
gests that festival productions may retain their interventionist potential
by adopting formalist devices such as meta-theatre or performing in
unconventional venues, such as a city block or a storefront window
in the festival’s host city, rather than succumbing to the bourgeois
conditions of the proscenium stage. Willmar Sauter (2007) locates
dialogic potential in what he calls ‘theatrical playing,’ or the performer–
spectator interactions that meld each party’s sensory, imaginative,
and symbolic construction of the fiction unfolding onstage so that
the interpretive work happens jointly in the moment of performance.
Temple Hauptfleisch (2007a) maintains that the festival itself cannot
guarantee that the cultural products on offer will generate meaningful
dialogues; the best any festival director and staff can do is to create
optimal conditions under which this might happen.
I am aware that my suggestion that artists play a primary role in
establishing those optimal conditions at festivals is controversial. After
all, theatre performed at a festival is different from performances staged
outside that framework. As Henri Schoenmakers (2007) notes, the
theatre artists who work on a single production are often presumed
to be answerable for its coherence. Yet when the same performance is
incorporated into the larger program of a festival, the overall theme and
structure of the meta-event can lend other perspectives to the individual
theatre events it encompasses. Since artists may have limited aware-
ness of the larger theoretical structure in which they participate, their
attempt to convey meaning in a performance is only a small piece of the
interpretive framework the festival offers to spectators. Moreover, the

structure governing that interpretive process is decidedly hierarchical;
artistic directors often select the productions and determine their order
and placement in performance venues (Cremona 2007). Actors and
individual directors may thus occupy the lower rungs of the corporate
structure of a festival, since the board of directors often determines the
vision of the festival and artistic directors implement it (Knowles 1995).
Even when a theatre director tries to stage a subversive production, she
or he might be thwarted by the ideological framework of the festival.
Knowles (1995) provides the example of how the critique of capitalism
in director Michael Bogdanov’s socialist production of Measure for
Measure fell flat in the context of the conspicuous consumption cul-
tivated by the 1985 Stratford Shakespeare Festival in Canada. More
insidiously, a male-controlled arts market may result in festival posters
and publicity that may fetishize the bodies of participating female
performers who otherwise strive to make feminist art (Holledge and
Tompkins 2000). In the context of all of these adverse conditions, how
can theatre artists successfully provoke substantial cultural dialogues at
international festival venues?
My argument is that under the right circumstances, theatre artists can
stage a performance that goes against the grain of the larger framework
of a festival, producing a tension between the theatre event and the
overall structure that has the potential to push festival attendees (both
artists and spectators) to reevaluate the festival’s ideological thrust. This
is not to underestimate the power of a festival’s theme and name, which
announce ‘the intention as well as the identity the festival chooses
for itself’ (Cremona 2007: 6). For example, the Lusophone identity of
FESTLIP may cast an ideological shadow over individual productions,
even if this is not the intention of the performers. But performers may
be able to reconfigure the terms of that discourse in a process that is
similar to what Stuart Hall calls articulation. In Hall’s view, ideological
positions crystallize into unifying discourses under concrete historical,
economic, or social conditions and then become attached to certain
political subjects or social groups. Articulation is dialectical: subjects
constitute an ideology by espousing it, which they do because they are
already constituted by the ideology (they can see themselves in it) (in
Grossberg 1986).
By performing at festivals in Cape Verde, Mozambique, and Brazil,
Lusophone theatre artists may constitute the ideology of lusofonia,
the notion of a transnational ‘family’ of Portuguese-speaking peoples
united by a common language and by cultural coherences. Because of
its colonial undertones and because the Portuguese state vigorously

promotes the concept, lusofonia is often critiqued as a homogenizing
discourse that disregards real power imbalances among Portuguese-
speaking nations. Yet even ideologies such as lusofonia are subject to
change. As Hall notes, individuals can evoke cultural transformations
over time by reorganizing ‘the elements of a cultural practice,’ shaping
them into new ‘discursive formation[s]’ even while they maintain
continuity with a past that is already determined (in Grossberg 1986:
54–55).
In this book, I illustrate how theatre artists from Portuguese-speaking
countries in Africa undertake these processes of cultural transformation,
which I call ‘recasting,’ at Lusophone festivals. While I am aware that the
festival structure threatens to commodify African theatre for audiences
and contain its radical impact, I attribute transformative potential to the
actions and objectives of the performers and to the audience’s reflexive
responses to them, all of which may resonate beyond the time of
the festival. I call this ‘festival aftermath,’ or the cultural tensions that
arise in the wake of festivals, such as new questions about collective
identities or the frustrations that accompany intercultural collaborations.
By examining festival productions in concert with their aftermaths,
we can better understand how international festivals perform the chal-
lenging task of building community at local, national, and transna-
tional levels.
Given the hierarchical nature of festivals, any focus on their
community-building potential must also take into account power
imbalances. When festivals involve participants from both African
and Western countries, these issues become paramount because of the
legacies of colonialism. These were the issues that arose for me during
my first glance at the 1999 Mindelact festival and continue to guide
my research today. How can artists from more marginalized nation-
states – the former Portuguese colonies in Africa – add their vigorous
voices to the collective construction of a Lusophone transnation? On
a national level, how can Lusophone theatre festivals facilitate new
dialogues among performers and audiences about the colonial histories
of participating countries? And how can they facilitate dialogues about
contemporary regional divides?
These questions speak to larger concerns about how meaning is
made in theatre contexts that have been affected by globalization.
One underlying concern for performance scholars is that mechanisms
for circulating theatre may ultimately override local epistemologies.
This hazard exists in both Western and non-Western theatre contexts.
For example, mass-produced musicals such as The Lion King threaten

the creativity of local directors since they must make a simulacrum
of a Broadway hit (Rebellato 2009). Non-governmental organiza-
tions (NGOs) operating in non-Western countries may use canned
narratives of trauma in children’s theatre to attract international donors
instead of stimulating the imaginations of performers (Edmondson
2005). Accordingly, performance scholars often look for spaces where
local knowledges surface in the context of globalizing processes.3
Yet meaning-making is a particularly vexed issue in festival venues,
since performances garner new connotations as they travel along
festival circuits.4 To that end, this book analyzes the content of festival
performances in tandem with the festivals’ rhetoric, theme, funding
sources, marketing strategies, and overall program. This is akin to Ric
Knowles’s method of ‘reading the material theatre’ (2004). However,
I add a historical dimension to this model, thus responding to Sauter’s
observation that many theoretical paradigms for festivals overlook
the historical circumstances that inform the festival occasion (2007).
Like other festivals that privilege specific transnational communities,
Lusophone theatre festivals lend themselves well to historicization
since there is a legacy of nation-to-nation connections for researchers
to investigate.
The double signification of the term ‘recasting’ is the theoretical crux
of this book. In one sense, recasting suggests a process of reconfiguring, or
the act of transforming and interrupting master narratives. Recasting an
idea or ideology means shedding new light on it, thus changing the way
it is perceived. Recasting in this sense may entail making a new mold;
older ideas can be conjured in order to codify new ones (which may in
turn require recasting by future generations). In the theatrical sense,
recasting invokes the practice of assigning living, breathing bodies to
various roles, but for a second time. If the original slate of actors no longer
serves a production – or if the actors have failed to perform properly –
a director must recast it. Alternatively, the needs of a production may
change, requiring the director to make strategic substitutions in the cast.
In this book, the solitary director doing the ‘recasting’ is replaced by the
collective work of an ensemble – the artists from Lusophone countries
who gather at international theatre festivals. At such festivals, I propose,
African theatre artists may recast themselves in leadership roles in
the Lusophone transnation, wresting the interpretive, discursive, and
performative power from their Portuguese and Brazilian counterparts.
Moreover, their embodied work as actors can recast the narratives of
nationhood that form the bedrock of their own countries.
‘Recasting’ thus signifies on two levels in this book: the transnational

and the national. Part one of my argument is that African performers
can trouble the foundations of an emerging Lusophone transnation
by exposing its underlying histories of Portuguese colonialism. This
may entail reminding theatre audiences about legacies of oppression by
performing scenes from a colonial past. Theatre festivals can also offer
African artists a powerful platform for shaking up and interrogating
the pecking order of countries in a global Lusophone arts network that
often locates Portugal and Brazil in the driver’s seat and African coun-
tries such as Cape Verde in the back seat, merely along for the ride.
Yet nationhood is integral to transnationalism. While the myth of
the homogeneous nation-state has long been exposed as a dangerous
misconception,5 nations themselves are not eclipsed in a global
era; they are simply reconceived. As Appadurai’s (1996) twist on
Benedict Anderson’s famous formulation states, a ‘post-national
imaginary’ redefines nations as imagined collectivities that tran-
scend the boundaries of the state (21). Cape Verde provides a good
example of this: Cape Verdean nationhood is constituted today by the
inhabitants of the islands plus the members of diasporic communities
in cosmopolitan cities such as Boston, Rotterdam, Rio de Janeiro,
Dakar, and Lisbon. Yet the global Cape Verdean nation must still
contend with the imperialist and colonial histories that propelled
new waves of migration to these urban centers. International theatre
festivals provide artists with opportunities to work through such
histories before a global Lusophone audience, whose members may
connect with these histories in intimate ways.
Accordingly, the second part of my argument is that African performers
may use productions staged at Lusophone theatre festivals to ‘recast’
their nations. This means that they insert wrinkles into the conventional
understandings of the geographic boundaries, laws and institu-
tions, citizenship rights, and myths of common culture upon which
transitions from statehood (a political category) to nationhood (a broader
understanding of the blend of commonalities and dissonances that
bind populations together) are predicated (Anderson 1991; Smith 1991).
Lusophone theatre often wrestles with the particulars of Portuguese colonial
rule: its weak economic status compared to that of Britain and France,
its policies of forced labor that persisted well into the twentieth century,
its racial and class divides, and its history of discouraging local languages
and performance traditions. Lusophone theatre also grapples with the
memory of a tempestuous state-building era in former Portuguese colo-
nies, which did not win independence until the mid-1970s, after the fall
of Portugal’s authoritarian regime (the Estado Novo, or Second Republic),

which had ruled Portugal and its colonies with an iron fist since 1933.
Thus, the nationalist governments in Angola, Cape Verde, Guinea-
Bissau, and Mozambique came to power only in 1974 and 1975, well
after the promise of independence had already been betrayed in other
sub-Saharan African countries that had shaken off European colonialism
decades earlier. By the 1970s, autocratic governments and coups d’état
dominated the political landscape in Africa, and the loan policies of the
International Monetary Fund (IMF) and the World Bank had begun to
curb the financial autonomy of governments. Perhaps responding to
these stark realities, the political parties that had led the liberation move-
ments in many Lusophone African countries quickly gave way to one-
party rule. In Mozambique, this shift helped trigger a lengthy civil war,
and in Cape Verde, it consolidated political rivalries that were shaped
by heated regional divides that had been set in place in the colonial era.
Contemporary theatre festival productions can bring to light the
contested nature of the ongoing process of nation formation in former
Portuguese colonies in Africa. A crystallizing example is Ramonda’s
production of Tabanca Tradiçon for Mindelact 1999, with which I opened
this chapter. Since Mindelact audiences comprise both foreigners
and nationals, the fact that spectators deserted the production of
Tabanca Tradiçon at the festival seemed to signal a rejection of Cape
Verdean cultural markers by both an international audience and by
Cape Verdeans themselves. Closer inspection, however, reveals that
the departing audience members were not rejecting a symbol of
Cape Verdean culture as a whole; they were rejecting the staging of a
regional cultural practice that was not their own. The majority of Cape
Verdean spectators at Mindelact hail from the northern island of São
Vicente, specifically the city of Mindelo, which hosts the festival, while
Ramonda performed a Tabanca street festival from Santiago Island in
the south.
Yet the Tabanca Tradiçon performance also illustrates how seemingly
national debates about cultural practices are embedded in wider
transnational fields. The regional rivalries that fueled the audience
walkout cannot be separated from the history of Portuguese colonialism
in Cape Verde, which deeply informs the symbolic resonance of
Tabanca on the archipelago. Cape Verde’s culture is widely considered
to be creolized, a mix of African and European cultural practices
that resulted from the fact that mainland West Africans and their
descendants shared space on the islands with people of European
descent for centuries. For example, Cape Verde’s official language is
Portuguese, but the language people speak on a day-to-day basis is

Crioulo (Creole), a blend of archaic Portuguese and West African lan-
guages such as Wolof and Mandingo.6 In the colonial era, Portuguese
administrators erected racial divisions in the archipelago according
to assumed geographic origins and cultural lineages. Because they
regarded Tabanca to be a raucous, unruly Black African tradition,
colonial administrators periodically prohibited Tabanca street festi-
vals in Santiago’s urban areas, including many neighborhoods in the
capital city of Praia.7 Official decrees against Tabanca perpetuated the
state’s association of Santiago, Cape Verde’s largest and most populous
island, with mainland Africa, and São Vicente Island with Europe.8
These racialized divisions persist in the popular imagination today
and constitute an uneasy aspect of Cape Verde’s creolized culture.
When São Vicente spectators walked out of Tabanca Tradiçon, they
rehearsed a colonial distaste for Tabanca festivals that persists in the
postcolonial era. They also enacted a broader resentment of Santiago
folk traditions, which became celebrated as ‘authentic’ national culture
in the wake of Cape Verde’s independence in 1975. Today, many São
Vicente Islanders take umbrage at the pro-Santiago slant they perceive
in the current PAICV (Partido Africano da Independência de Cabo
Verde/African Party for the Independence of Cape Verde) government,
the successor to the political party that ushered Cape Verde to inde-
pendence on a wave of ‘re-Africanization’ cultural policies. Thus, the
production’s framing of Tabanca as a fêted element of Cape Verdean
culture naturally triggered resentment in many São Vicente Islanders
attending Mindelact, especially since international festival venues are
presumed to celebrate the host country’s cultural highlights (Holledge
and Tompkins 2000).
The dramatic form of Tabanca Tradiçon likewise shaped its reception
at the Mindelact festival. Partly because Mindelo theatre audiences
have attended Mindelact festivals each year since its inception in
1995, they have adopted the conventions of the Western proscenium
stage: they arrive on time and sit quietly as the performance unfolds.
The Mindelact Association, which is presided over by Portuguese theatre
director João Branco, prides itself on having ‘trained’ its audiences to
engage with theatre this way. This spectator ‘training’ is partly a result of
Branco’s earlier immersion in Porto’s theatre scene and the postcolonial
migration of Western artists such as Branco to non-Western countries.
Yet the type of audience behavior Branco has cultivated in Mindelo
does not mesh with the vocal, dynamic, and kinetic interactions that
Tabanca parades demand of participants and bystanders. That September
evening, Ramonda’s actors attempted to ‘recast’ the Mindelact festival’s

rules for proper theatre comportment by marching noisily around the
auditorium as if it were a maze of Santiago city streets. The spectators
protested Ramonda’s disregard for their habitual theatre codes by desert-
ing the performance space. The contested performance reflected the
larger ideological issues at stake in negotiating Cape Verde’s complex
cultural heritage in the postcolonial era.
By examining the aftermath of such theatre productions, Recasting
Transnationalism through Performance illustrates how international
theatre venues can be generative sites where artists, spectators, festival
personnel, and the media can articulate and debate conflicting
discourses and popular understandings of nationhood and transnational
communities. Drawing from my ethnographic and archival research at
the three festival sites examined in the book, I focus on productions
staged by theatre troupes from Cape Verde, Angola, Guinea-Bissau,
and Mozambique that grapple with issues of race, colonial histories,
feminisms, sexual economies, language hierarchies, and adaptations
of Western ‘classics,’ all of which pertain to the Lusophone world
but also exceed its carefully laid boundaries. In this sense, ‘recasting
transnationalism’ means reevaluating global issues from the point of
view of seemingly marginalized countries. The theatre troupes from
these countries may subtly alter the course of intercultural connections
forged in festival arenas.
Intertwining discourses: African theatre festivals,

globalization, and circulation
Africa is a promising geographical site for cultural and economic queries

about festivals.9 To begin with, international arts and theatre festivals
on the African continent have a markedly different lineage from key
festivals in Europe, such as the Edinburgh Theatre Festival and the
Festival d’Avignon. Born in 1947, those were modernist ventures that
functioned chiefly as tourist attractions designed to pick up the pieces
of weakened theatre traditions after the devastation of war and boost
people’s spirits and national economies in their overt celebration of
European culture (Kennedy 1998; Knowles 2004). This is no doubt why
Adorno (1991), writing in 1960,10 included European arts festivals in
his vitriolic attack on mass culture, calling them mere ‘gypsy wagons’
of national cultures engaged in sheer capitalist ventures (118), and this
is also why they have long been critiqued for their elitism and profit-
seeking agendas (see Harvie 2003; Wehle 2003).
By contrast, the first international arts festivals in Africa carefully

balanced goals related to tourism with concrete political objectives
related to specific transnational communities. The pioneering Negro
Arts Festival in Dakar (1966) and its reincarnation in Nigeria as FESTAC
(Festival of Black Arts and Culture, 1977) were staged in a burst of pan-
Africanist zeal. They commemorated a surge of newly independent
African countries and featured a vibrant mix of jalis (professional story-
tellers) from Gambia; theatre groups from Guinea and Kenya; dance
troupes from Sierra Leone, Mali, Chad, and the Ivory Coast; and a host
of Black artists from the Caribbean, North America, and Europe.
International arts and theatre festivals in Africa have had to be acutely
responsive to the sea changes in the global arts market brought about by
a crucial financial shift. The Dakar festival and FESTAC took place just
before and after the critical period of the early 1970s, which globalization
theorists pinpoint as the time when many national economies went
global by shifting to speculative forms of capital such as derivatives (Lee
and LiPuma 2004). This signaled a move away from production-based
capital and toward capital linked to a global market that was increasingly
dependent on speculative ventures such as hedge funds and commodity
futures. Some African economies could survive this transition in the
1970s because they had precious natural resources. For example,
Nigeria in that decade was at the height of its oil boom: profitable
exports to foreign refineries resulted in lavish government spending,
conspicuous consumption by elite Nigerians, and the importation
of status-lending foreign technologies such as color televisions.
FESTAC, a government arts initiative, benefited from the wealth Nigeria
accrued from the new globalized economy; the state constructed
an extravagant National Theatre equipped with state-of-the-art
technology to host the festival. As Andrew Apter (2005) argues, FESTAC
‘remapped’ the African diaspora onto a global economic circuit and new
transnational alliances such as the OAU (Organization of African Unity,
now the AU) and ECOWAS (the Economic Organization of West African
States). But the Nigerian economy began a rapid downward spiral in the
1980s that was accelerated by government mismanagement of funds
and coups d’état, making FESTAC a one-time event.11 Even with all of
its wealth from oil, Nigeria could not keep up with new global trends
in speculative capital.
Lee and LiPuma (2004) argue that the shift to speculative capital
perpetrated ‘abstract violence’ on African and Latin American econo-
mies because international lending institutions, such as the IMF and
the World Bank, insist that governments take steps toward opening
their already vulnerable markets to foreign speculation as a condition

of loans (25). Lending conditions also include structural adjustment
programs that have resulted in decreasing levels of public employment
and sharp reductions in state assistance for health care and education.
These policies disempower the very people the loans are meant to
assist (Ibrahim 2002).12 James Ferguson (2006) has critiqued theorists
of globalization who write positively about global flows. As Ferguson
incisively notes, transnational capital may span the globe but it does
not flow evenly across it. Rather, transnational capital hops over
large portions of the world, even countries such as oil-rich Angola,
whose resources may have helped to produce that capital. In this
stark scenario, culture is often the last to benefit from the eviscerated
budgets of African governments. Festival organizers in Africa are thus in
a double bind: they are deprived of substantial state support and they
may also lack access to powerful corporate sponsors, since capital has
largely hopped over their domestic spaces.
Unlike their European counterparts, then, international festivals
in Africa have had to grapple with the challenges of global finance
from their inception. Indeed, many current African theatre festivals –
including PANAFEST (Pan-African Historic Theatre Festival) in Ghana,
the festival for ritual-based theatre in Cameroon, and two festivals in
Burkina Faso – arose during the 1980s and 1990s,13 the period when
Africa’s economies began to feel the full force of global capital and
structural adjustments. Therefore, they have always operated with
great financial difficulty (Campana 2003). The Mindelact International
Theatre Festival and the Festival d’Agosto, both of which were born
in the 1990s, are no exception. The Mindelact festival must virtually
reinvent itself every year in its quest for financing, since it has few
guaranteed sources of long-term funding. While the Cape Verdean
Ministry of Culture is a regular supporter, its contribution covers only a
fraction of Mindelact’s operating budget. Although the Festival d’Agosto
in Mozambique was much grander in its scope, it received only minimal
government financing. The inability of organizers to raise sufficient
funds from domestic corporations, NGOs, and foreign agencies was a
major reason the festival ended after 2005.
The African festivals that have survived in such harsh economic condi-
tions have done so in part because of their focus on community-building.
As Campana (2003) notes, festival directors in Africa consistently
prioritize ‘creation, exchange, and meeting’ over commercial objectives
or artistic one-upmanship (53). This is true even of the mammoth
Grahamstown Arts Festival in South Africa, which now houses over
600 performances in formal and improvised theatre spaces sprawled

across the town. While Grahamstown originated in 1966 as an English-
language festival designed to celebrate British cultural contributions to
South Africa, it has evolved into an international event that features a
balanced mix of national and international theatre companies. Yet the
community that is most emphasized at Grahamstown is the national
one, and scholars have analyzed how its changing theatre program
has helped South Africans navigate the nation’s transition during an
embattled anti-apartheid campaign (Grundy 1993), the first inclusive
democratic elections in 1994 (Arthur 1999), and the country’s strug-
gle to redefine its cultural topographies in the 2000s (Larlham 2007).
Grahamstown is also unusual among African festivals in terms of finan-
cial resources; South Africa’s Standard Bank has sponsored it for many
years.
Because of their origins in the decades when a critical shift to global
capital took place, international arts and theatre festivals in Africa cre-
ate opportunities for scholars to evaluate how the new condition of
circulation-based finance has affected performance and transnational
connections in Africa. As Lee and LiPuma (2002) argue, changes in
global finance have vital implications for cultural studies, since analy-
ses of contemporary cultural forms must take into account the specific
economic system that produced them.14 African arts festivals can help
us understand how cultural production has been shaped by what Brian
Edwards (2007) aptly calls ‘the age of circulation.’ For example, Apter
(2005) maintains that FESTAC’s grandiose performance spectacles,
which included opulent royal durbars and an elaborate regatta of war
canoes, mirrored the cultural values generated by petro-dollars and an
economy of excess. Jemima Pierre (2009) analyzes PANAFEST as part of
the Ghanaian government’s neoliberal turn in recent decades toward
development assistance from diaspora foundations in the United States
and elsewhere.
While previous studies have asked how African festivals construct
pan-African connections, many African theatre festivals since the 1990s
have privileged a single language community. For example, the Festival
International des Francophonies, which has been held since 1984 in
Limoges to celebrate global Francophone theatre, finds its African
counterparts in the two major theatre festivals in the Ivory Coast, FATF
(Festival Africain de Théatre Francophone) and MASA (Marché des
Arts du Spectacle Africain). All three receive substantial funding from
French cultural agencies (Conteh-Morgan 2004) and are examples of
France’s efforts to consolidate a transnational French-language artistic
community. The 1990s was also the decade that birthed the Mindelact
International Theatre Festival and the Festival d’Agosto. As a result,
many new transnational arts networks in Africa were forged along
linguistic divides that were established during the colonial era. When
language replaces race as the main criterion for transnational connec-
tions, new analyses are needed that take into account colonial legacies
in Africa and their cultural repercussions in the global era.
Lusofonia in transnational perspective
The Lusophone world is a compelling laboratory for studying theatre

and transnationalism. Portuguese-language theatre festivals seek
to translate the collective histories of Portuguese imperialism into
positive formulations of intercultural connections in the contemporary
Lusophone world. The notion of lusofonia, or ‘fraternal’ relationships
among Portuguese-speaking nations because of shared histories and
a common official language, prevails in these festival arenas. The
lusofonia sentiment has generated a political organization called the
Community of Portuguese-Language Countries (Comunidade dos
Países de Língua Portuguesa; CPLP), an intergovernmental alliance
of eight Lusophone countries that promotes cooperation among its
members in areas such as health, technology, education, culture,
defense, agriculture, and immigration policies. There is an explicit
connection between the CPLP and the burgeoning of the Lusophone
theatre festival circuit (see Chapter 2), both of which began in the
1990s. Lusophone festivals thus reveal how cultural production works
in concert with geopolitical strategies to stitch nations together into
transnational communities.
Scholars have warned, however, that the egalitarian potential
enthusiasts ascribe to Lusophone transnationalism, and the CPLP in
particular, merely masks its neocolonial design (Almeida 2004; Margarido
2000).15 These scholars perceive lusofonia as a perilous reincarnation
of ‘lusotropicalism,’16 a controversial theory developed in the mid-
twentieth century by Brazilian sociologist Gilberto Freyre, who claimed
that Portugal practiced a benevolent form of colonialism that promoted
harmonious cultural encounters through Portuguese settlers’ easy adap-
tation to tropical climates and their tendencies toward miscegenation
with local women. The theory of lusotropicalism concealed the racism
and labor oppression that occurred in Portuguese Africa, and it has
long since been discredited (Bender 1978). Nevertheless, Freyre’s
theory was integral to Portuguese dictator António de Oliveira Salazar’s
propagandist campaign to retain his African colonies in the post-World

War II era, a time when the regime was under intense pressure from
the UN to decolonize (Castelo 1998). Significantly, some scholars see
parallels between Salazar’s appropriation of lusotropicalism and the cur-
rent Portuguese government’s attachment to the CPLP (Thomaz 2002).
In fact, Portugal has supported the CPLP from its inception; it hosted
the organization’s inaugural conference in Lisbon in 1996. Because it
consolidates Portuguese-language countries into one transnational unit,
the CPLP enables Portugal to retain official linkages with its former
colonies, a situation that raises the specter of ideological and economic
control.
Indeed, the term ‘Lusophone’ itself is fraught with neocolonial
implications. Derived from the ancient name of Lusitania for the
Roman province in the Iberian Peninsula that is now Portugal, the term
Lusophone is commonly applied today to Portuguese-language coun-
tries and everything associated with them, such as literature, food, and
music (Arenas and Quinlan 2002). Potentially, ‘Lusophone’ is a homog-
enizing identity tag that seeks to enfold strikingly diverse nations on
four continents – Europe, South America, Asia, and Africa – into a single
cultural category with etymological roots in a Western imperialist center.
As Arenas and Quinlan note, even scholarly use of the term flirts
with neocolonialism since ‘Luso’ lumps together ‘former colonizing
and colonized nations’ without differentiating the power dynamics
among them (xxi). In one sense, the term is simply a pragmatic
designation for the countries that concern me here, and in fact
I use ‘Lusophone’ throughout this book. However, Arenas and Quinlan
also point out that scholars can use the term subversively if they call
attention to the historical and cultural tensions it produces. Since
this book exposes the interventions of African theatre artists into the
neocolonial miasma that lusofonia evokes, it troubles the ideological
contours of Lusophone transnationalism. Yet this book also explores
the complexity of lusofonia, which in some contexts signals a benign
camaraderie, at other times a homogenizing ideology, and at other
times a dangerous holdover from colonialist lusotropricalism. In sum,
lusofonia will always look different depending on the angle from which
one views it.
In this book, the Mindelact International Theatre Festival receives
pride of place, mainly because of my extensive fieldwork there in the
period from 2004 to 2007. Complementing my analysis of Mindelact is
an examination of Lusophone African theatre performed at (or arising
from) the Mozambican and Brazilian festivals also featured here. By
privileging the Cape Verde Islands in my discussion of a Lusophone

transnation, I am attempting to ‘provincialize’ its presumed centers
(Chakrabarty 2000) – Portugal as former colonizer and Brazil as current
economic powerhouse. What does transnationalism look like from the
vantage point of ten tiny islands in the middle of the Atlantic whose
population barely exceeds half a million? And yet Cape Verde’s small
population and isolated location have been balanced by its strategic
geopolitical position off the coast of Senegal, which made it a focal
point of Portuguese conquest in Africa, a vital stopover for various
Western powers during the transatlantic slave trade, and, later, a major
coal refueling hub for British ships engaged in maritime commerce in
the nineteenth century. Not only has Cape Verde historically played
a centralized role in global affairs, but its acclaimed music scene,
epitomized by the golden-throated ‘barefoot diva’ Cesária Evora
(recently deceased) lends Cape Verde almost enough cultural cachet
to rival its fellow Lusophone country, Brazil. Cape Verde is thus an apt
surveillance spot from which to gauge African theatre artists’ critical
contributions to Lusophone transnationalism at large, especially given
the startling longevity of the Mindelact International Theatre Festival
(currently in its nineteenth year) in the face of profound financial and
logistical challenges.
The very concept of transnationalism demands a comparative perspec-
tive. Indeed, the three international festivals I examine here offer vastly
different viewpoints on the globalizing processes of the Lusophone
world. For example, the Cape Verdean government, whose major
trading partners include Portugal and oil-rich Angola, touts its ability
to ‘leverag[e] language ties with Lusophone countries’ in order to pen-
etrate the global economy.17 This is paralleled in Cape Verde’s theatre
scene. Mindelact used its Lusophone connections to obtain aid from
Portuguese associations when it segued from a national festival to an
international one in 1997. Mindelact’s statutes then positioned the
festival as the optimal nodal point for Lusophone theatre exchange
because of Cape Verde’s proximity to Europe, South America, and
mainland Africa. Mindelact thus remembers and maintains the histori-
cal lusofonia connection, even though in recent years it has opened its
stages to European, African, and South American troupes of all linguistic
backgrounds.
By contrast, Mozambique’s short-lived Festival d’Agosto accentuated
that country’s rogue status in the Lusophone transnation. Mozambique
first earned that reputation when it joined the British Commonwealth in
1995. At the Festival d’Agosto, Lusophone productions graced Maputo’s
stages alongside English-language theatre from neighboring South Africa,

Zambia, and Zimbabwe. By testing Mozambique’s loyalties both to the
CPLP and the SADC, the Southern African Development Community
that enfolds Mozambique into a partnership with surrounding English-
speaking nations, the Festival d’Agosto revealed the artificiality and
instability of lusofonia.
Finally, FESTLIP represents a seismic shift in the center of gravity of
the Lusophone cultural world. While Portugal provided funding and
structural support for earlier Portuguese-language theatre festivals, the
Brazilian Ministry of Culture provided strong financing for FESTLIP
from 2008 to 2010, the critical first three years of its existence. The
festival is thus a showcase for Brazil’s rising star in the global economy.
In recent years, international media have cast a spotlight on Brazil’s
expanding middle class, its burgeoning wealth in oil, and its overall
bargaining power in international trade (Forero 2009a, 2009b). Brazil
is also at the cutting edge of a global cultural scene, due partly to the
selection of Rio de Janeiro for both the 2014 FIFA World Cup and the
2016 Olympic Games and partly to the worldwide enthusiasm for
capoeira, samba, caipirinhas, and Candomblé. Brazil’s weight in the
world of global culture was likely the reason many Brazilian officials
demonstrated apathy toward the CPLP project in its early stages in
the 1990s; Brazil did not need Lusophone transnationalism to acquire
global clout. Yet Brazil’s attitude toward lusofonia and the CPLP appears
to be changing. The Brazilian government has recently invested heav-
ily in projects that foster connections to other Lusophone countries
and to Africa in general. This has benefited FESTLIP, which arrived
on the scene in 2008 with Lusophonist zeal and a special commit-
ment to bringing theatre from Lusophone African countries to Rio.
While Brazil has thus recast itself as an emerging leader of the global
Lusophone arts community, usurping Portugal’s role, its geopolitical
dominance raises new questions about how African countries and citi-
zens can exercise agency in redefining the parameters of Lusophone
transnationalism.
Significantly, many Lusophone African artists and writers relish
the concept of lusofonia despite its colonial baggage and potential
hegemony. At periodic conferences that unite authors writing in the
Portuguese language, novelists from Lusophone African countries have
celebrated lusofonia as a means of gaining a wider readership for their
work.18 I have often found that African theatre artists are eager to join
a Lusophone festival circuit because it affords them increased mobility
in the global cultural economy. At the closing ceremony for FESTLIP in
July 2009, Angolan guitarist and lyricist Daniel de Oliveira performed

an ode he had composed about FESTLIP’s successful uniting of irmãos
(‘brothers,’ or ‘siblings’) from Angola, Brazil, Cape Verde, East Timor,
Guinea-Bissau, Mozambique, Portugal, and São Tomé. He then invited
an array of FESTLIP artists from each of the participating countries into
a circle on stage with him to link arms and chant ‘irmãos, irmãos’ in
unison.19 While Oliveira’s profession of solidarity with other Lusophone
performers was undoubtedly sincere, he also used the festival setting
as a platform from which to launch his international career; he spoke
with festival organizers and visiting attendees (including me) about
contacts we had in the music industries in our home countries. This
example shows how lusofonia may open global pathways of exchange
that are normally blocked by restrictive visa requirements and the pro-
hibitive cost of international travel. For example, sometimes foreign
governments facilitate travel arrangements for African artists attending
Lusophone theatre festivals.
Lusophone African performers’ often-enthusiastic responses to the
Portuguese-language theatre festival circuit typify what I call ‘global cast-
ing calls.’ Festivals offer African theatre troupes an array of tantalizing
prospects, including coveted opportunities for self-promotion in a global
Lusophone setting. However, they also make it possible for performers
from Lusophone Africa to stage their ‘recastings’ of nationhood in the
context of a transnational community that is itself integral to the story
of each participating country’s nation formation. Thus, Cape Verdean
dramatizations of labor exploitation under Portuguese colonialism
unfold before an audience that includes Portuguese festival attendees
who are familiar with the colonial dynamic from the reverse perspec-
tive. Such performances, and the post-show conversations that occur
informally among festival crowds, enable Lusophone artists from diverse
geographic and socioeconomic contexts to work through colonial lega-
cies collectively.
While this kind of dialogic dynamic has been linked with cultural
festivals that emphasize one national context (Crespi-Vallbona and
Richards 2007; Lev-Aladgem 2007), it is also present in the international
framework of Lusophone theatre festivals. In part, this is because the
lines dividing performers from spectators virtually dissolve. Lusophone
artists slip in and out of the roles of performer and spectator throughout
the festival proceedings; at any given main-stage performance, a large
percentage of the audience is composed of participating Lusophone
artists from other countries who are not performing that night. This
adds a new layer to Schoenmakers’s (2007) notion of the ‘festival
participant’ who attends multiple events on a program and can thus

evaluate each one in the context of the festival’s overarching concept
(30). Many spectators of Lusophone festival productions are doubly
invested in critical interpretations of theatre because they are perform-
ers at the festival themselves. If, as Schoenmakers argues, a festival’s
framework encourages spectators to draw comparisons and contrasts
among its range of events, this habit of interpretation may extend from
year to year on Lusophone festival circuits.
Another reason Lusophone international theatre festivals lend
themselves to cultural dialogues is their size and structure. Unlike large-
scale international theatre festivals and the associated fringe festivals
in Edinburgh, Avignon, and Grahamstown, Lusophone festivals are
typically intimate events that showcase 15–30 productions, generally
over a ten-day period. Such ‘low-density’ festivals, according to Sauter
(2007: 20), are more likely to intensify camaraderie among participants.
Both Mindelact and FESTLIP cultivate community by housing visiting
artists for the duration of the festival (often in the same cluster of
hotels), arranging for them to eat meals collectively at restaurants (the
festivals pick up the tab), and planning workshops and roundtable
debates. They thus fit Schoenmakers’s (2007) theory of affiliation,
which maintains that festivals with ‘related social activities, such as
discussions, introductions, meetings of experts, and with a central
meeting place’ are more apt to fulfill participants’ needs for emotional
connections with others (35).
Thus, Lusophone theatre festivals self-consciously formulate what
Appadurai (1996) has deemed a ‘community of sentiment,’ or a
‘group that begins to imagine and feel things together’ (8), often
across national boundaries.20 The Lusophone ‘community of senti-
ment’ that theatre festivals foster seems to epitomize the notion of
‘minor transnationalism,’ or the experiences of cultural solidarity and
strivings toward mutual learning that take place across nation spaces
that are peripheral to global centers of power (Lionnet and Shih 2005).
As artistic directors, institutional affiliates, and actors have recounted
to me in numerous interviews since I began my fieldwork in 2004,21
the Lusophone transnation’s marginal position in a global cultural
economy that is dominated by English, French, and Spanish speakers
is what motivates theatre festivals’ embrace of lusofonia. Undergirding
these cultural connections is a ‘transcolonial’ dynamic that occurs when
subjects inhabiting transnational communities recognize that they
share experiences with colonialism and neocolonialism as common
sites of trauma (Lionnet 2000; Lionnet and Shih 2005).
I am wary, however, of painting an overly rosy picture of this

phenomenon. As Appadurai (1996, 2001) notes, the expansion of the
social imagination that characterizes an increasingly connected world
exists alongside the nightmarish disjunctures that accompany global cul-
tural configurations. While people, objects, and cultural texts may be in
frequent motion in the era of late capitalism, their paths have disparate
speeds and trajectories and varied relationships to the ‘differently
configured regimes of power’ in which they are embedded (Ong 1999: 4).
The CPLP’s framing of lusofonia as an egalitarian principle that brings
Portuguese-language countries into a new cosmopolitan relationship
founded on horizontal exchanges ignores some potent realities. For
example, although many Portuguese and Brazilian nationals circulate
to Cape Verde or Mozambique with relative ease, the Portuguese and
Brazilian embassies in those countries regularly feature long queues of
Africans who are going to great lengths and personal expense to obtain
travel visas.22 Any transnational community thus features a confluence
of ‘major’ and ‘minor’ players, and for all of them, their cultural
influence and political efficacy are still caught up in the positions of
individual nation-states in the global economy.
Given the imperialist weight of lusofonia, community-building on
Lusophone festival circuits is inherently ambiguous. Inequalities that
were cultivated during the colonial era persist in the present day, and
arguably, this leaves African theatre artists little room to maneuver. Often
they are overshadowed by their Brazilian and Portuguese counterparts,
who have more access to theatre training. Indeed, at all three festivals
I discuss, the participating theatre companies from Brazil and Portugal
are largely professional while the African ones are nearly all amateur.
This means that African productions are less likely to be applauded
for their production values. Moreover, the festival’s programming may
be heavily influenced by sponsorship from corporations, government
entities, and cultural institutes in Brazil and Portugal, a dynamic that
calls attention to the real power holders in the lusofonia community.
Yet African participants may find opportunities to subtly comment on
various ideological agendas (including those of the festival), through
their performances; the reflective space provided by workshops, talkback
sessions, and seminars (Cremona 2007); informal dialogues with
other artists over meals; or their reports on the festival to friends and
colleagues back home. These incidences of festival aftermath may
directly counter the kinds of affiliations nurtured by Lusophone festival
organizers and provide evidence of how community-building at inter-
national theatre festivals is a deeply contested process.
Nation-building and ‘festival aftermath’
Until recently in scholarship on African theatre, the term ‘contested’

has signaled performers’ confrontations with the state.23 The Cape
Verdean theatre I observed on Mindelact stages from 2004 to 2007,
however, rarely enacted overt critiques of government policies. This
may suggest that resistance models are out of place in Cape Verde,
which has enjoyed relative peace and stability since independence in
1975, smooth transfers of power since the first multiparty elections in
1991, a pattern of ‘good governance’ (Baker 2006), and an exemplary
human rights record. Yet while the state may escape direct contestation
from Cape Verdean theatre, nationhood almost never does. Indeed,
most of the festival productions I witnessed conveyed an obsession
with what it means to be ‘Cape Verdean’ in the context of the archi-
pelago’s vexed history of cultural contact from all over the globe. At the
Mindelact festival, regional claims to importance within the national
imaginary seemed to trump most other concerns. The Tabanca Tradiçon
production is an example of this dynamic. It also illustrates how audi-
ence reception may enact the resistance to government policies that
actors onstage do not; when the São Vicente spectators walked out of
the production, they revealed their impatience with a folk tradition
that has been championed by a PAICV government perceived as favor-
ing Santiago over their home island. Disputed theatre productions in
festival venues may therefore reveal the profound entanglement of
audiences with nation formation and political commentary.
Cape Verdean theatre at Mindelact thus fits newer conceptual
models that gauge how performers and spectators may call forth a
potent combination of resistance, collusion, and even indifference
to the state in their yearning to articulate a national culture. Laura
Edmondson (2007) has coined the term ‘collaborative nationalism’ to
describe Tanzanian popular cultural performances in the late 1990s,
when ‘the state borrowed from popular culture and vice versa in an
ongoing cycle of shadowing, adaptation, and, indeed, co-creation’ of
national identity (18). In her history of Angolan musicians in urban
Luanda in the 1960s, Moorman (2008) stresses that politically charged
music created a template the new nation could follow in its efforts
to bridge divides related to gender, ethnicity, and class. Moorman
calls this empowerment process an important step toward ‘cultural
sovereignty’ (7), which performers exercise when they choose whether
or not to engage the state in their presentation of nationhood. Notions
of collaborative nationalism and cultural sovereignty vividly illustrate
the instability of nation formation, which, as Bhabha (1994) rightly

observes, is less a homogenizing process than a series of ever-colliding
narratives and counternarratives that ‘continually evoke and erase’ the
‘totalizing boundaries’ of a people’s presumed territorial allegiances,
historical contours, and cultural affinities (213).
Audiences at theatre festivals provide paradigmatic examples of the
confusing welter of signifiers that underscore the messy process of
nation-building. Festival audiences, which include local spectators from
the host city, nationals from all over the country who may be merely
watching or actively participating in the festival, and international
visitors with varying degrees of involvement and investment in the
festival, can weave complex cultural dialogues into the fabric of a fes-
tival. As Schoenmakers (2007) notes, festival participants who attend
multiple events – productions, talkbacks, workshops, debates – become
fully saturated with the festival’s schema, which allows them to form
knowledgeable opinions about the ideological underpinnings of the
programming as a whole. Yet these value judgments will diverge
considerably, since festival signifiers may say utterly different things
to disparate audience segments. Local references in Tabanca Tradiçon
may convey cryptic cultural nuances to Santiago Islanders; passages
of Kikongo-language singing may interpellate a specifically Angolan
audience; a Mozambican troupe’s critique of Portuguese-language
hegemony may speak straight to the director of Maputo’s Instituto
Camões (Portuguese Cultural Center), who may be sitting in the house.
In short, spectators’ varying degrees of cultural literacy ensure that
there is no single interpretation for theatre festivals’ overarching nar-
ratives. Here I am questioning Schoenmakers’s (2007) assumption
that a festival framework tends to focus a particular interpretive light
on individual productions, resulting in a higher degree of consensus
about a production than if the same performance were staged outside
a festival venue. I propose instead that an international festival is just
as apt to produce lack of consensus among its layers of spectators. This
is not unlike the polyvocality that Catherine Cole (2001) observes
about Ghana’s 1950s- and 60s-era concert parties, in which traveling
performers created comedic sketches that often used domestic scenarios
as metaphors for larger national issues and government critique while
simultaneously referencing Ghana’s predicament in the global arena,
specifically the Cold War. In both concert parties and festival venues,
references to the local, the national, and the global may work differ-
ently upon diverse constituencies of spectators at the same moment in
time, producing a wide array of interpretations.
Yet there is one crucial difference between these two performance

examples: concert parties are instances of ‘popular’ culture, while inter-
national theatre festivals have been considered ‘elite’ venues. While
Karin Barber’s generative introduction to Readings in African Popular
Culture (1997) challenges the critical divide between those two terms,
it is clear that African theatre that is recognized as ‘popular,’ or theatre
that is performed for the ‘masses’ by constituents who generally occupy
lower socioeconomic strata, has been the favored epistemological lens
for investigating the relationship between African performance and
national identity (Askew 2002; Cole 2001; Edmondson 2007; Jeyifo
1984; Thiong’o 1987). This is perhaps because of its resonance with
empowerment processes. In Barber’s (1997) redefinition of the term,
‘popular’ refers to a set of people who are ‘naming the inequality they
suffer from’ and acknowledging ‘their own struggle and endurance’
(5). The relatively high ticket prices charged at international theatre
festivals – even at smaller ones in Africa – seem to target upper-class
consumers of culture who, at the very least, do not suffer from class
inequality. For example, Cape Verdean troupes in the country’s major
cities, Praia and Mindelo, typically charge 200–300 escudos (about
US$3.50) when they perform (if they charge at all). Yet tickets for those
same productions may sell for twice that much (400–500 escudos)
if they are staged for Mindelact. Thus, Cape Verdean spectators at
Mindelact are mainly theatre devotees who can afford to spend money
on leisure activities. From this vantage point, any new frameworks for
national culture that the Mindelact festival proposes would appear to be
skewed toward a privileged minority population.
This would only be true, however, if we assumed that moment-to-
moment interactions between audience members and performers were
the crowning events of the festival-going experience. This book pre-
sumes that the actor–spectator encounters, or what Sauter (2007) calls
‘theatrical playing,’ is only one piece of the puzzle (22–23). Another
major piece is ‘aftermath,’ or the new questions festival productions
generate about contentious issues such as race relations, sexual identities,
family and gender dynamics, and local and global political issues. Here,
I am building on Hauptfleisch’s (2007a) theory of ‘eventification,’
which asserts that a festival’s prestige can transform productions into
significant events that resonate in the ‘cultural memory of the particular
society’ (82), thus extending their lifespan outside of the festival context.
I argue that beyond retaining the memory of a performance, the festival
mechanism can continue to spur active debates about the festival and
its performances over the course of many years. After all, Hauptfleisch
also asserts that festivals naturally generate ‘rancour and wrangling’

because a range of constituents – artists, politicians, sponsors, journal-
ists, theatre audiences, corporations, administrators, and the host city’s
general population – all strive to assert their rights over a festival’s pro-
ceedings (2007b: 44). My point is that this ‘rancour and wrangling’ can
also be ‘eventified,’ or expanded over many festival cycles, especially
since interpersonal disputes and festival productions often gesture to
broader questions about group identities and power relations.24
My conceptualization of ‘aftermath’ resonates with Rebecca Schneider’s
(2011) theorization of how performance ‘remains.’ For Schneider, per-
formance already contains multiple temporalities, particularly historical
or artistic reenactments. As a present act, performance is the future of
the past and likewise generates future histories. This is also true of ‘after-
math’ but in a more aggressive sense. Given its connotation of a fall-out,
especially after an adverse event or circumstance, the word suggests
that the contestation that marks community-building is an ongoing
process. Aftermath is about tracking a performance’s ‘remains’ through
its future trajectories. How is it resurrected in dialogues and argu-
ments that, in time, could help constitute national and transnational
communities?
In the context of a theatre festival, aftermath might take many
shapes: the media’s rehashing of festival events, bloggers’ vigorous
debates about the controversial topics theatre productions may have
introduced, or gossip among theatre artists who may know about
the festival’s goings-on only through hearsay. From this viewpoint,
international theatre festivals are powerful tools that a wide range of
people may use to reimagine both nationhood and larger transnational
dynamics. For example, Chapter 5 examines a heated artistic debate
about two different adaptations of Shakespeare staged by a young Cape
Verdean theatre director and an older Portuguese director who was
once his mentor. Playing out over five years, the debate revealed how
two generations of Mindelact theatre directors jointly ‘recast’ questions
of adaptation and cultural consumption on the islands by publishing
diatribes online and in print media. Thus, critical attention to ‘after-
math’ demonstrates how a theatre festival’s cultural work may spill
out over the carefully constructed temporal boundaries the festival’s
time frame posits, as well as the theatre-going demographic the festival
targets as patrons. In this regard, international theatre festivals can be
viable venues for the empowerment processes that scholars of African
performance have heretofore mainly attributed to popular-culture
contexts.
Methods and structure
How does one conduct an ethnography of three festival sites in

three diverse cultural contexts on two separate continents? In some
respects, my methods approximated what George Marcus (1998) terms
‘multi-sited ethnography,’ whereby researchers strive to situate local
knowledges within the transnational social and economic vectors
that constitute the ‘world system.’ Marcus calls for a mobile approach
to ethnography that traces the circulation of culture and identities
across global networks. Yet any researcher who works in multiple sites
knows there is a certain unevenness of the fieldwork experience. Since
rigorous ethnography demands a sustained presence in one principal
community, any comparative ethnographic project will inevitably
highlight one site and potentially give the others short shrift. My
methodology fell into this trap, since I had the luxury of seventeen
months of fieldwork on the Cape Verde Islands and just two months
each in Mozambique and Brazil. Such a situation requires a researcher
to be particularly resourceful in adapting her research methods to the
specificities of each site.
In Cape Verde, I became deeply integrated into the theatre scenes in
Praia and Mindelo, my two main research locations, during a research
period that included the summers of 2004 and 2005 and another
full year, from September 2006 to September 2007. During this time,
I witnessed four Mindelact festivals (2004–7), attending main-stage
productions, theatre workshops, roundtable discussions, Festival Off
(a series of shorter theatre pieces staged in the courtyard of the Mindelo
Cultural Center), and informal social gatherings that extended well
into the madrugada (dawning hours). My formal ethnographic work
on the islands began with participant-observation at rehearsals with
theatre troupes and interviews with actors, directors, festival personnel,
and spectators. However, I soon received invitations to participate
actively in the performance process, culminating in a whirlwind final
six months wherein I took dance classes with Raiz di Polon, a contem-
porary dance troupe in Praia; co-authored a new play with Finka Pé,
a Praia-based theatre group; acted in a Festival Off piece with an artistic
collective, Praia-Mov, for Mindelact 2007; and collaborated on a new
historical drama about Santiago Island’s infamous Tarrafal Prison with
OTACA,25 a theatre troupe from the Santa Catarina municipality on
Santiago.
When I accepted these invitations, I hoped they could be gateways
to ‘co-performer witnessing,’ Dwight Conquergood’s (2002) term for
a way of knowing ‘grounded in active, intimate, hands-on participation

and personal connection’ (146). In retrospect, I am unsure if my par-
ticipation in these projects unlocked any elusive knowledge stored in
the actors’ bodies, which the co-performer witnessing model promises
to do. However, it did render me useful to the artists with whom
I worked. This evokes Margaret Drewal’s (1991) point that ethnographers
should take up any role their research collaborators may need – such
as photographer or cook – as part of their personal responsibility
to the community. According to Drewal, this kind of involvement
also productively implicates the researcher in the performance. For
instance, at Mindelact 2005, OTACA invited me to play a Boston police
officer in a short comedic sketch for Festival Off about Cape Verdean
immigration to New England. In that play, I performed a critical task
for OTACA, since the troupe needed an American actor in order for the
skit to function properly. Notably, I also played a role that symbolized
the weight of US law, the dangers inherent in crossing borders, and the
specter of police domination, all of which highlighted my status as an
American researcher who had the socioeconomic power and political
capital required to enter Cape Verde, while the reverse was not true for
most of the actors with whom I worked on the islands. My presence in
the production thus illustrated the very real stakes for Cape Verdeans of
joining the sizeable diaspora community in New England, which many
of my research contacts indeed aspired to do.
Collaborating with numerous troupes may in fact work against
Conquergood’s site-intensive model of co-performer witnessing. Indeed,
Laura Edmondson points out that co-performer witnessing, which
implies a close relationship with a single performance community, may
be incompatible with Marcus’s notion of multi-sited ethnography,
a method that she prefers. I agree with Edmondson that Conquergood’s
theories contain a certain romanticization of embodied performance
and lengthy co-residence. Surely, if we are to work transnationally, as
trends in scholarship and our current global era demand, we must be
willing to adapt Conquergood’s methods to suit our multiply-situated
fieldwork. If an ethnographer moves from one local site to another (as
I did in Cape Verde), or even from one country to another (as I did
with Mozambique and Brazil), she may use snapshots of co-performer
witnessing at each site to develop a fuller picture of how global per-
formance venues put local epistemologies to use and how local actors
conceptualize their participation in a larger performance event, such as
an international festival. In other words, what an ethnographer sacri-
fices in the brevity of the co-performing witnessing activities she does
with multiple troupes, she gains in the increased knowledge of cultural

circulation that her mobility affords her.
In Brazil and Mozambique, I became less of a co-performer witness
and more aware of the tricky business of ‘being in’ fieldwork. Working
from Harry Wolcott’s classic text, The Art of Fieldwork, Quetzil Castañeda
(2006) relates ‘being in’ fieldwork to the intimate experience of ethnog-
raphy itself, or the one-on-one or small-group contact that comes from
immersion at a research site.26 For Castañeda, this element of fieldwork
can begin to resemble Augusto Boal’s method of invisible theatre,
wherein performers behave provocatively in public in order to incite
public debate about a contentious social issue, never revealing that they
are actually doing theatre. Similarly, an ethnographer is always engag-
ing in observation and reflection in the field, even outside of the frame-
work of formal interviewing and participant-observation. Castañeda
gives the example of a one-on-one interview in a public place that
attracts the attention of a passerby, perhaps a friend of the researcher,
who elects to join the conversation, or a handful of people who cluster
around a note-taking fieldworker to ask questions about what she or he
is doing. For Castañeda, the people who ‘self-select’ into the research
study are emergent audiences who use their own agency to decide the
extent of their participation (83). When ethnography becomes this kind
of ‘invisible theatre,’ the line between data gathering and ‘hanging out’
becomes inherently blurred (see Madison 2012: 20).
I noted this often during my time in Brazil. In July 2009 and 2010,
I conducted intensive, short-term ethnographic work at the second and
third annual FESTLIP festivals, whose activities were spread out among
various theatre spaces in Rio de Janeiro. My formal fieldwork included
attending and filming all of the African productions staged by theatre
troupes from Cape Verde, Angola, Guinea-Bissau, Mozambique, and
São Tomé and interviewing many of the participating African artists
individually or in groups. I also attended workshops and discussion
panels and interviewed FESTLIP’s artistic director, Tânia Pires. Yet
I gained much of my knowledge of FESTLIP simply from ‘being in’ the
field. FESTLIP typically designates a single restaurant in Copacabana
as the main eatery for participants and picks up the bill for them. By
eating all of my meals there, I could talk to a large number of festival
participants, including those from Brazil and Portugal, and informally
gauge reception of their peers’ productions, which were often discussed
the day after the performance. FESTLIP is also a fairly social festival,
and group excursions to nightclubs and late-night bonfires on the
beach, besides being a lot of fun, also afforded insights about how
a community of Lusophone artists was forming during the festival’s

run. I had to be careful, however, about how my ‘emerging audiences’
perceived my interactions with them in social settings. While I clearly
developed close friendships with the artists I met there, I often had to
separate my two roles (friend and researcher) by asking them if I could
mention in my published work on FESTLIP something they had told me
only informally in a social space.
In Mozambique, where there was no ongoing festival to attend,
I had to rely mainly on formal interviews. In 2009 and 2010, I spent one
month each summer in Maputo, interviewing theatre artists who had
participated in the Festival d’Agosto in the past and observing rehears-
als for their current performances. While this kind of fieldwork can
feel a bit mechanical to an ethnographer accustomed to the intensity
of co-performer witnessing, I found that what initially felt like mere
‘data gathering’ often led to new avenues for ‘being in’ fieldwork. For
instance, I felt an instant regard for the young artists in the theatre
troupe Luarte, which spurred me to take a deeper look at their inter-
cultural adaptation of Cervantes’s Don Quixote, a performance I saw in
Maputo in August 2009 and that now plays a key role in Chapter 5.
Only by informally ‘being in’ fieldwork with Luarte did I discover how
much that production owed to the Festival d’Agosto, which helped
inform my theorization of ‘festival aftermath’ in relation to adaptations
of Western texts.
My archival work helped me contextualize the reception of
performances and their material conditions of circulation (Knowles
2004). In Cape Verde, I conducted most of this research at the
Mindelact Association’s own archive, CEDIT (Centro de Documentação
e Investigação Teatral do Mindelo/Theatre Documentation and
Research Center of Mindelo). The center houses over 1,500 documents,
ranging from newspaper and magazine articles about Cape Verdean
performance dating from the 1950s to the present day to posters, flyers,
and other print media from Cape Verdean theatre performances.27
This material provided crucial evidence about trends in Cape Verdean
theatre history, funding, media rhetoric, and news coverage abroad. In
Mozambique, locating newspaper articles about the Festival d’Agosto
in the Arquivo Histórico (Historical Archive) in Maputo and examining
festival programs and other print material from participants’ personal
collections proved integral to my attempt to historically reconstruct
a now-defunct festival.
In the field, I strove to follow D. Soyini Madison’s (2012) notion of
‘critical ethnography’ by keeping my own positionality in mind. This
meant a constant awareness of my privileged status as a White North

American woman affiliated with a university in the US. It was my
responsibility to attend to the power dynamics of this situation and
take into account how my research collaborators saw my presence on
the scene. For example, I was sometimes hesitant to comply if a theatre
director invited me to perform in a skit, lead an acting workshop
for her or his troupe, or give my opinion about a scene’s progress in
a rehearsal. In such cases, I let the directors know that while my uni-
versity training was not actually in theatre practice, I could draw on my
previous amateur experience with theatre to act as a co-collaborator.
In this way, I could accept their invitations to participate while refus-
ing the status of ‘expert’ performer. I adopted a similar strategy during
Mindelact 2005 and 2006, when festival director João Branco asked
me to draw on my academic specializations by leading workshops on
adaptation and African theatre. For those two-day sessions, I chose the
formats of roundtable discussion and group work in order to avoid
a teacher–student relationship that might reinforce a hierarchical binary
of ‘provider’ and ‘receivers’ of knowledge. Finally, I was often asked
to share my research skills by helping theatre troupes craft funding
proposals, one of which allowed the young Cape Verdean director
Herlandson Duarte to complete a three-month professional direct-
ing course at the Gulbenkian Foundation in Lisbon. Since notions of
circulation were central to my research, I regarded my collaboration
on funding proposals as an attempt to level the playing field, since it
allowed Herlandson and others to access the global circulation that
my US citizenship, educational opportunities, race, and socioeconomic
privilege afforded me as a matter of course.
Another aspect of Madison’s ‘critical ethnography’ is allowing the
voices of the performers to guide the research venture and analysis
of performances. One interview method was especially fruitful in this
regard. Because I had videotaped each of the performances I planned
to include in my chapters, I often watched the DVDs together with the
director or the performers, asking them for commentary about what
was happening in each moment and why. This process is conveyed in
Chapter 4, which features my analysis of Raiz di Polon’s theatre-dance
piece, Duas Sem Três (Two without Three). In that analysis, I weave
together excerpts from interviews with dancer Bety Fernandes, my field
notes from dance classes, and my own semiotic reading of the dance
moves.
Most of the performances I analyze in my chapters are productions
staged in Cape Verde for the Mindelact festival from 2004 to 2006.
I selected performances that fall under the categories of historical

dramas, explorations of women’s labor and sexuality, and adaptations
(or ‘creolizations’) of plays from the Western canon. I chose these
genres because they portrayed recurring patterns I had traced through
the three festival editions I witnessed during my fieldwork period.
Thus, they are thematic strands that Cape Verdean theatre groups are
interested in engaging with at the start of a new millennium. Further,
they each interrogate different slices of social narratives that contribute
to nationhood: representations of race and colonial authority, gender
roles and their relationship to national ‘authenticity,’ and the consump-
tion of foreign material related to processes of cultural creolization.
My research at FESTLIP and the Festival d’Agosto uncovered many
similarly themed performances, which I examine in tandem with the
Cape Verdean productions. Overall, I discovered that colonial histo-
ries, gender issues, and adaptation hold important keys to unlocking
how Lusophone African countries’ stories of nationhood fit together,
which in turn illuminates how Lusophone transnationalism operates
on festival stages.
The book begins with a sweeping look at Lusophone transnationalism
and its sprawling reach across theatre festivals in the Portuguese-speaking
world, and then looks more closely at individual productions and their
contributions to both transnational communities and national identi-
ties. Chapter 2, ‘Mapping Festivals,’ proposes that international theatre
festivals may help track trends in global politics. After examining the
legacy of ‘lusotropicalism’ for former Portuguese colonies, I detail Cape
Verde’s place within a burgeoning Lusophone transnational community,
correlating that history with the evolution of the Mindelact International
Theatre Festival. I close by discussing the place of Mozambique and Brazil
in Lusophone transnationalism, illustrating how the Festival d’Agosto
and FESTLIP reflect critical changes in each country’s cultural and foreign
policies.
Chapter 3 employs theories of memory and global circulation to
analyze the use of Lusophone histories in festival productions that
dramatize critical moments in the colonial pasts of Cape Verde and
Angola. I illustrate how Lusophone performers have put the practice
of ‘historical imagination’ – a fusion of on-the-ground research and
dramatic license in order to explore colonial histories – to vastly dif-
ferent uses. Tchom di Morgado (The Proprietor’s Land), performed
at Mindelact 2004, celebrated the revolts of rural laborers against
exploitative Portuguese landlords in Cape Verde. For my analysis of
Mãe Preta (Black Mother), performed at Mindelact 2005, I discuss how
a Portuguese theatre troupe transformed race representation and Cape

Verdean cultural legacies in its retelling of a Cape Verdean woman’s
oral history about drought on the islands. I conclude by examining
an Angolan performance staged for FESTLIP 2009, Kimpa Vita, which
used fantasy to tell the tale of Beatriz, a seventeenth-century Congolese
prophetess, in order to recast Angola’s early history with colonialism
and the encroachment of the Catholic Church.
Chapter 4 targets the role of Cape Verdean and Mozambican performers
in constructing new paradigms for gender and sexuality. An imagina-
tive theatre-dance piece performed at Mindelact 2004 was especially
provocative in its reformulation of labor roles, emigration narratives, and
popular notions of Cape Verdean women’s sexuality. While the dance
performance seemed to adhere tightly to nationhood in its content, its
subsequent travel on festival circuits made the dance troupe’s new per-
spectives on gender and sexuality relevant within a wider transnational
context. By contrast, a Mozambican piece performed at FESTLIP 2009,
O Homem Ideal (The Ideal Man), explicitly interrogated global issues in
its narrative. Paralleling a Mozambican woman’s dire economic straits
and capitulation to prostitution with Mozambique’s predicament in a
global development scheme, the play subtly referenced US, Brazilian,
and Chinese manipulation of Mozambique’s economy in recent decades.
The Mozambican performers thus challenged festival spectators to think
about both finance and sexual economies beyond the confines of the
Lusophone transnation.
In Chapter 5, I argue that African adaptations of canonical works
can become platforms for intergenerational and intercultural debates
about the language and cultural hierarchies that continue to plague
Lusophone African countries in the post-independence years. The
chapter begins with the story of two Lusophone directors who
sustained a heated postcolonial debate about theatre, national identity,
and language in Cape Verde through their drastically different
approaches to adapting Shakespeare for the festival stage. I then put
those Cape Verdean productions in dialogue with an intercultural
adaptation beyond the Lusophone realm, a co-production between a
Mozambican troupe and a cluster of theatre artists from the Basque
country of Spain that adapted Don Quixote to a Mozambican context.
Born from the Festival d’Agosto in Mozambique, Dulcinéia e o cavaleiro
dos leões (Dulcinéia and the Knight of the Lions) showcased the cultural
dialogues that allowed the Mozambican and Basque co-directors to find
common ground as representatives of two similarly oppressed minority
communities.
My concluding chapter moves away from Cape Verde entirely to

examine how theatre troupes from Guinea-Bissau and Mozambique,
both called GTO (Grupo Teatro do Oprimido/Theatre of the Oppressed
Group), used Brazilian director Augusto Boal’s methods of interactive
forum theatre to solicit audience opinions about social crises in their
respective nations. I show how Boal’s forum theatre, which Boal initi-
ated in the 1960s to help poor Latin American communities brainstorm
about solutions to their own sources of oppression, functions differently
at Lusophone festivals: it creates productive moments of cross-cultural
misunderstandings that allow Lusophone performers to work through
colonial legacies and national histories collectively. In festival contexts,
artists from other countries offered profound cultural misreadings dur-
ing the talkback portions of the forum; these events gave the African
directors a chance to correct spectators’ misconceptions of Mozambican
and Guinean culture. The chapter concludes by asking how scholars
can continue to chart the agency of performers within the context of
the ever-changing landscape of international theatre festivals.
Cape Verde’s late liberation leader, Amílcar Cabral, generated
cultural theories that profoundly influenced my work in Recasting
Transnationalism through Performance. In fact, I suspect that Cabral
anticipated the journeys of African countries from a preoccupation with
national culture toward a more transnational perspective in one of the
final passages of his important essay ‘National Liberation and Culture.’
After urging African political leaders and elite classes to reconnect with
the rural masses by reviving cultural folk forms (such as the Tabanca
street festivals I discussed at the start of this chapter), Cabral (1979
[1975]) concludes that the ultimate aim of recuperating national culture
is the ‘development, on the basis of a critical assimilation of mankind’s
conquests in the domains of art, science, literature, etc., of a universal
culture, aiming at perfect integration in the contemporary world and
its prospects for evolution’ (153). Cabral’s use of the problematic term
‘universal’ notwithstanding, he was suggesting that national cultures
in Africa should make their way onto the world stage. My hope is that
my discussion of Cape Verdean, Angolan, Guinean, and Mozambican
performances at international theatre festivals will illuminate just how
successfully Lusophone African theatre artists have taken up Cabral’s
challenge.
2
Mapping Festivals: Cape Verde,
Mozambique, and Brazil in the
Lusophone World
International theatre festivals are sites where participants and attendees

alike can explore national identity, transnationalism, and global con-
nections. Such issues are often informed by language, which is itself
often connected to economics. In this chapter, I examine how festival
venues may be indicators of broader trends in the global economy and
in diplomatic relations among countries in a transnational community.
I trace the histories of the three international theatre festivals at the
core of this book – the Mindelact International Theatre Festival in Cape
Verde, the Festival d’Agosto in Mozambique, and FESTLIP in Brazil – in
the context of the wider Lusophone world. While the Brazilian festival
supports the notion that Portuguese is viable as a global language and
cultural unifier, the festivals in Cape Verde and Mozambique have ulti-
mately called that idea into question. As evidence, I examine critical
shifts in the statutes, practices, and funding sources of the festivals over
time and the new social imaginaries about lusofonia that theatre troupes
from Lusophone African countries give birth to on festival stages.
Social imaginaries are typically understood as methods of collective
understanding that are ‘embedded in the habitus of a population
or . . . carried in modes of address, stories, symbols, and the like’
(Gaonkar 2002: 4). Theatre plays a crucial role in creating social imagi-
naries because it helps people imagine things that are unfathomable
in their habitus. For example, at Mindelact 2006, the Cape Verdean
theatre troupe Fladu Fla1 performed a play called Profisia di Krioulo (The
Creole Prophecy),2 a fantasy about Cape Verdean Crioulo becoming
the next language of global commerce and communication. Such
fantastical performances undermine lusofonia by imagining a world in
which the Portuguese language is not Cape Verde’s only ticket to the
global cultural economy. In Profisia di Krioulo, the Crioulo language,
35
a deliberate marker of Cape Verde’s national identity, became a signifier

of global connectivity.
By charting the new social imaginaries that emerge on Lusophone
festival stages and placing them in dialogue with the evolutions of the
festivals over time, I show how African performers have articulated their
agreement with or resistance to lusofonia and its accompanying political
alliance, the Community of Portuguese-Speaking Countries (Comunidade
dos Países de Lingua Portuguesa; CPLP). My analysis presents lusofonia as
a politically flexible discourse that can be leveraged for cultural prestige
or discarded altogether in favor of a broader and more linguistically
inclusive vantage point. I argue that transnationalism is an inherently
contentious concept when its major signifier is a common language and
that international theatre festivals are productive places for bringing
these polemical cultural dialogues to light.
Lusofonia and its discontents
In contemporary discourses of lusofonia, Portuguese as a common

language becomes synecdochic of a whole cultural sign system that all
Lusophone nations supposedly share. While Portuguese imperialism
is ostensibly the genesis of this Lusophone identity, the notion
of a coherent and cohesive Portuguese world can be traced to the
lusotropicalist theories of Brazilian sociologist Gilberto Freyre and the
appropriation of these theories by Portugal’s authoritarian regime in
the mid-twentieth century. Uncovering the resonance of lusotropical-
ism in today’s Lusophone transnation helps us decipher how intercon-
nectivity occurs along a distinct circuit of exchange that is the legacy
of the Portuguese empire’s logic of possession. This approach grounds
theories of global connectivity in specific transnational histories rather
than in (false) assumptions that cultural flows blanket the entire globe
(Cooper 2005).
While Freyre’s theories were not actually called ‘lusotropicalism’ until
1953, they were always based on one core assumption: Portuguese
colonizers adapted well to the tropical climates they inhabited
because of a supposedly innate social pliability that allowed them
to absorb cultural influences from the Blacks and native people they
encountered. In Freyre’s view, these cultural exchanges were medi-
ated by miscegenation, which he linked to an absence of racial pride
that originated in the Iberians’ history of mixing with Moors. He
concluded that the Portuguese proclivity for acculturation created har-
monious relations among colonizers and the colonized that resulted
Cape Verde, Mozambique, and Brazil in the Lusophone World 37
in a uniquely benevolent brand of imperial conquest and settlement.

In 1933, Freyre expounded these ideas in an influential book about
the foundations of Brazilian society, Casa-grande & senzala, which was
translated in 1946 as The Masters and the Slaves. He later extended
them – some say haphazardly – to Portuguese colonies in Africa and
Asia with the 1940 publication of O mundo que o Português criou (The
World the Portuguese Created), which described the Portuguese empire
as the most democratic, humane, and fraternal on earth (Castelo 1998).
This book caught the eye of Portugal’s right-wing dictatorship, which
by the 1950s was being criticized by the United Nations for delay-
ing decolonization after World War II. The regime, led by António de
Oliveira Salazar, used Freyre’s writings as the basis for a campaign to
retain its African colonies, which it renamed ‘overseas provinces.’ It
even sponsored Freyre’s 1951 voyage to the African colonies in its effort
to legitimize his lusotropicalist views there.
Critiques of Freyre’s theories began as early as 1955, when Angolan
intellectual Mário Pinto de Andrade decried the dystopia of cultural
domination that lurked behind the lusotropicalist myth of harmonious
colonial relations in the African colonies.3 But Freyre did not quite
ignore the conditions of oppression that facilitated the miscegena-
tion upon which he based his theories. In The Masters and the Slaves,
for example, he continuously berated White plantation owners and
their young sons for their sexual exploitation of native and Black
women, who were coerced into cooperation through an unjust power
system. At the same time, he praised the mestiço offspring of such
unions because they purportedly formed a Brazilian ‘super race’ (1971
[1946]). For Freyre, the paradox of Portuguese colonialism was that
cruel domination produced ‘racial democracy,’ a social system suppos-
edly based on peaceful coexistence and racial harmony. Gerald Bender
(1978) has called this standpoint ‘an invidious lie’ that was used to
justify colonial exploitation (3).
The traces of Freyrian doctrine that have lingered in the Portuguese
national imaginary long after lusotropicalism was discredited as
essentialist and unscientific, however, do not acknowledge oppression.
As Cláudia Castelo (1998) observes, official and popular discourses often
recycle sanguine notions that Portugal has an immunity to racism,
that it tends toward convivência (close contact) with other peoples and
cultures, and that Portuguese people have a so-called universalist voca-
tion that predisposes them to travel and assimilate.4 These sentiments
are repeated without acknowledging their Freyrian heritage and their
endorsement by the Salazar regime, as if they have become aspects of
Portuguese identity paradigms that are taken for granted.5 As Miguel

Vale de Almeida (2004) wryly notes, in Portugal, ‘luso-tropicalism has
become a social fact’ (63). Indeed, many scholars argue that skewed
lusotropicalist ideas inform contemporary alliances such as the CPLP
(Castelo 1998; Thomaz 2002). The challenge now is to find ways of
discussing the present-day Lusophone transnation that excavate the
notions of inequality that were built into Freyre’s theories and that
continue to haunt cultural and socioeconomic exchanges.
A useful first step is to trace how lusotropicalist ideas have been
revived as lusofonia. As Kesha Fikes (2009) argues, lusofonia retains the
Freyrian notion of intimacy among Portuguese-speaking cultures while
deemphasizing its racial undertones. Lusofonia now signifies a global
kinship of Portuguese-speaking nations based on a shared language,
a shared colonial history, and common cultural referents (Arenas
2011). Defenders of lusofonia claim that linking it to lusotropicalism
is reductive because it is no different from other theories about global
communities defined by language, such as francophonie.6 Yet since frater-
nity and solidarity (fraternidade and solidariedade) are recurring themes
in both Freyrian discourses and contemporary expressions of lusofonia,7
it is hard to overlook the connection between the two ideologies.
While each Portuguese-speaking country has its own relationship to
lusofonia (Arenas 2011), it has been a pet project of Portugal for over two
decades. Even before the CPLP officially took shape, a mayor of Lisbon
conceived of a global network of Lusophone cities by initiating the
Union of Luso-Afro-American-Asiatic Capital Cities (União das Cidades
Capitais Luso-Afro-Américo-Asiáticas; UCCLA) in 1985.8 UCCLA was
designed to promote cooperation and intercâmbio (cultural exchange)
among the capitals of Angola, Brazil, Cape Verde, Guinea-Bissau,
Mozambique, Portugal, São Tomé, and Macau (the region in China
formerly controlled by Portugal), and it declared all these urban cent-
ers ‘twin cities’ that were linked by linguistic solidarity.9 When the
CPLP was officially founded in Lisbon in 1996, it used a similar familial
vocabulary at the state level, referring to the new ties of ‘fraternity and
cooperation’ among Lusophone countries that had existed since the
mid-1970s, after the fall of the Portuguese dictatorship and the inde-
pendence of the former Portuguese colonies in Africa.10
While Lusophone heads of state first met to discuss the CPLP in Brazil
in 1989, its official site later became Lisbon. Its permanent council
consists of a representative of Portugal’s Ministry of Foreign Affairs
and the ambassadors of each CPLP country in Lisbon (the presidency
of the CPLP rotates among member states.) The constitution of the
CPLP cites as its raisons d’être the celebration of a shared linguistic

heritage, the global promotion of Lusophone cultural expressions, and
the social and economic development of countries who use Portuguese
as an official language (CPLP 1996). Yet the CPLP has been subject to
critique since the beginning. Santos refers to the CPLP in initial years
as an ‘empty shell’ (2003: 72), a collection of protocols and objectives
without concrete implementation, mainly due to lack of funds and
wavering commitments from member states.11 Even today, the CPLP’s
official website (CPLP.org) lists far more meetings and forums to discuss
economic cooperation among member states than actual economic
agreements. The CPLP has, however, had certain diplomatic successes.
Portugal recently gained a seat on the UN Security Council partly
because CPLP member states endorse its candidacy; the CPLP has also
attempted to mediate in the longstanding political crisis in Guinea-
Bissau (Bloomfield 2012). These examples show how a ‘strength in
numbers’ approach can benefit individual CPLP countries. Along with
the Instituto Camões, which plants Portuguese cultural centers strategi-
cally around the globe and is likewise housed under Portugal’s Ministry
of Foreign Affairs, entities such as UCCLA and the CPLP have made
Lisbon a center of lusofonia.
In addition to diplomatic measures at the state level, Portugal fosters
Lusophone connections through the media, international awards, and
publications. Lisbon is the site of the TV channel RTP África and its
radio correlate, RDP África, which broadcasts news about Lusophone
African countries in African nations and in Portugal. Similarly, the
Instituto Camões positions itself as the arbiter of Portuguese-language
literary production in Africa, and cultural centers in individual countries
sponsor poetry, fiction, and playwriting contests that often reward win-
ners with publication.12 From Lisbon, the Associação das Universidades
de Língua Portuguesa (AULP) offers the Fernão Mendes Pinto Award
of 10,000 euros each year to a master’s thesis or doctoral dissertation
that contributes to an understanding of how Lusophone countries are
drawing together.13 The prize illustrates how official institutes encour-
age knowledge production about lusofonia in order to legitimize what is
essentially an abstract and fiercely debated concept.
Many African authors and intellectuals have resisted the tendency to
group together what are in reality vastly different countries. In 1981,
Mozambican novelist Orlando Mendes delineated this idea clearly in
an article on ‘Lusofonia e luso-africanismo’ in the leftist magazine
Tempo, calling the very terminology ‘Lusophone Africa’ an instance of
‘cultural recolonization’ that sought to undo the independence gained
in Mozambique and elsewhere in the previous decade (60). More

recently, Cape Verdean poet and theatre director Francisco Fragoso
(2005) flatly stated that ‘“Lusophone Africa” doesn’t exist, or at least
it doesn’t exist as a geographic, political, or historical entity’ (9).14
Ironically, Dr. Fragoso’s article appeared in a magazine whose title seems
to validate the very geopolitical space his words seek to annul: África
Lusófona, which is published and distributed out of Lisbon. This points
to a larger postcolonial conundrum: to ensure that their critiques of
lusofonia receive the widest distribution, African intellectuals often have
to rely on the social and media infrastructures that have been created in
Portugal to concretize the notion of a ‘Lusophone world.’
The CPLP’s economic practices have generated another critique of
lusofonia. While its constitution paints an idyllic picture of trade among
member states achieved through ‘bilateral, trilateral, and multilateral’
cooperative agreements (CPLP 1996), the commerce and investment
the CPLP facilitates in Africa either occurs between Portugal and each
Lusophone African country or between Brazil and individual African
countries. This is because an infrastructure for bilateral or multilateral
trade among various Portuguese-speaking African nations is virtually
nonexistent (Cardoso 2005).15 With the possible exception of Angola,
whose oil wealth and rapidly growing economy have allowed the
country to invest reciprocally in Portugal in recent years (Arenas 2011),
Portugal is the country that stands to gain the most with its bilateral
trade agreements with African countries. The CPLP thus crystallizes how
economic imbalances in the global era often follow the linguistic and
geographical routes that were established during the period of European
colonialism.
Another critique of lusofonia centers on the unequal access of citizens
of Lusophone countries to mobility. The CPLP’s website identifies cir-
culation as a high priority, since it supports other objectives integral to
the organization, such as solidifying ‘fraternal’ links among Portuguese-
speaking nations, resolving social conflicts related to the growth of
immigrant communities in each member state, and promoting human
rights. The measures the CPLP uses to facilitate circulation encompass
help with acquiring visas – including the granting of emergency medi-
cal visas – and reductions in fees for citizens of one CPLP country who
seek residency rights in another.16 However, skeptics of the lusofonia
project detect a discrepancy between what the CPLP promises and what
it practices. Dr. Francisco Fragoso, who lives in Lisbon, decries what he
calls ‘discriminação lusófona’ (Lusophone discrimination) in Portugal’s
capital, where Cape Verdean immigrants work ‘like slaves’ and have
trouble accessing medical services.17 Alfredo Margarido (2000) argues

that despite the CPLP’s best intentions, language cannot function as an
actual passport for crossing borders. Lusophone residents of the south-
ern hemisphere still encounter formidable obstacles when they attempt
to migrate to Europe, while Portuguese citizens can circulate freely
within the parameters of CPLP nations and beyond.
Lusophone theatre festivals provide platforms for African artists to
intervene in the issue of Lusophone circulation. Firstly, festivals are
directly related to bodies in motion; actors need visas and funding in
order to participate in festival events outside their home countries.
Thus, when African theatre troupes cannot raise the necessary funds
for travel – as happened with Mozambican theatre companies several
times before one finally debuted at the Mindelact festival in 2005 – they
call attention to unequal access to circulation in the Lusophone world.
Second, African theatre groups may use festival venues to address the
vexed topic of circulation by staging their own social imaginaries of
immigration. Mindelact 2005 afforded a salient example with Balade, an
original play performed by the Guinea-Bissau theatre troupe Os Fidalgos
(The Nobles).
Balade dramatized the troupe’s experience with Cena Lusófona,
a Portuguese theatre association that promotes intercultural theatre
encounters, called estações (stations),18 among artists in CPLP countries.
In 2003, when Os Fidalgos traveled to Coimbra, Portugal, to par-
ticipate in Cena Lusófona’s sixth theatre estação, a handful of actors
failed to show up at the airport on the designated day of departure
from Portugal. When they returned to Bissau, the other Os Fidalgos
performers devised a piece depicting their frustration with their fellow
actors for overstaying their visitors’ visas, since the breach of trust
with the Portuguese embassy in Bissau negatively affected the troupe’s
chances to obtain other travel visas to perform abroad.19 Balade
depicted the life of squalor that the Guinean actors subsequently
encountered as illegal immigrants in Portugal, where jobs and meals
proved hard to come by. At the end of the piece, one character finally
demanded, ‘How are we going to pay rent this month?’ Her friend
replied, ‘We’re not going to pay rent, we’re going to buy plane tickets!’
An image of the straggling actors beginning their journey back to
Bissau closed the play.
Balade significantly recast the issue of Lusophone circulation. First,
it exposed the flaw in the CPLP’s design for circulation. Africans from
Lusophone nations have slim chances of obtaining visas that grant
them permanent residence in Europe. The CPLP’s policy of granting
temporary visas to such individuals – for professional work or for

medical emergencies, as the CPLP constitution outlines – may only
whet their appetite for staying longer in Portugal. Yet in Os Fidalgos’
theatre piece, the characters’ suffering in Portugal also made circulation
seem much less desirable, since the racism they experienced belied the
sanguine notion of Lusophone ‘fraternity’ the CPLP promotes. In the
play, Guineans are decidedly not welcome in Portugal. The troupe’s
alteration of the ending to the real-life event also called attention to
tensions between national and transnational desires. As of 2005, the
actual Os Fidalgos actors on whom the play was based were still in
Coimbra trying to make ends meet.20 By staging their imaginary return to
Bissau, the other Os Fidalgos actors chose to privilege the Guinean
nation-space over the former metropole.
The birth of international theatre festivals in Lusophone countries in
recent years provides fertile ground for Lusophone African troupes such
as Os Fidalgos to stage new social imaginaries about lusofonia. Yet the
‘rules’ of participation differ in each festival setting. International
theatre festivals in Portugal and Brazil often limit participation to
theatre artists from Lusophone countries. In Portugal, examples include
MITO (Mostra Internacional de Teatro de Oeiras; International Theatre
Showing of Oeiras; founded 2008), which emphasizes Portuguese and
Brazilian cultural exchanges, and the Festival Lusófono de Teatro
Intimista de Matosinhos (Lusophone Festival of Intimate Theatre of
Matosinhos), which cites the dissemination of the Portuguese language
and lusofonia as an objective.21 Brazilian examples include FESTLIP and
a similar festival called FestLuso, which is based in the coastal state of
Piauí. FestLuso even timed its 2010 edition to coincide with an official
meeting of the CPLP in Bahia.22 In São Paulo, the Circuito de Teatro
em Português (Circuit of Portuguese-Language Theatre) has featured
a select group of Portuguese-language troupes each year since 2004
(Diário Liberdade 2011).
Theatre festivals in Lusophone African countries, such as Mindelact
and the Festival d’Agosto, have tended to be less rigid about language.
They have allowed theatre troupes from disparate linguistic backgrounds
to participate but have still privileged Portuguese-language theatre on
their programs. While each of the festivals I analyze in this book has
a different stance toward the lusofonia project, together they highlight
a major cultural paradox: lusofonia may manifest itself in the hospitality
festival hosts shower on visiting artists, but its legacy of economic and
power imbalances is resurrected in the constant financial struggles that
have marked theatre festivals in Cape Verde and Mozambique.
Lusofonia in decline: The Mindelact International

Theatre Festival
Mindelact (the Festival Internacional de Teatro do Mindelo) has become

a major theatre event in West Africa. Held each year in September in
Cape Verde’s northern city of Mindelo, Mindelact features a dozen or so
main-stage shows, one for each night of the festival’s typical run of ten
to fourteen days. The one-show-a-night format ensures robust houses
for productions and enables festival artists to see each other’s work.
This is different from what happens in larger theatre festival venues
that feature concurrent performances. The primary performance venue
is the 220-seat auditorium of the Mindelo Cultural Center (CCM). In
addition, Festival Off, a more informal theatre program for novice
theatre troupes who perform after each night’s main-stage produc-
tion, is held in the CCM’s courtyard. These days around 200 artists
participate each year on the main stage and in Festival Off. Troupes
from Cape Verde, Brazil, and Portugal are staples at the festival, and
there are usually one or two performances from African countries such
as Angola, Guinea-Bissau, Mali, Mozambique, Senegal, and São Tomé,
as well as a couple of others from Europe or Latin America. The small
size of Mindelact makes it a ‘low-density’ festival and thus more con-
ducive to group conviviality (Sauter 2007: 20), which is also nurtured
through theatre workshops, roundtable debates, street performances,
and social events. Mindelact selects productions on a competitive basis
from proposals that are submitted and offers participants housing and
meals. Theatre troupes must raise their own funds to travel to Mindelo,
and many seek sponsorship from their ministries of culture, municipal
governments, or local corporations.
Mindelact began in 1995 as a distinctly local event then expanded
to encompass national, transnational, and global theatre circles. These
identity shifts have required both festival organizers and participants
to undergo constant acts of recasting. Mindelact’s precarious financial
situation demands that it cast itself variously as ‘national,’ ‘Lusophone,’
or ‘global,’ depending on where funding is available. With the exception
of periodic multiyear contracts that it signs with the Cape Verdean
Ministry of Culture, Mindelact must request funds each year from a
variety of sponsors, including corporations, institutes, and government
agencies from around the globe. Ticket sales cover only a fifth of the
festival’s direct costs, which are quite modest compared to international
arts festivals elsewhere in the world (in 2005, it was around four million
Cape Verdean escudos, or US$48,000).23 Here, I trace some of Mindelact’s
fluctuating funding scenarios through its complex negotiations with

the lusofonia project, which it now attempts to hold at arm’s length.
Overall, Cape Verde’s Mindelact festival reveals how seemingly marginal-
ized countries can make profound ideological statements by continually
recasting the identity of its major cultural events. Moreover, many of
the cultural interventions actors make at Mindelact resonate on both
transnational and national levels because of Cape Verde’s complex
Crioulo culture.
Mindelact was founded by a cluster of artists living in the city of
Mindelo, among them Portuguese director João Branco and Cape
Verdean actor Manuel Estevão. In the festival’s first two years, 1995–96,
Mindelact featured only Cape Verdean theatre troupes that came mainly
from three islands: São Vicente (Mindelo’s home island); Santo Antão,
a close neighbor; and the southern island of Santiago, the most populous
island in the archipelago where the capital city of Praia is located. The
festival relied on funding from national and local governing bodies,
including the Ministry of Culture and the municipal government of
São Vicente, and certain members of the private sector, such as Shell Oil
and PROMEX, then the archipelago’s premiere tourism agency. Many of
these entities continued their financial support over the years, and local
hotels, banks, and airlines added their patronage as Mindelact’s prestige
grew. The festival generated the Mindelact Association, which became
a non-profit organization in 1996 and now oversees both the annual
Mindelact festival and Março, Mês do Teatro (March, Theatre Month,
a series of performance events organized on each island). The Mindelact
Association also publishes a journal devoted to Cape Verdean theatre
(Revista Mindelact) and houses a small archive of documents related
to theatre on the islands (CEDIT). The Mindelact Association has thus
become the principal promoter of theatre arts in Cape Verde.
In 1997, Mindelact opened its stage to theatre troupes from outside
Cape Verde. At that time, it relied on established Lusophone infrastruc-
tures. Led by Branco, Mindelact’s organizational team had long waged
a campaign to be included in the program of Cena Lusófona, a theatre
association born in Coimbra in the mid-1990s with start-up funds from
Portugal’s Ministry of Culture. Members of the association have traveled
to various cities in Portuguese-speaking countries to organize ‘stations,’
or meetings, which bring together theatre artists from Lusophone coun-
tries for festivals, co-productions, playwriting workshops, and other
cultural exchanges. In 1995, João Branco stated, ‘We don’t want to miss
the Cena Lusófona train’ (Público 1995).24 In response, Cena Lusófona
named the 1997 Mindelact festival as the site for its third theatre
station.25 This provided the structural and financial support to help

Mindelact internationalize. The 1997 program featured a co-production
of the Cena Lusófona artistic team and a Mindelo theatre group, an
acting workshop by Brazilian television superstar Nelson Xavier, and
the Angolan theatre company Elinga’s historical fantasia Luís Lopes
Sequeira. It thus fulfilled Cena Lusófona’s goal of dynamic Lusophone
intercâmbio (cultural exchange) at its theatre stations.
In the early days of the Mindelact festival, the lusofonia discourse was
woven into Mindelact’s statutes. When Branco and his Cape Verdean
collaborators drafted the charter document in 1996, they referred to
Cape Verde as the ideal nexus for Lusophone cultural exchange because
of the islands’ strategic mid-Atlantic location, nearly equidistant from
‘Lusophone brothers’ in South America, Europe, and on mainland
Africa.26 The notion of fraternity recalled troubling lusotropicalist
credos even as it sought to forge new tracks of circulation among theatre
artists from Angola, Brazil, Cape Verde, Guinea-Bissau, Mozambique,
Portugal, and São Tomé. For the next ten years, Mindelact’s official
statutes included two primary objectives that explicitly announced
a Lusophonist agenda: ‘to present theatre productions by foreign theatre
groups, privileging contact with groups coming from Lusophone
countries’ and ‘to serve as a link between Cape Verdean theatre practi-
tioners and programs promoting theatre exchange among Lusophone
countries.’27 The latter was clearly a play for Cena Lusófona’s support,
which Mindelact received in 1997.
Mindelact’s original statutes thus linked its hopes for international
cultural exchange to the Portuguese language. Because the festival
framed itself as a center of Lusophone artistic exchange, it was well
positioned to receive economic aid from Portugal. Indeed, since 2003,
the festival has received financial support from Cooperação Portuguesa,
a division of Portugal’s Ministry of Foreign Affairs that provides
development support for the five Lusophone African countries and East
Timor. The Mindelo branch of the Instituto Camões lends the festival
its theatre lighting equipment each year. Branches of the Instituto
Camões in other countries, including Guinea-Bissau and Mozambique,
often support Mindelact by financing the travel of troupes from those
countries to Cape Verde for the festival.
Yet Mindelact’s knack for perpetually recasting its identity ensures
that the lusofonia project will never completely absorb it. Since it must
piece together funding from a multitude of sponsors annually, the fes-
tival essentially reinvents itself from year to year. As a result, Mindelact
uses the discourse of Lusophone transnationalism only sporadically
and strategically, mainly during years when there are special funds
available for cultural initiatives that foreground the Lusophone iden-
tity. Mindelact’s courting of Cena Lusófona in its early years provides
one example; another occurred in 2003, the year that UCCLA named
Mindelo the Capital of Lusophone Culture. That year, the Mindelact
Association structured its budget around attracting funds from UCCLA,
justifying its financial requests by emphasizing the unprecedented
number of theatre troupes from other Lusophone nations that were
slated to perform at the festival.28 In recent years, in the absence of spe-
cial financial incentives from Lusophone organizations, Mindelact has
been free to reinvent itself as a truly global theatre festival that does not
restrict itself to Portuguese-language troupes.29 In 2007, for example,
the Mindelact Association’s general assembly met to approve a revision
to its statutes that excised the two objectives that explicitly referred to
other Lusophone countries.30 At the assembly meeting, which I attended
in March 2007, João Branco announced that the Mindelact Association
no longer needed to cite Lusophone-oriented objectives specifically
since it had already achieved them.
Mindelact has therefore regarded Lusophone transnationalism not
as the ultimate destination for cross-cultural encounters, as Cena
Lusófona’s ‘stations’ seem to promote, but as a pit stop on a larger
journey toward global theatre exchange. Its vacillating position on
lusofonia reveals the elasticity of discourses of transnationalism. While
Mindelact may at times cloak itself in lusofonia in order to cash in
on cultural capital, it can also cast that label aside when it is no
longer profitable. Indeed, since the early 2000s, the festival program
has featured an increasing number of Latin American and Spanish
productions (performed without surtitles because the assumption is that
Portuguese-speaking spectators generally understand Spanish) and thea-
tre by French-speaking theatre troupes, who often opt for teatro gestual
(physical theatre), such as mime or dance aesthetics, in order to bypass
the language barrier.31
The Cape Verdean government has adopted a similarly practical stance
toward lusofonia: it uses the discourse mainly when linguistic allegiances
can be used to consolidate its influence on a global or regional scale. In
2002, for example, Cape Verde agreed to be the official host country of the
IILP (Instituto Internacional da Língua Portuguesa; International Institute
of the Portuguese Language), a branch of the CPLP that advocates for
Portuguese as a major mode of communication in cultural, educational,
and scientific circles worldwide. By demonstrating its investment in the
lusofonia project, Cape Verde was able to curry favor with Portugal that
enabled it to broker new alliances that were beneficial to the islands.

This occurred in 2007, when Portugal, as an EU member, negotiated
a special partnership between Cape Verde and the EU that grants the
islands increased security, protection, and diplomatic access to Europe
(Vieira and Ferreira-Pereira 2009). Cape Verde has similarly benefited
from its ties to Brazil, which now eclipses Portugal in its scale of global
influence. In 2010, Cape Verde sought to increase its profile in its
regional community, ECOWAS (the Economic Community of West
African States), by hosting the first summit between Brazil and ECOWAS
(Seabra 2010). In doing so, Cape Verde’s government positioned itself as
cultural translator between its geographical neighbors and its wealthier
linguistic ‘brother’ across the ocean. Like the Mindelact festival, the
Cape Verdean government treats lusofonia not as the defining character-
istic of Cape Verde’s culture but a (sometimes) useful claim to a broader
transnational community that can just as easily be discarded when it
loses its utility.
This approach to lusofonia is pragmatic. A common language can
facilitate global or intercultural connections even though it might
not be the driving force behind an initiative. For Mindelact’s artistic
director João Branco, it is natural that most theatre troupes that
participate in Mindelact are Portuguese-speaking, since this makes
cross-cultural communication easier at festival events. This, he asserts,
is why Mindelact appeals to entities such as Cooperação Portuguesa
and Instituto Camões. Yet Branco maintains that language is not the
festival’s principal concern. He describes the bonds among theatre
artists at Mindelact as a ‘net of affection’ rather than one of language,32
highlighting the camaraderie that forms at intimate festivals like
Mindelact, which provides opportunities for social interaction among
artists at meals and social gatherings.
Even though lusofonia is downplayed as a collective identity at
Mindelact, it still operates on a practical level because Portuguese is
the main language spoken at the festival. And this is exactly where
new social imaginaries may step in. For example, many of the acting
workshops are conducted by visiting professional theatre companies
from Brazil or Portugal, since the actors from Lusophone African
countries who participate are nearly all amateur. Thus, the language of
theatre pedagogy at Mindelact is almost wholly Portuguese. Yet the
workshops offer fertile moments when African actors can make decisive
contributions in their local languages. For instance, at Mindelact 2005,
I attended a workshop on corporeal expression led by the Brazilian
company Teatro Livre (Free Theatre) at which two female instructors
asked us to introduce ourselves using both movement and voice.

Almost everyone (including me) did so in Portuguese, even though the
vast majority of participants were Cape Verdean and thus spoke Crioulo
as a first language. However, one young actress from the theatre troupe
OTACA, Nilda Vaz, elected to do hers in badiu fundu (deep badiu), the
form of Cape Verdean Crioulo spoken in her hometown of Assomada
on Santiago Island. Since her movement consisted of pulling plants out
of the ground, her introduction was a self-conscious performance of
linguistic difference and rural Santiago life, a stark contrast to the
cosmopolitan self-presentations by the Brazilian teachers, who spoke
Portuguese and referred to their theatre training in the methods of
Eugénio Barba. Naz’s performance thus became a social imaginary that
demonstrated how locality may seep into festival contexts and interrupt
the Lusophone framework.
Such incidents also indicate how language enables Cape Verdean
theatre artists to recast their nation at the Mindelact festival. As Eunice
Ferreira (2005) points out, the decision to perform in Portuguese or
Crioulo is important for performers invested in staking claims to national
identity at Mindelact. While Portuguese is the sole official language
on the islands and is used widely in schools, workplaces, government
forums, and the media, Crioulo is spoken almost exclusively in homes,
on the streets, and in social settings. Cape Verdean linguist Dulce Almada
Duarte (2003) describes Cape Verde’s linguistic context as ‘diglossic,’
meaning that two variants of a language operate in a society but are used
by speakers for different social situations. The use of language in Cape
Verde epitomizes diglossia since an imperial tongue coexists with a Creole
version of that language. In diglossic contexts, one language is often
stigmatized, as in Cape Verde, where Crioulo is considered less formal
or ‘lower’ than Portuguese (Veiga 2004). This is the result of specific
historical circumstances: Crioulo emerged as a lower-class trade language
in the sixteenth century,33 when enslaved West Africans arriving on the
islands fused Portuguese words with syntaxes from their own languages,
forging a common tongue that Portuguese traders also adopted.34 The
disparagement of Crioulo was exacerbated during the solidification of the
colonial education system in the nineteenth century, when Portuguese
became the official language of instruction (as it still is) (Duarte 2003).
Yet Crioulo has been reappropriated as a vibrant symbol of Cape Verdean
nationhood in the post-independence years. Its use by Cape Verdeans at
Mindelact can thus be a potent form of resistance to language hierarchies
that are relics of earlier eras. Cape Verdean actors who perform in Crioulo,
whether in a workshop setting or in a production, refuse to translate
their work for foreign attendees at Mindelact, most of whom do not

understand that language. Crioulo performances at Mindelact can thus
be read as postcolonial statements that reject the hegemony of dominant
European tongues.
Still, in Cape Verde, choosing a theatrical language is more complex
than confronting a Portuguese or Crioulo binary. Since there are
different – yet mutually intelligible – variants of Crioulo spoken on each
of the archipelago’s islands, a theatre troupe’s use of a particular Crioulo
variant may speak volumes about the unique social history of the island
where they live. For example, Crioulo from São Vicente Island contains
numerous loan words from English and French that are holdovers from
Mindelo’s history as a port city, while badiu fundu from Santiago Island
features more grammar and vocabulary from West African tongues,
since Santiago was historically the point of entry for enslaved Africans.
Language is thus an indicator of the intricate negotiations that have
long informed Cape Verde’s creolized culture. This drama unfolds
onstage at Mindelact each time a theatre troupe opts to perform in
Crioulo (Ferreira 2009).
At the Mindelact festival, language and other cultural signifiers may
simultaneously represent Lusophone transnationalism and creolized
national identity in Cape Verde. Both historically and in contemporary
discourses, the Cape Verdean nation is imagined as occupying a space
somewhere in between Europe and Africa. Theatre productions on
the islands actively participate in the construction of Cape Verde’s
in-between identity, which is constituted in part by the fact that some
islands and populations associate more with Africa and others associate
more with Europe. Santiago Island, in the south, is often considered
the most ‘African’ of the islands, as it was the entry point for newly
arrived African slaves. True to this historical reputation, Santiago
theatre troupes often use Mindelact’s stage to debut original plays about
Cape Verde’s history of slavery and land appropriation. In contrast, the
northern island of São Vicente, where Mindelo is located, is popularly
regarded as the most ‘European’ because of the intensive presence of
Europeans at the height of the port era. Shakespeare adaptations, which
are performed at Mindelact exclusively by Mindelo theatre groups,
maintain Mindelo’s close association with Europe.
Mindelact’s slate of Cape Verdean theatre productions thus helps
to sediment the differing social taxonomies of the islands. These
productions illustrate how Crioulo identities are sustained through
a constant reiteration of regional differences. The statements of Cape
Verdean artists about these production patterns are revealing. Santiago
Island theatre directors criticize the preference of Mindelense troupes

for adaptations, remarking that Shakespeare’s plays have nothing to
do with a Cape Verdean reality despite the best efforts of Mindelo
theatre directors to creolize them.35 In turn, many Mindelo performers
disparage Santiago theatre, saying, ‘We’re tired of plays about colonial-
ism. We want to see new themes from Santiago groups.’36 Curiously, to
many Mindelo artists, 400-year-old Shakespeare plays present newer
themes than the nation’s 40-year-old independence movement because
Shakespeare is newer to Cape Verdean theatre.
Such incidents illustrate how an international theatre festival venue
can host healthy ongoing cultural debates about transnationalism
and a fiercely contested national identity. The ambivalent stance of
the Mindelact festival toward lusofonia provides a striking contrast to
the almost suspicious attitude toward the lusofonia project that was in
evidence at the Festival d’Agosto.
Contesting Lusofonia: The Festival d’Agosto
It was one of those magical nights during a summer research trip to

Maputo in 2010. I sat at a card table in the back room of a dusky bar on
the outskirts of the city, chatting in Portuguese with the 20-something-
year-old actors from the amateur theatre troupe, Luarte, as we clutched
our glasses of 2M-MacMahon, Mozambique’s local beer (which I always
joked was named after me). We had just returned from a rehearsal for
Luarte’s upcoming show, which was being guest-directed by Dadivo
José, an amateur playwright and a familiar figure in the local theatre
scene. When talk turned to the glory days of Mozambican theatre a dec-
ade earlier, the artists began to wax nostalgic for festivals gone by. ‘The
best festival we ever had was the Festival d’Agosto,’ Dadivo recalled.
The young manager of Luarte, Dinis Chembene, chimed in with gusto:
‘I’ve always said: one day that festival is going to come back, like
a phoenix rising from its ashes.’ With eyes lit up, the other actors
nodded in agreement.
Mozambican artists often assigned a quasi-mythical status to the
Festival d’Agosto when they spoke with me about it during my two
summer trips to Maputo. Actress Zaina Rajás called it a ‘festival that
turned Maputo into an art capital,’ since theatre productions took
place in Maputo’s major performance venues and joined forces with art
exhibits, book fairs, and rollicking music concerts at the large Franco-
Moçambicano auditorium in the city center.37 Each year on the opening
day, festival organizers and participating artists took to the streets in
costume, marching through Maputo’s major arteries and summoning

onlookers to join in the festivities. Theatre organizer Joaquim Matavele
(2009) called the Festival d’Agosto a ‘wake-up call for Mozambican
theatre,’ since it prompted once-dormant theatre companies to revive
and prepare new shows and gave young troupes an international venue
to aspire to.
The brief history of the Festival d’Agosto (it lasted from 1999 to
2005) offers a pointed commentary on transnationalism, since it
illustrates Mozambique’s rogue status in the Lusophone transnation.
While Portuguese-language productions from Mozambique, Brazil,
Portugal, and Cape Verde often appeared on the stages of the festival
and a Portuguese cultural association, ACERT-Trigo Limpo, was a major
collaborator during the festival’s peak years (2002–3), the Festival d’Agosto
never explicitly embraced lusofonia in its festival rhetoric. This makes
it distinctly different from the Mindelact festival and calls attention
to the wide disparity that exists among the African countries that are
often haphazardly lumped together as PALOPs (Países Africanos de
Língua Oficial Portuguesa; African Countries with Portuguese as an
Official Language). Unlike Cape Verde, Mozambique shares borders,
indigenous languages, and migrant populations with other African
countries: Tanzania, Malawi, Zimbabwe, South Africa, and Swaziland.
Many foreign troupes that performed on the stages of the Festival
d’Agosto were from neighboring countries, which are almost all
Anglophone. The festival thus showcased English-language productions
alongside Lusophone ones.
The Festival d’Agosto provides evidence about how international
theatre festivals may reflect larger trends in world politics. Since the
end of its debilitating civil war in 1992, the nation of Mozambique has
carefully sought to balance its loyalties to regional and linguistic affilia-
tions. For both the Festival d’Agosto and the Mozambican government,
this has often meant prioritizing another transnational alliance, the
Southern African Development Community (SADC), over a Lusophone
one. The SADC is a regional alliance that promotes economic coopera-
tion and security among its fifteen member states. It is just one of many
African alliances that have promoted economic regionalism in order to
capitalize on the spirit of pan-African solidarity and self-reliance that
arose in the post-independence era. From its inception, the SADC has
striven to lessen trade obstacles among its member states. This trade
liberalization path has primarily benefited the economic giant of the
region, South Africa. Still, South Africa’s exponentially increased invest-
ments in Mozambique since the formation of the SADC has brought
financial gains to the country, even though it has created few local
jobs there (Pallotti 2004). Further, southern Africa’s often-tempestuous
political climate has made intergovernmental security efforts impera-
tive for the region, while cooperative initiatives to develop tourism
make good sense for SADC countries with faltering economies (Ghimire
2001). Thus, the geopolitical value of the SADC to Mozambique in
recent decades has powerfully overshadowed lusotropicalism as the
basis for the country’s transnational leanings. Mozambican govern-
ments and cultural leaders have therefore adopted measured caution
toward the lusofonia project. Their approach to the CPLP and linguistic
‘brotherhood’ reveals the pitfalls of lusofonia as a diplomatic tool and
indicates how festivals may help articulate a nation’s ideological posi-
tions vis-à-vis global affiliations.
Mozambique’s role as a rebel in the Lusophone transnation first mani-
fested itself in 1995. That year, Mozambique joined the Commonwealth
despite the fact that it was not English-speaking and was not connected
by constitution to any other member state of the Commonwealth.
The Commonwealth had long recognized Mozambique as an ally
against the apartheid regime in South Africa. It had been supplying
Mozambique with the economic and technical aid it needed during
and after the country’s civil war, which from 1977 to 1992 pitted the
nation’s liberation party, FRELIMO, against RENAMO, a rival movement
that was partially funded by the apartheid government of South Africa.38
After the fall of apartheid, Mozambique was granted formal entrance
to the Commonwealth largely because its Anglophone neighbors had
pled its case; Nelson Mandela personally advocated for Mozambique’s
membership at the 1995 Auckland meeting (Velde-Ashworth 2005).
Mozambique has enjoyed many benefits from this alliance, includ-
ing Commonwealth accords that address such issues as sugar pricing
policies, construction, debt management, and official observation of
Mozambique’s elections.39 Mozambique’s unorthodox move alarmed
Portugal, which, as Malyn Newitt (2002) writes, ‘saw one of the eight
ships in the worldwide Lusophone fleet sailing away to join the
Anglophones’ (234). Newitt contends that Mozambique’s joining of the
Commonwealth is what prompted Portugal to speed up the formation
of the CPLP, which happened just one year later, in 1996.
Since then, the Mozambican government has taken other decisive
actions to limit the CPLP’s power, even though it is a member of that
organization. For example, in August 2002, heads of state from all
Lusophone countries met in Brazil’s capital, Brasília, to discuss the
issue of universal citizenship status. Under the proposed protocol, all
nationals of CPLP countries would be considered citizens of the larger

CPLP body and would be accorded voting, education, and private
property rights and equal taxation treatment if they lived in a CPLP
country other than the nation of their birth. When it came time to vote,
the president of Mozambique, Joaquim Chissano, was the lone dissent-
ing voice on a proposal that was viewed favorably by most other CPLP
governments. Angola eventually joined Mozambique in opposing the
protocol, placing the question of CPLP citizenship at an impasse that
continues to this day (Leitão n.d.). One of the Chissano government’s
main objections was that Mozambique’s membership in the CPLP was
secondary to its regional affiliation with the SADC, so it could not make
any important decisions about CPLP citizenship without first ascertain-
ing if that move would compromise any of Mozambique’s agreements
with the SADC (Macaringue 2002a). Many editorials in the Mozambican
press lauded Chissano’s move. Pointing out the political and economic
threats the protocol posed to African nations, since CPLP giants Portugal
and Brazil stood to benefit most from it, the editorials voice the general
discomfort of Mozambicans with the lusofonia project.40 Significantly,
this CPLP meeting occurred just three weeks before the start of the 2002
Festival d’Agosto, a cultural event that rejected strict Lusophone borders
and strengthened ties with Anglophone neighbors. In both scenarios,
Mozambique exercised unusual power in a transnational setting, taking
actions that changed the dynamics of lusofonia in both the artistic and
the political realm.
During the years I traveled the Lusophone festival circuit, I watched
Mozambican theatre artists being questioned about their country’s
attitude toward lusofonia. Most often, such questions carried a note
of suspicion about Mozambique’s linguistic loyalties. For example, at
a panel on Lusophone playwriting at FESTLIP 2010 in Rio de Janeiro,
the Brazilian moderator asked Mozambican actress Cândida Bila
why Mozambique had maintained a distance from the Lusophone
community. Bila responded that Mozambique’s actions have been less
a rejection of the Lusophone community than a political move to
mitigate the country’s outlier status among the Anglophone countries
that surround it. It is telling, however, that accusations of linguistic
betrayal are only attached to an African country in the CPLP when
Portugal and Brazil have also joined other regional and transnational
communities besides the CPLP; Portugal is a member of the EU and
Brazil is a member of UNASUR (Union of South American Nations)
respectively (see Thomaz 2002).41 The evidence suggests, then, that in
the Lusophone world, ‘betrayal’ translates to choices African countries
make that do not support the influence of Portugal and Brazil over
their economy and political life. When charges of betrayal arise at
Lusophone theatre festivals, they reveal how economic imperialism
is often writ large in the cultural domain, a point that Amílcar Cabral
stressed about the colonial era that takes on new meaning in postcolo-
nial times (1979 [1975]).
It is surely not a coincidence that the year Mozambique entered the
Commonwealth, 1995, was the same year that Cena Lusófona chose
Maputo as the site of its first official theatre ‘station.’ This cultural
event appeared to be an attempt by Portuguese theatre artists (and
Portugal itself) to restore Mozambique’s fading links to the Lusophone
world and resituate the country within the domain of lusofonia. At the
behest of Portugal’s Ministry of Culture, which funded Cena Lusófona
in its early years, artistic director António Augusto Barros organized
a month-long festival in Maputo that included 20 performances from
over a dozen theatre companies from Angola, Mozambique, Portugal,
and São Tomé and two co-productions staged by a mix of Portuguese
and Mozambican artists. The seminars and workshops were capped off
by a two-day forum that invited theatre practitioners, cultural attachés
from Portuguese embassies in Lusophone countries, representatives of
various institutes and foundations, journalists, and scholars to debate
the future of Lusophone intercâmbio in the realm of theatre.42
Yet according to accounts I heard during my fieldwork in Mozambique
nearly fifteen years later, Cena Lusófona’s first theatre ‘station’ was
not a happy event. It exposed the profound power imbalances that
may surface in even the best-intentioned intercultural gatherings.
Gilberto Mendes, the director of Gungu, the most commercially
successful theatre company in Maputo, said that although the festival
carried the promise of equitable cultural dialogues, Cena Lusófona’s
team came to Maputo expressly to teach, which disappointed the
Mozambican performers, who craved mutual learning.43 Manuela
Soeiro, the artistic director of Mutumbela Gogo, another high-profile
theatre company in Maputo, recalls that the Portuguese organizers
made unrealistic demands on them, such as asking them to provide
the festival’s technical equipment and staff and ensure full houses for
performances. Both Mendes and Soeiro described the resulting festival
as ‘neocolonial.’44 David Abílio, then director of the National Song and
Dance Company of Mozambique,45 critiqued Cena Lusófona for not
involving Mozambicans in organizing the festival, which made it dif-
ficult for local troupes to feel invested in it. ‘When things are run from
the outside in, it’s not good for our self-esteem,’ Abílio remarked.46
It is thus no surprise that when the Festival d’Agosto was formed in

Maputo four years later, it took its cue about cultural connections not
from the CPLP but from Mozambique’s relations with other southern
African countries. In 1999, the Maputo-based theatre company M’Bêu
was elected to host a freshly conceived annual theatre event called
the International Anti-Corruption Theatre Movement (IATM), which
had first manifested as a theatre festival in Kampala, Uganda, in 1998.
Spearheaded by a Danish NGO called MS (now MS ActionAid Denmark),
the IATM united theatre groups from Angola, Burundi, Botswana, Kenya,
Lesotho, Mozambique, Namibia, South Africa, Tanzania, Uganda,
Zambia, and Zimbabwe. At the IATM festivals, African theatre artists
staged plays that critiqued corruption among government officials and
local police, using the didactic approach to the arts that is common to
Theatre for Development groups. While the IATM is not officially under
the umbrella of the SADC, the IATM festival in Mozambique, which
was also the first Festival d’Agosto, reflected the broader concerns of
the SADC about partnership and security among adjoining countries in
southern Africa. The festival thus became an artistic manifestation of
Mozambique’s geopolitical leanings toward its Anglophone neighbors.
There were also financial benefits to working with the IATM on the
festival. M’Bêu received around $210,000 to organize the 1999 festival,
an astonishing amount compared to the shoestring budgets of most
African theatre festivals.47 This windfall for Mozambique’s theatre
community was part of a larger trend of Nordic countries investing
heavily in Mozambique in the post-civil war era; most of the funds
came from MS-Denmark and the Norwegian Embassy in Maputo. M’Bêu
actress Isabel Jorge told me that cultural organizers in Mozambique
often turn to Nordic institutes first for their projects; Lusophone
associations such as the Instituto Camões are only a secondary source.48
This is further evidence of the Mozambican artistic community’s
skepticism toward the lusofonia project, especially given the fact that
funding from the former metropole is limited.
When the Festival d’Agosto resurfaced in August 2002, it exempli-
fied the unique shape transnationalism may take in Africa. Festival
organizers blended the Lusophone connections of Mozambique
with the country’s geographic links to SADC countries, illustrat-
ing how African artists may cultivate a ‘cultural transversalism’ that
productively engages with more dominant countries (in this case,
Portugal as a comparatively richer Western nation) while nurturing
shared cultural expressions (such as ethnic identities and indigenous
languages) with adjacent African countries (Lionnet and Shih 2005:
8). During the festival’s two-year hiatus, the organizers drifted away
from IATM, mainly because that movement had already lost momen-
tum.49 However, they decided to revive the Festival d’Agosto because
of its popularity among performers and the theatre-going public in
Mozambique. Organizers retained the festival’s regional focus by
including troupes from Lesotho, Zambia, and Zimbabwe on its ten-day
program, but they also reached beyond the African continent to collab-
orate with Trigo Limpo–ACERT,50 a Portuguese theatre association that
had enjoyed a long relationship with M’Bêu’s parent theatre company,
Mutumbela Gogo. Trigo Limpo enthusiastically offered to coordinate
the participation of troupes from Europe and South America (Spain,
Portugal, Belgium, Croatia, and Brazil), while M’Bêu coordinated the
African groups.51
M’Bêu’s solicitation of help from a Portuguese theatre association did
not signal an about-face toward lusofonia, mainly because Trigo Limpo’s
stance on interculturalism is very different from that of Cena Lusófona.
Trigo Limpo has never had an official connection with the Portuguese
government, which has a vested interested in cultural projects that
support lusofonia. Trigo Limpo collaborates with African theatre troupes
from both Lusophone and non-Lusophone countries and seeks its
funding from the municipal government of Tondela, the Portuguese
town in which it is based, and from local businesses.52 Thus, the theatre
association was able to finance major elements of the Festival d’Agosto in
2002 and 2003, including glossy programs and posters and lighting and
sound equipment, much of which it donated to Mozambican theatres
after the festival ended.53 José Rui Martins, the artistic director of Trigo
Limpo, stated at the Festival d’Agosto 2002 that the intention behind
this aid was less ideological than previous intercultural endeavors in
Mozambique were: ‘We believe that this festival is a gigantic step toward
European cultures losing their paternalist attitude toward African
culture. We want to learn and exchange knowledges [with the artists
here]’ (quoted in Chaúque 2002).54
The Mozambican theatre artists I interviewed spoke warmly of Trigo
Limpo’s involvement with the Festival d’Agosto, mainly because it was
Mozambicans – Evaristo Abreu and his associates from M’Bêu – who ini-
tiated the festival and orchestrated its programming. Amateur troupes
in Maputo won opportunities to team up with professional Spanish
theatre companies and Mozambican spectators were delighted with
the physical theatre of the Trottino Clowns from France and a cappella
concerts by Bernard Massuir of Belgium. Both have also performed at
the Mindelact International Theatre Festival.
The global perspective of the Festival d’Agosto was advantageous

on many levels. The broad palette of theatre aesthetics from around
the world ensured that novice Mozambican actors could witness
a variety of performance styles beyond the text-heavy productions that
often emanate from Portugal and Brazil.55 As Manuela Soeiro pointed
out, such diverse theatrical registers are often lacking in festivals that
limit themselves to one language, since strictly Lusophone festivals
often feature the same theatre troupes from CPLP countries year after
year.56 The more open approach of the Festival d’Agosto facilitated rich
intercultural exchanges, especially since the festival also focused on
visual art and music. In addition to scheduled concerts by Mozambican,
Portuguese, and Galician bands, impromptu music celebrations often
erupted in the bar above Teatro Avenida, one of the main performance
venues, which fostered camaraderie among festival participants.57
An array of workshops on acting, directing, playwriting, stage music,
African dance, and Theatre of the Oppressed methods also drew par-
ticipants together. As both Mozambican and European artists led these
workshops, these events rejected the colonial hierarchy of ‘the West
teaches the Rest.’ By all accounts, the Festival d’Agosto lived up to the
play on words in its title (while it literally means the ‘August festival,’
since that is the month when it occurred, ‘dá gosto’ is also a Portuguese
expression meaning ‘it gives pleasure’).
After Trigo Limpo ceased its official collaboration in 2003, however,
the festival quickly ran out of steam. While the 2004 edition contin-
ued its combination of international productions from Mozambique,
Zambia, South Africa, Canada, France, and the UK, a sharp drop in
attendance signaled the public’s wavering support. A headline run by
Mozambique’s major newspaper, Notícias, read: ‘A Party with Empty
Stages: The Public Skips Out on the Festival d’Agosto, Turning M’Bêu
into a Disaster’ (Filipe 2004). Despite the high quality of the festival’s
offerings, houses were nearly empty at most of the 60 productions on
the program. Spectators quoted in the newspaper article suggested that
scheduling was the key issue. Since many shows ran on weeknights and
began either at seven or nine in the evening, several people mentioned
that they oftentimes opted to skip the theatre in favor of an early bed-
time because of work the next day.58 Festival organizer Evaristo Abreu,
who was also quoted in the article, dismissed these criticisms out of
hand. He remarked that in previous years, the public had expressed
the concern that shows were scheduled too early, at 6 p.m. when most
people were just leaving work. For the 2004 edition, the organizers had
adjusted the start times accordingly but people still complained. ‘I just
don’t know what people want,’ Abreu declared in frustration (quoted

in Filipe 2004).59
The price of tickets may have also affected festival attendance. They
generally ran around 100–150 meticais (US$3–5) per show. While this
is the standard cost of admission for theatre performed in any formal
venue in Maputo, it is still a substantial amount since the average
annual income was around $420 in the early 2000s.60 In a newspaper
article that ran at the conclusion of the previous year’s Festival d’Agosto,
an actress from Trigo Limpo, Ilda Teixeira, was cited as saying that festi-
val organizers had had to decrease ticket prices in 2003 because only the
local elite had been able to afford the cost of the tickets in 2002 (Jamisse
2003). When I interviewed M’Bêu actress Isabel Jorge in 2009, she told
me that she did not believe ticket prices had been unreasonable. All
festival participants could attend any performance on the program for
free, and students received half off all tickets. She further explained that
in 1999, the very first year of the Festival d’Agosto, ticket prices were
roughly the ‘cost of a banana.’ After that, M’Bêu chose to raise prices
slightly in order to valorize the performances showcased (Jorge 2009).
My interviewees in Maputo had varying theories about why the
festival did not succeed over the long term. Alvim Cossa, who heads
GTO, the Theatre of the Oppressed company of Maputo, remarked
that spreading the theatre program out over six performance venues
in Maputo divided an already small theatre-going population.61 Actor
and theatre professor Rogério Manjate cited the organizers’ hubris in
making the festival international from the start. Since the Maputo
public had had little exposure to foreign theatre troupes, he explained,
it would have been better to start with a more modest program and
gradually expand as spectators adjusted to the new event. Manjate
(2010) described the Festival d’Agosto’s vision as ‘megalomaniac,’ too
grandiose for its own resources.62 Like Mindelact, the Festival d’Agosto
had to piece together sponsorship each year from a variety of sources,
including corporations (local hotels, Mozambique’s airlines, and
Coca-Cola), the Ministry of Culture, Lusophone entities (Cooperação
Portuguesa and the Instituto Camões), and associations in other par-
ticipating countries (Cooperación Española, the British Council, and
the Canada Council for the Arts, for example). Also like Mindelact, the
Festival d’Agosto provided housing and meals for all of its participating
guests, a huge undertaking given the large number of artists who came
to Maputo each year for the festival.
What options do festival organizers have in Africa, given continent-
wide dilemmas of scarce finances, transportation difficulties, and
local populations that are unaccustomed to (or financially unable to

attend) recreational events such as theatre? In the midst of the Festival
d’Agosto’s decline, Abreu called upon the Mozambican government to
increase its funding of the cultural initiatives to which it pays lip ser-
vice (Filipe 2004). Yet given Mozambique’s strained economy, increased
government assistance may be improbable. This poses a problem for
ambitious African arts festivals such as the Festival d’Agosto, which
reportedly had a budget of US$400,000 in 2003, a figure it reduced to
$12,000 by forging partnerships with private institutes and securing
discounts from hotels and airlines (Manjate 2003). Many international
theatre festivals in Africa find themselves at the mercy of foreign and
private donors, some of which, according to Manuela Soeiro, did not
fulfill their financial promises to the Festival d’Agosto’s organizers,
leaving them in the lurch in 2004 and 2005, the festival’s final years.63
Trigo Limpo–ACERT’s withdrawal from the Festival d’Agosto after
2003 spelled the beginning of the end. ACERT could at least guarantee
support drawn from its European connections, but support from those
connections ended after the Portuguese association decided it could
no longer shoulder the burden of co-coordinating the festival.64 Since
Portugal is still a source of support for festivals in Lusophone African
countries, is resistance to the lusofonia label ultimately detrimental to
a festival’s operations? Are festival organizers like Abreu then forced to
uphold a linguistic ideology promoted by the former metropole or suf-
fer the consequences of eschewing it?
In Mozambique, the answer to this question may lie somewhere in
the as-yet-unknown future of the festival. Evaristo Abreu has told me
that he would like to start the festival again in Maputo. Interestingly,
his inspiration came from M’Bêu’s participation in FESTLIP 2009 in
Rio de Janeiro. After witnessing FESTLIP’s access to hotels and public-
ity (much of it then funded by the Brazilian Ministry of Culture), and
comparably lavish conditions for theatre venues, Abreu began speaking
with FESTLIP’s artistic director, Tânia Pires, about a possible partnership
with a Maputo festival. If the Festival d’Agosto does rise from the ashes
like a phoenix, as Dinis Chembene predicted, chances are it will rely
on funding from Brazil, a new source of support for Lusophone artistic
endeavors.
As both a former Portuguese colony and contemporary global
economic power, Brazil represents an intriguing player on the con-
temporary African cultural scene. In some sense, the aid it cur-
rently provides to Lusophone African countries is less bogged down
with the weight of imperialism than that supplied by Portugal, as
the former European colonial power. The briefest glance at Brazil’s

historical relationship to Africa, however, tells a more complex story.
Long before Brazilian independence from Portugal in 1822, Brazilian
merchants wielded considerably more control over the transatlantic
trade routes that transported enslaved Africans from Angola to Rio de
Janeiro (Newitt 2010). Brazil received the vast majority of the enslaved
Africans arriving in the Americas during the slavery era in Brazil; most
of these enslaved peoples came from the ancient Kongo kingdom,
which encompasses present-day Angola, but many also arrived from
West Africa (through the Cape Verde Islands) and, starting in the early
1800s, Mozambique (Arenas 2011). Thus, Brazil’s connection to former
Portuguese colonies in Africa has deep historical roots, many of which
are traumatic in nature. During the slavery era in Brazil, Afro-descended
people suffered violence at the hands of White masters, as depicted in
Gilberto Freyre’s controversial writing on lusotropicalism. Moreover,
the intense controversy over affirmative action in Brazil in recent years
only demonstrates the extent to which the country has absorbed one
of the legacies of lusotropicalism, the myth of racial democracy, which
problematically asserts that there is no racism in Brazil; in actuality, the
disenfranchisement of people of color there is hardly a contestable fact
(Htun 2004).
Overall, Brazil’s newfound status as funder of Africa-related cultural
activities is overshadowed by a checkered history of relations with both
Africa itself and descendants of Africans in Brazil. The FESTLIP thea-
tre festival in Brazil attempts to serve as a corrective to that troubling
history.
Lusofonia revived: The FESTLIP theatre festival
The opening ceremony for Brazil’s second annual FESTLIP (Festival

de Teatro da Língua Portuguesa) in July 2009 was a gala event. Held
in a lavish auditorium in downtown Rio de Janeiro, it drew festival
participants, local journalists, politicians, cultural figures, and even
the occasional telenovela star, most of whom were dressed in ritzy
cocktail dresses and finely pressed suits. As the lights dimmed in the
theatre space, Tânia Pires, FESTLIP’s artistic director and head of TALU
Produções, the production company that organizes the festival, took
the podium. Pires spoke ardently of the festival’s mission to unite art-
ists in the global Portuguese-speaking family by showcasing theatre
exclusively from Lusophone countries. She singled out Africa that year,
warmly welcoming a troupe from Guinea-Bissau, a country that was
participating in the festival for the first time, and expressing a fervent
desire that São Tomé would participate the following year (it did).
Later that evening, Marcelo Dantas, a representative from the Ministry
of Culture, declared that it was Brazil’s ‘vocation’ to take charge of a
global Lusophone alliance, since Brazil was demographically connected
to Africa through its large Afro-descended population and linguistically
linked to Portugal through its colonial heritage. ‘When I worked in
the CPLP, we often didn’t have the money to support these kinds of
projects,’ Dantas said. But Brazil’s many government agencies could all
contribute aid to FESTLIP. Indeed, the glamor of the opening ceremony
sent a clear message: in terms of financing the cultural sphere of lusofo-
nia, Brazil now overshadowed the CPLP.
Given Brazil’s earlier hesitation about the CPLP, Dantas’s use of
the word ‘vocation’ at FESTLIP 2009 was striking. Since 1983, the
Portuguese government had been attempting to organize biannual gather-
ings of heads of state of Lusophone countries in the hope of starting
a ‘tri-continental dialogue.’ However, Portugal had been proceeding
carefully because newly liberated African nations were reluctant to ally
with a former colonizer less than a decade after independence. Brazil’s
participation was thus a key to the success of the summits, yet the
country was conspicuously absent in the planning stages of these events.
Even after the CPLP officially formed in 1996, the Brazilian minister of
foreign affairs, Luis Filipe Lampreia, wasted little time in disparaging it
and making it clear that it was low on Brazil’s list of diplomatic priorities
(Santos 2003).
Brazil’s diplomatic ties to Portugal and African countries in the second
half of the twentieth century form part of a complex story characterized
by ever-shifting positions. In the early 1960s, Brazil’s leftist President
João Goulart openly referred to a ‘natural vocation toward Africa’ in
a move that was calculated to expand the country’s economic ties with
wealthy countries such as Nigeria and South Africa (Arenas 2011: 32).
This is part of a larger historical pattern in which Brazil has used the
rhetoric of celebrating Africa within its borders – the demographic and
cultural imprint left by roughly 4 million arrivals from Africa during
the transatlantic slave trade and their descendants in Brazil (Andrews
1997) – in order to curry favor with African governments and expand
Brazilian industries on the African continent. Yet Brazil’s engagement
with Lusophone African countries has often been tied up with its own
relationship to Portugal. In the early 1970s, for example, the Brazilian
government, which was by then a right-wing dictatorship, and its top
oil company, Petrobras, were in negotiations with Portugal to access
Angolan oil through the metropole in exchange for openly supporting

Portuguese colonialism in Africa. While this move was partly due to
strong diplomatic ties between Brazil and Portugal since they signed
a Treaty of Friendship in the 1950s, it was swiftly halted by Brazil’s foreign
minister, Mario Gibson Barboza, who insisted it would be disastrous for
Brazil’s relationships with all African countries. At the time of the fall of
the dictatorship in Portugal in 1974, Barboza had already persuaded the
Brazilian government to engage with African countries on its own terms
and begin severing its close ties to Portugal (Dávila 2010).
Today’s CPLP thus raises an age-old question: Is Portugal truly Brazil’s
best route to Africa? Lampreia coolly dismissed the CPLP in 1996,
arguing that Brazil did not need a Portuguese-driven organization to
further its interests in Africa (Santos 2003). However, Brazilian foreign
policy in the new millennium suggests a slight shift in the way Brazil is
playing the game. Under the leftist presidency of Luis Inácio ‘Lula’ da
Silva (2003–10), Brazil’s government used the rhetoric of historical and
racial links with Africa to ease into trade and investment negotiations
with Angola, Mozambique, Nigeria, Ghana, and South Africa, among
other countries. Lula visited a record 25 African countries, and dur-
ing his presidency the number of Brazilian embassies on the African
continent doubled (Goforth 2010). While diplomatic gestures did not
always have commensurate impact in the economic realm, Lula always
traveled to Africa with representatives from Brazil’s major corporations
and promoted them while he was there. Exports to Africa increased
exponentially during Lula’s presidency, and the Brazilian Development
Bank (BNDES) lent money to construction projects executed by
Brazilian corporations in Africa (Barboso et al. 2009). While some of
these projects were certainly beneficial to Africa,65 one can presume
that Brazil, as the dominant partner, benefited more. Yet Lula’s admin-
istration also used its connections with other CPLP member states to
its financial advantage. For example, linguistic ties could have been
the ideological basis for Brazil’s strategic placement of an embassy in
São Tomé in 2003, but rumors of uncovered oil reserves on the island
nation were more likely the motivator. Thus, the Lula government’s
increased attention to the CPLP became firmly intertwined with its
Africa-centered ambitions (Barboso et al. 2009). This signaled that
Brazil was ready to play a mediating role in Lusophone transnational
relationships (Arenas 2011).
Arguably, Brazil’s change in attitude toward the CPLP has breathed
new life into the once-faltering organization. By the late 1990s, the
CPLP’s political impotence and economic frailty had become infamous.
It was unable to provide aid even when member states had the direst
needs, such as during Mozambique’s debilitating floods of 1999. In
2000, former Portuguese president Mário Soares called the CPLP a disas-
ter and blamed Portugal for its lack of vision and poor implementation
(Santos 2003). Even today, the CPLP operates on the modest budget of
2 million euros per year, a sum compiled from contributions made from
each member state, with Brazil and Portugal contributing the majority
(Bloomfield 2012). Yet Brazil’s robust economy – it was the eighth larg-
est in the world in 2010 (Goforth 2010) – and its revived interest in
the CPLP has the potential to recast lusofonia as profitable, especially
for cultural initiatives. As Tânia Pires explained to me during our
interview in 2010, the cabinet of international relations within the
Ministry of Culture had in recent years adopted a clear focus on projects
that promoted the Portuguese language and intercultural connections
with CPLP countries, a move that had been profitable for FESTLIP in
its initial years. Although the Brazilian Ministry of Culture no longer
funds FESTLIP (see Chapter 6), during its first three years, from 2008
to 2010, it covered about 70 percent of the festival’s costs, which were
roughly $588,000 in 2010.66 Lusofonia has cropped up in an array of
other cultural initiatives in Brazil, including FestLuso and the Circuito
de Teatro em Português and a major exhibit in 2011 in São Paulo that
showed art works by three dozen artists from Portuguese-language
countries (Diário da Região 2011).
African artists from Lusophone countries have been integral to all of
these projects. Indeed, the Brazilian Ministry of Culture’s other focus
in recent years has been projects that promote African culture, both
in Brazil and on the African continent.67 Fundação Cultural Palmares
(Palmares Cultural Foundation), a division of the Ministry of Culture
that is dedicated to preserving, protecting, and disseminating Black
culture in Brazil and combating racism in the country, is relevant
here (Fundação Cultural Palmares 2010). In the late 2000s, it began
supporting cultural initiatives such as FESTLIP that bring Lusophone
African artists to Brazil in the name of strengthening the Portuguese
language. These Brazilian policies are not without self-interest on
the government’s part: by currying favor with African nations in the
cultural realm, Brazil is in a ‘friendlier’ position to approach African
governments about economic and political agreements.
A controversial linguistic reform has accompanied the new era of
Brazil’s engagement with global commerce and its emerging role as
a leader in the Lusophone transnational community. In 1990, the
heads of all the Lusophone states signed the Portuguese Language
Orthographic Agreement. Brazil, Cape Verde, Portugal, and São Tomé

and Príncipe ratified the new orthography in 2008, and each country
adopted a different timeline for its official implementation. The catch
is that the accord is more aligned with Brazilian spellings than with
European Portuguese spellings (although in some cases both options
are acceptable). Predictably, this has sparked a heated debate among
Portuguese writers, intellectuals, and politicians, some of whom fear
that ‘Africa will be “lost” once again – this time to Brazil’ (Zúquete 2008:
499), since most Lusophone African countries currently use a variant
that is more similar to European than to Brazilian Portuguese. Many also
suspect that Brazil’s interest in the accord revolves around the country’s
geopolitical ambitions in Africa; the reform increases the export value of
Brazilian cultural products, media, books, and other educational mate-
rials (Dávila 2010). This has profound implications for the markets in
Lusophone African countries the Brazilian government is now targeting.
FESTLIP came on the scene in 2008, the same year the Brazilian and
Portuguese governments ratified the new language accord. Both events
are indications of Brazil’s rising influence in the Lusophone world.
FESTLIP’s vision for theatrical lusofonia trickles down to all of the
participating artists and the audience in Rio, which includes Brazilians
of various racial identities and Africans from Lusophone countries living
in Rio. The houses at FESTLIP performances are often full, since theatre
productions are offered free of charge to the public, a luxury that the
festivals in Cape Verde and Mozambique cannot afford. FESTLIP’s pro-
gram, which unfolds over ten to twelve days, includes a dozen or more
main-stage productions, a big concert called FESTLIP Show that features
well-known musicians from represented countries (such as Cape Verde
and Mozambique), acting workshops for festival participants, a special
menu at a downtown Rio restaurant that offers culinary specialties from
all the Lusophone countries appearing at FESTLIP, and a series of panels
on topics ranging from Portuguese-language playwriting to the role of
the media in Lusophone theatre. To ensure intercâmbio, or intercultural
exchange, Pires arranges for visiting artists to stay for the duration of
the festival, often at the same hotel in Copacabana, which FESTLIP pays
for along with all of the participants’ meals at a common restaurant.
Unlike the festivals in Cape Verde and Mozambique, FESTLIP covers
participants’ airfare and provides them with a small daily stipend; artists
can thus participate in the festival without having to raise funds in their
own countries.68 FESTLIP’s structure also ensures that artists have spaces
for social exchange, which strengthens the transnational Lusophone
artistic community the festival endorses.
Pires’s success in garnering resources for FESTLIP indicates that the

numerous government and private associations who have supported
the festival feel that it is a profitable investment. Pires and her organi-
zational team has also secured funding from Brazilian institutes such as
FUNARTE (Fundação Nacional de Artes; National Foundation of the Arts),
the government-owned bank Caixa, and private enterprises, including
Oi, one of the country’s major cell phone service providers. FESTLIP also
partners with SESC-Rio (Serviço Social do Comércio), a municipal associa-
tion that works with local businesses to finance urban cultural centers.
The SESC provides performance venues for main-stage productions to
FESTLIP free of charge. These include Sesc Ginástico, a large auditorium
in downtown Rio, and two smaller theatres in the inland neighbor-
hood of Tijuca and near the beach in Copacabana, FESTLIP’s home base.
FESTLIP also counts on Lusophone sources of support such as the CPLP
and Portugal’s Instituto Camões. Indeed, Pires contends that Brazil needs
to play a fundamental role in maintaining a global Lusophone commu-
nity because of its size, the vast number of Portuguese speakers who live
there, and the influence of its culture around the world.69
The festival foregrounds pressing questions about the role of Africa
in lusofonia. According to Pires, an empathetic connection to Africa is
what prompted her to establish FESTLIP. While performing at an Ibsen
festival in Oslo in 2006, she crossed paths with the Mozambican theatre
company Mutumbela Gogo, which was there performing an original
piece called As Filhas de Nora (Daughters of Nora), a ‘sequel’ to A Doll’s
House. Pires became ‘enchanted’ with the performance and its unique
style of spoken Portuguese. After a trip to Mozambique, Pires returned
to Rio determined to found an international theatre festival that would
unite ‘irmãos da língua’ (siblings of the same language) and strengthen
the ‘universo da lusofonia’ (lusofonia universe).70 FESTLIP debuted in
2008 with ten theatre companies – two each from Angola, Brazil,
Cape Verde, Mozambique, and Portugal. By 2010, it had expanded to
include one or two troupes from each Lusophone country, including
São Tomé and East Timor. In the interim, Pires visited all eight official
Portuguese-speaking countries for a project she had designed called
Teatro sem Fronteiras (Theatre without Borders). Financed by the
Brazilian Ministry of Culture, Teatro sem Fronteiras provided transpor-
tation for Pires and three other Brazilian theatre professionals to each
Lusophone country to lead workshops on movement, improvisation,
and lighting. While Gilberto Freyre’s journey to Portugal’s African
colonies 60 years earlier was intended to reinforce the metropole’s
claims on those colonies, Pires’s global perambulations suggest that
Brazil is the new ‘glue’ that holds together a contemporary Lusophone

cultural community.
When I asked Pires about the potential pitfalls of Lusophone
transnationalism in the context of the dominant roles of Portugal and
Brazil in the language community, she maintained that a festival
director could mitigate these national disparities by creating a level
playing field among festival participants. She emphasized that she is
careful to treat African, European, and South American artists equally
by scheduling them in the same cluster of performance venues, giving
them equal access to rehearsal spaces, and situating them in the same
hotels, despite the fact that most of the Brazilian and Portuguese compa-
nies are professional while the African companies are amateur.71 Indeed,
many of the African artists I interviewed at FESTLIP praised Pires for
the hospitality she extended to each participant regardless of her or his
citizenship or artistic status. Pires and her production team thus attempt
to compensate for socioeconomic inequities at the state level by craft-
ing a utopian vision of how transnational Lusophone connections could
unfold in an ideal world. Thus, festival administrators may also create
new social imaginaries about national and transnational connections,
just as performers do onstage with their festival productions.
In its decision to bring African theatre productions to Rio, FESTLIP also
performs a pedagogical task in Brazil. Despite Africa’s centrality to the
Brazilian national identity because of historical and cultural ties, many
Brazilians still lack basic knowledge about Africa. As Dávila argues, Africa
has long functioned as an abstract entity in Brazil, a mirror the Brazilian
nation holds up to understand itself better. To understand African cul-
ture, many Brazilians rely on facile cultural signifiers such as drumming,
or else more familiar cultural manifestations, such as the visible traces
of African spiritualities in Afro-Brazilian Candomblé religious practices.
Brazilians’ notions of Africa are also related to the myth of ‘racial democ-
racy’ that Gilberto Freyre created and that numerous Brazilian regimes
in the mid-to-late twentieth century embraced. As a result, Brazil’s
relationship with Africa is deeply entrenched in ‘symbolism about race
relations in Brazil’ rather than actual awareness of African cultures
(Dávila 2010: 254). That situation is not likely to change soon: a 2003
law that required schools to teach African and Afro-Brazilian history
and culture has remained largely unimplemented. Many of the Angolan
and Cape Verdean artists I spoke with at FESTLIP expressed frustration
about the ignorance about Africa they encountered in Brazil, especially
the misconception that Africa is one single country or a homogeneous
cultural space.72
FESTLIP productions from Lusophone African countries can thus

stage an informal ‘Africa awareness campaign’ in Rio by showcasing
cultural and historical specificity from Angola, Cape Verde, Guinea-
Bissau, Mozambique, and São Tomé. For example, the Guinea-Bissau
theatre troupe GTO (Grupo de Teatro Oprimido; Theatre of the
Oppressed Group) has effectively used Brazilian director Augusto Boal’s
forum theatre methods at FESTLIP to correct Brazilians’ misconceptions
about Africa, particularly assumptions about gender relations on the
continent (see Chapter 6). Since forum theatre relies on spectator
intervention onstage, Brazilian nationals who attend can learn about
Guinea-Bissau in an embodied way while the festival audience as
a whole can productively debate the choices made onstage. Forum
theatre at international theatre festivals can be a powerful tool for
shaping new – and more informed – social imaginaries about Africa that
have the potential to replace the colonialist ones that are still cherished
in many Western nations.
Conclusion
When theatre companies from Lusophone African countries take to

the stage in international theatre festivals in the Portuguese-speaking
world, they bring new social imaginaries about colonial legacies, lan-
guage hegemony, and immigration that may, over time and over many
festivals, filter into the popular imagination in the countries where
they perform and in the Lusophone world at large. While funding,
policies, and programming may determine the overarching structure
and ideological viewpoint of festivals, artists can nevertheless recast
Lusophone transnationalism on festival stages. To be clear, I am not
suggesting that artists’ intentionality and personal agency are solely
responsible for these reconfigurations, although of course they are
important pieces of the puzzle. Rather, I suggest that festival artists gen-
erate performances that produce a multiplicity of effects, some of which
spring directly from the artists’ intention, and others of which result
from the integration of those performances into diverse festival venues
and new cultural contexts. It is the interface of the performances with
these new surroundings that can recast Lusophone transnationalism in
surprising and unpredictable ways, which are sometimes positive and
other times negative. Since that transnational community has its roots
in Portuguese colonialism, I turn next to dramatizations of traumatic
colonial histories on festival stages.
3
Recasting the Colonial Past:
History, Imagination, and Fantasy
on Festival Stages
Over my years of fieldwork on the Lusophone festival circuit, I saw

numerous theatre troupes present productions that raised questions
about representing histories from Africa, where for years the European
versions of history were the only ones to be found in textbooks. The
past has significant relevance to the present, since representations of it
become sites of political struggles wherein diverse communities cultivate
collective identities and stake claims to socioeconomic resources (Bond
and Gilliam 1994). International theatre festivals are excellent examples
of such sites. In Cape Verde, performers can use Mindelact productions
to highlight the historical strands of their creolized culture that are
specific to their own local islands and claim the cultural capital that
performing at the nation’s most prestigious theatre venue affords. At
Mindelact 2004, for example, the Cape Verdean theatre troupe OTACA
performed Tchom di Morgado (The Proprietor’s Land),1 a dramatization
of a colonial-era peasant revolt against an exploitative Portuguese land-
lord on Santiago Island. The next year, the Portuguese theatre company
ESTE2 staged a Cape Verdean oral history about drought, generating
warm praise from many Mindelact attendees while raising questions
from others about responsible cultural representations. At FESTLIP in
Brazil, African artists have an opportunity to use the festival stage to
remind the larger transnational community of complex colonial histo-
ries. In 2009, the Angolan theatre company Elinga recreated the tale of
Kimpa Vita, an early eighteenth-century Kongolese prophetess who was
burned at the stake for heresy in the area that is now Angola.
Since all three performances took liberties with the histories they
recounted, new scholarship on imagination and collective memory
in transnational formations is relevant to my analysis of them. Aleida
Assmann and Sebastian Conrad (2010) state that memory ‘rethinks the
68
History, Imagination, and Fantasy on Festival Stages 69
future in alliance with recasting the past’ (1). At Lusophone theatre

festivals, recasting the past means reconceiving it in an embodied,
innovative way that provokes profound reflection about national
identities and about the individual histories of Portuguese-speaking
countries. The role of embodiment has long been acknowledged in
the processes of remaking cultural memory (see Counsell 2009). In
a generative work, Paul Connerton referred to this corporeal process as
the cultivation of a social memory (1989). While social memory has
been conceived mainly along national lines, when bodies with differ-
ent nationalist cultural memories come in contact with each other in
a new transnational space, they must renegotiate their national identi-
ties if they wish to create a new collective memory (Mitra 2009). This is
particularly likely to happen in diasporic spaces, as Ric Knowles (2009)
points out in the context of his exploration of intercultural theatre in
Toronto that adopts a pan-Asian approach. This tendency to expand
cultural memories to encompass a more global perspective is also
evident in recent decades of African theatre, as John Conteh-Morgan
(2010) notes about theatre in Francophone African countries since
the 1960s. As theatre artists there moved away from a glorification of
past African civilizations that they imagined to be centralist and rigid,
they began to produce theatre that rejected the boundaries of a single
national space. In the 1980s and early 1990s, they also drifted further
away from realism and drew increasingly on fantasy and the grotesque
to critique postcolonial regimes.
In this chapter, I draw on the three radical revisions of the colonial
histories of Cape Verde and Angola that were staged at Mindelact and
FESTLIP to examine the different ways they recast the past. I argue that
when performers use the past imaginatively in productions at international
theatre festivals, the changes they make to representations of race, colo-
nial authority, and the agency of historical subjects have lasting effects
on the way some people in nations and transnational communities
remember their pasts. The prestige of a festival, its substantial media
coverage, the rhetorical strategies participants and organizers of the
festival use, and, in some cases, a festival’s position as a state-supported
venue work together to create a semblance of authenticity for the his-
tory it stages.
Paradoxically, the historical distortions in these plays brought out
larger historical ‘truths’ about the colonial histories at stake. In some
instances, this was because the performances highlighted the kinds of
‘truth’ that folk histories produce. Folk histories are ‘disjunctive and
fragmented’ and resist placement within a singular linear narrative
(Bond and Gilliam 1994: 12). Since many African performers draw on
oral histories when they recast the colonial past, they often rely on the
folk histories carried by the living archives from which they draw. Folk
histories are often predicated on an understanding of past events as
cyclical and ever repeating rather than as singular events. In Cape Verde,
for example, the exploitation of peasant farmers on Santiago Island
was a recurring daily phenomenon for several centuries, and drought
ended and recommenced in cyclical waves. Since those who produce
folk histories are often excluded from formal education or participation
in the public sector, they possess what Foucault calls ‘subjugated
knowledges,’ or epistemologies that are officially disqualified or rel-
egated to a lower rank on social or educational hierarchies (1980: 82).
Performers bring these subjugated knowledges to light when they recast
the colonial past on festival stages.
While oral histories can help performers reconstruct recent colonial
events, fantasy is a method that can be used productively for ancient
histories officially recorded by scholars and government officials.
Unlike folk histories, official histories often provide timelines of key
events and the names of the specific actors who participated in and/or
precipitated those events. Official histories present the past as ‘enduring
and impenetrable,’ presumably because they are reinforced through the
printed word (Bond and Gilliam 1994: 12). The story of Kimpa Vita
is this kind of history. Her story was chronicled by Italian Capuchin
missionary priests who lived in the Kongo kingdom during her lifetime.
American historian John Thornton used archival documents at the
Vatican to produce the most well-known book about Kimpa Vita,
The Kongolese Saint Anthony: Dona Beatriz Kimpa Vita and the Antonian
Movement, 1684–1706 (1998). The Angolan artists from the Elinga thea-
tre company drew partly on Thornton’s book in order to create Kimpa
Vita. However, they also demonstrated the penetrability of so-called
official histories by rounding out the story of the prophetess using the-
atrical fantasy and what they knew about her from the various religious
cults that exist in her name today. They thus sacrificed the archival
precision of ‘official’ histories for the larger truths that may not be
recorded in letters, law books, and textbooks. The Elinga performers
filled in gaps in the historical record with their own subjectivities,
opinions, and imagination about Kimpa Vita.
The fact that performers imagine themselves into historical epochs
is not without its complications. It is now an accepted premise in
performance theory that performers act as ‘surrogates’ who introduce
continuities or discontinuities in their portrayals of historical figures
from official narratives of the past (Roach 1996). Yet, as Richards (2006)
notes, conceiving of ourselves as surrogates for long-deceased ances-
tors runs the risk of ‘displacing the past entirely, planting ourselves
center on the stage of the past rather than seeking to negotiate our
relationship to that past’ (491).3 This raises the question of the presen-
tist agenda of memory, since communities often reassemble fragments
of collective memory into configurations that address their contem-
porary needs and desires (Eyerman 2004). Theatre has an increased
risk of dislodging the past since it supplements the psychological sub-
stitutions of memory with the material substitutions of embodiment.
The question of whether or not Lusophone theatre artists displace the
colonial past as they recast it is an important part of my analysis of
performances.
I propose that a displacement of the past occurs when the agendas
of theatre artists become more important than their desire to recover
stifled historical voices. In Mãe Preta, for example, a Portuguese theatre
company prioritized the theatrical representation of drought over
the actual life experiences of Matilde Tavares, whose oral history had
inspired the play. Because her voice was muted in the mise-en-scène,
the colonial past of Cape Verde was essentially displaced. Conversely,
a productive recasting of the past can occur when performers give
marginalized subjects the agency that was denied them in official
histories. This was, for the most part, what the OTACA and Elinga
theatre troupes accomplished with Tchom di Morgado and Kimpa Vita,
respectively. Yet those performances also illustrate how even the most
politically efficacious performances about history may include moments
of displacing the past. In the Cape Verdean and Angolan performances,
these moments offered festivalgoers the opportunity to engage in an
array of interpretations as they reflected on shared colonial histories.
Tchom di Morgado: Performing the memory of revolt
In September 2004, I attended OTACA’s performance at the Mindelact

festival in the auditorium of Mindelo’s Cultural Center. As the show
opened, the theatre was filled with the plaintive notes of soulful Cape
Verdean morna music. A voiceover in Portuguese explained that we
were now in the (unspecified) time when Santiago camponeses (farmers)
began to revolt against White proprietors, the morgados, for their
land rights. Bita, the play’s protagonist, was illuminated on a stump
downstage, grasping a hoe and wearing worn work clothes. In an angry
barrage of Santiago Island Crioulo, he recalled his past sufferings while
actors upstage mimed them: his father fatally beaten in the morgado’s
yard after being caught trying to ‘steal’ his crops back, weeping women
bearing his body away, his mother dying from grief. As the flashback
ended, Bita declared that he would no longer give half his harvest to
the morgado and would induce others to strike. In the morgado’s office,
André, the proprietor’s Cape Verdean guard and spy, reported on the
workers’ subversion. He and the morgado enlisted the aid of the local
colonel, whose troops seized Bita in his fields and dragged him to the
morgado’s house, where he suffered the same fate as his father. After
a poignant funeral procession, the voiceover declared that when Cape
Verde became independent, farmers proudly took back their lands. The
actors danced onstage to take their bows, accompanied by the rapid
tempo of funaná music.
The Mindelact festival created an aura of authenticity around Tchom
di Morgado. The summary of the play in the festival program stated that
it was ‘based on facts collected from the elderly of Santiago’s interior
(especially Engenhos village in Santa Catarina), people with profound
knowledge of the disastrous relationships between farmers and the
land’s proprietors, the morgados.’4 The festival validated OTACA as
‘truth-tellers’ about the history of Santiago by providing this blurb after
the play’s title: ‘The roots and traditions of the largest island of the
country, by the group that best knows how to interpret them.’5
This claim relies in part on OTACA’s longevity. Founded in 1979 by
Narciso Freire and Luís Garção, OTACA was among the first theatre
groups to form in Cape Verde after independence and is one of the few
that remains from that time (Branco 2004). OTACA has built its reputa-
tion on dramatizing the history of Santa Catarina. At Mindelact 2000,
they performed Revolta d’Rubom Manel, based on a celebrated 1910 peas-
ant uprising against Portuguese authorities in the small town of Rubon
Manel. This revolt spawned a famous Crioulo phrase (‘Men with knives,
women with machetes, children threw rocks’)6 and inspired a song by
renowned Cape Verdean composer Orlando Pantera.
The air of authenticity surrounding Tchom di Morgado proved alluring
to spectators. When I heard of one audience member who claimed to
have known the historical Bita, I became excited about investigating the
‘true’ story. In October 2006 I visited the municipality of Santa Catarina
and Narciso Freire, co-founder and artistic director of OTACA, promised
to take me to Bita’s house in Engenhos. The day before, we had visited
the town of Rubon Manel to see the monument marking the 1910 revolt
OTACA had dramatized in Revolta d’Rubom Manel. As we wound down
Santiago’s lush mountainside in a rickety truck, I imagined a similar
plaque on Bita’s house, which I pictured as a hovel that perhaps had

been built in the 1930s or 1940s. To my surprise, when we arrived
at the house, Freire promptly introduced me to ‘Bita’s parents.’ But
we were at the home of Edimilson Sousa, the actor who played Bita.
Disappointed yet determined in my quest for historical background,
I welcomed Freire’s idea that I interview Edimilson’s grandmother and
great-uncle, who were sitting outside. However, they responded with
blank stares when I asked them about the historical Bita. Freire gently
interrupted to explain to me that Tchom di Morgado was a general sum-
mary of peasant strikes that occurred in Engenhos in the nineteenth
and twentieth centuries; OTACA had simply wanted to interrogate the
‘agrarian question.’ I was stunned. When I had interviewed OTACA in
2004 after their performance at Mindelact, I had asked about the revolt
as if it were a specific historical incident. Neither Freire nor the actors
had corrected me.
This ethnographic moment revealed that the perspective on history
I had brought to the field did not cohere with the historical vision
OTACA presented in Tchom di Morgado. My understanding of history
had been shaped by the things that fall under the rubric of official
history, such as chronologies of events and names of singular heroes.
OTACA, however, drew on folk histories that conveyed a cyclical pat-
tern of abuse endured by a host of farmers over centuries.7
I finally realized what Freire wanted me to see at Edimilson’s home.
The play is a true story, but it is a constructed truth that the actor
weaves from the stories he has heard his whole life. Since Edimilson
authored that historical truth when he created Bita’s character, I could
only learn it by talking to his personal sources, his grandmother and
great-uncle. Although they were not aware of it, they did know the
historical Bita about whom I had inquired – Edimilson. In plays that
use oral histories imaginatively, the mimesis that normally dominates
the theatrical scene may function in reverse. Instead of the actor imi-
tating a historical ancestor, the historical precedent may be created in
the image of the actor. In performance, Edimilson ‘mimes’ Bita into
historical existence. This confounds Freddie Rokem’s (2000) claim that
an actor in a historical drama can be a ‘hyper-historian,’ or a ‘witness
of the [historical] events vis-à-vis the spectators’ but can never actually
become the historical figure (25). According to Rokem, the actor does
not believe this is possible. But the OTACA artists affirmed a material
connection between Bita and Edimilson. They even used their names
interchangeably (for example, actress Nilda Vaz told me she played
‘Edimilson’s mother’ rather than ‘Bita’s mother’ in Tchom di Morgado).8
For OTACA, recasting the past in this instance means fusing oneself
with an invented historical ancestor.
My interviews in Engenhos shed light on a research process that
Freire calls ‘natural, something we do every day.’9 He and the OTACA
actors are, in effect, ethnographers by birth, since their accumulated
knowledge of oral histories informs their theatre. While Freire drafts the
storylines for plays, actors are free to improvise dialogue and gestures,
as long as they keep to the plot.10 Edimilson had poignant stories to
draw upon. His great-uncle, Alvarino Monteiro, described morgados as
‘owning the land even though they never bought it from anyone.’11 His
grandmother, Amélia Sousa, recalls that the morgado took half of her
father’s straw and a fifth of his garden every year.12
These oral narratives corroborate textual accounts of the morgado
system in Cape Verde. Portugal’s 1836 decree abolishing slavery threat-
ened to bring about a crisis in the economies of its colonies. Yet because
slavery in Cape Verde did not end in practice until 1875, Portuguese
settlers on Santiago had nearly 40 years to solidify a system of land
control that would enable them to retain control over agriculture. By
establishing contracts with rendeiros (renters who paid annual fees to
sow the land) and parceiros (‘partners’ who turned over portions of their
produce), morgados could continue their oppression even after the end
of slavery in 1875 under the guise of employing ‘free’ workers (Furtado
1993).13 This system did not end until the country became independent
in 1975. The Santa Catarina municipality was the focal point of agricul-
tural exploitation in the colonial era (Fig. 1). There, renters also endured
brutal policing by the guards of the morgados (Stockinger 1992).
Engenhos residents maintain that their village bore the brunt of
this brutality and was thus the setting for a majority of the worker
protests. While most farmers’ protests consisted of filing complaints
against the morgados or their guards in the Santa Catarina town hall,
residents also had a vague idea that sometime in the 1800s laborers
in Engenhos engaged in a mass armed revolt that may have inspired
the more famous uprising in Rubon Manel in 1910.14 Freire also had
this impression, yet he did not go to the history books to seek it out.
Suspicious of prejudicial colonial narratives of Cape Verdean history,
Freire relies on the authority of oral and folk histories in his theatre.15
Had Freire gone to the textual accounts, he would have found the
historical revolt lingering in local memory. In 1822, a throng of workers
filed a legal complaint about the violence and economic abuse of the
local colonel in Engenhos. When the colonial government ruled in the
colonel’s favor, the workers armed themselves and patrolled the borders
Figure 1 Manuel Semedo Tavares stands in front of the morgado (landowner)

house in Engenhos village, Santiago Island, where he has worked as a guard since
1956. Photo by the author.
of Engenhos for months, threatening to kill any colonial representative

who tried to enter. This incident appears in an account by Senna
Barcellos, a captain in the Portuguese military. His bias is evident in his
conclusion that some ‘learned’ enemy of the colonel must have incited
the workers to revolt (Barcellos 2003), implying that the workers lacked
the intellectual ability to mobilize themselves. Late twentieth-century
historians echo this implication. António Carreira (2000) assumes that
intransigent farmers were imitating the seditious behavior of White
degredados, Portuguese criminals sentenced to live on the islands.
‘Imitation’ suggests a kind of mimesis that disavows the agency
of marginalized historical subjects. OTACA restored that agency by
creating the persona of a peasant worker whose motivation for striking
comes not from the outside but from the degradation his family expe-
rienced. This is an example of how a theatre group can productively
recast the past. The memory of his father’s death drove Bita’s revolt.
While it was Freire who wrote this plotline, the theme of unfairly
castigated fathers is also central to the oral history of Amélia Sousa,
Edimilson’s grandmother. Sometime in the 1950s, the morgado Carlos

Serra exiled Amélia’s father, Tomás Moreira, from Engenhos because he
had filed a complaint at the Santa Catarina town hall.16 Moreira fled to
the mountains.
Armed with a family history of trouble with land rights, Edimilson
used his first monologue to ask: who controls the land and on what
authority? The monologue needed to convey the urgency of agricultural
revolt to a Mindelact audience. Because Mindelo is a port city whose
colonial history did not feature land exploitation, Mindelense theatre-
goers are just as removed from the socioeconomic context of Santa
Catarina as the festival’s international attendees. To draw spectators
into the worldview of the play, Edimilson transformed Bita’s opening
thoughts, which Friere had scripted as private reflections, into a direct
address to the audience: ‘But people, why? Because they’re white? Because
they speak Portuguese?’17 This rhetorical device urged spectators to grap-
ple with the issue, inviting ‘the participatory play of the spectator’ that
Elin Diamond (1997: 49) admires in Brecht’s brand of theatrical mimesis.
It exposed contradiction, another Brechtian hallmark, by foregrounding
the arbitrary links among race, authority, and the Portuguese language
that prevailed during the colonial era. In Edimilson’s performance,
then, a largely imaginative take on the past actually conveyed broader
historical truths about land exploitation in Cape Verde in the colonial
period.
At the apex of Bita’s anger, the actor constructed a provocative
Brechtian gestus, ‘a gesture, a word, an action, a tableau, by which . . . the
social attitudes encoded in the playtext become visible to the spectator’
(Diamond 1997: 52). As he grasped a hoe (a semiotic signifier of the
subjugation of workers) low on the handle, his index finger and posture
pointed outward and upward (Fig. 2). Bita’s provocative pose with the
hoe was captured on film by Mindelact photographer João Barbosa,
and it became an icon for the play. The image featured prominently in
a photography exhibit at Mindelact 2005 and in a review of Mindelact
2004 in Theatre Journal (Ferreira 2005). A year later, it appeared in a major
Cape Verdean newspaper accompanying a report on the new monument
in Rubom Manel to commemorate the 1910 upheaval. The article did
not mention the fact that the newspaper image was actually from
OTACA’s other play, Tchom di Morgado. Rather, the subtitle of the arti-
cle, ‘The Defiant Cape Verdean Spirit’ (Fortes 2005), indicates that Bita
now signifies an atemporal memory of nationalist revolt. The Mindelact
festival thus ensured that the play’s larger historical truth filtered
into the collective memory of Cape Verde. This also had implications
Figure 2 Edimilson Sousa plays peasant farmer ‘Bita,’ a strike leader inspired
by the actor’s extended family’s experiences with agricultural exploitation in
Engenhos. In OTACA’s Tchom di Morgado. The 2004 Mindelact International
Theatre Festival, Cape Verde Islands. Photo: João Barbosa, courtesy of the
Mindelact Association.
for Lusophone transnationalism because in a broader sense the play

celebrated peasant subversion against Portuguese colonialism.
Another way that OTACA recast the past was by emphasizing fea-
tures of oral histories that texts conceal. Carreira, a highly esteemed
historian of Cape Verde, claims that after slavery ended, the physical
abuse of the morgados ceased: their guards resorted to verbal threats to
farmers, since ‘renters could no longer be shackled, whipped, or put
in solitary confinement’ (Carreira 2000: 360–61). Yet the elderly in
Engenhos speak plainly about times when violent acts occurred in the
post-slavery period.18 Of one vicious guard, Pepé, it was said that ‘if he
kills one, he kills six.’19 Because they attended to oral histories, OTACA
could stage the violent acts omitted from official histories. In the final
scene, Bita was tied to a wooden post as the colonel’s soldiers brutally
whipped him.
Yet OTACA also displaced the past by changing representations of
race in Engenhos history. In Tchom di Morgado, it was two Portuguese
characters (the morgado and the colonel) who perpetrated the violence
against Bita. This conflicts with the memories of elderly Cape Verdeans
in Engenhos. They associate violence with the native Cape Verdean
guards the morgados hired; the names of those men live on in infamy.20
Alverino Monteiro recalls, ‘If my father asked me to do something,
I might take my time. If Pepé told me to do it, I would run.’21 Head
guards, or encarregados, were often the only visible authority on the
morgado’s land, since many Portuguese morgados were absent landlords
who lived in Portugal most of the year (Carreira 2000).22 OTACA thus
obscured the race and nationality of the adversaries who feature in the
oral histories of Engenhos residents.
This is an example of how the exigencies of global spectatorship may
deeply affect how collective memories are reshaped. Freire once told
me that he kept the Mindelact context in mind while he was writing
Tchom di Morgado: ‘I wrote the play here [Santiago Island], but I was
thinking there [Mindelo].’23 To represent Cape Verdean history to an
audience unfamiliar with its nuances, it is surely more straightforward
to accentuate the ‘black and white’ relations of dominance typically
associated with colonialism, thus keeping the identity of the colonial
oppressor clear. Perhaps it would have been too ambiguous to depict the
Cape Verdean guard, André, as a complicit figure who moved between
oppressor and oppressed. Yet the oral histories of Engenhos residents
suggest that this is exactly what guards did. Some even subjected renters
to repressive rituals of their own.24 As Foucault (1980) notes, it is these
local, subtle uses of power that ultimately keep disciplinary systems
intact. By choosing not to represent the guards’ methods of subjuga-
tion, OTACA’s performance obscured the processes by which racial and
colonial authority is constructed. Historically, Cape Verdean guards
became proprietors themselves by currying favor with employers and
earning enough money to buy land.25 Cloaking themselves in authority
by appropriating the policies and wealth of Portuguese morgados, these
guards transformed themselves into the authority figures that kept the
colonial system in Cape Verde functioning.
Much was at stake in OTACA’s performance. Freire spoke to me about
the urgent need to educate Mindelact audiences about the rich his-
tory of Santa Catarina, and he feels that he achieved this with Tchom
di Morgado. Yet Santiago Island theatre, which often stages history and
folklore, is falling out of favor with urban Mindelo audiences who
have come to expect a more Western aesthetic, such as adaptations of
Three Sisters or King Lear. Theatre artists in Mindelo tell me they are
tired of the theme of colonial history in Santiago theatre. These two
divergent viewpoints represent a kind of tug-of-war over what kind
of theatre festival Mindelact should be. While Mindelo artists tend to

privilege the European roots of Cape Verde’s Crioulo culture, Santiago
artists advocate for the firm place of Africa in Cape Verdean memory,
in this case represented by a labor situation directly descended from
African slavery on Santiago Island. Clearly, if the Mindelact festival is to
accurately represent its host culture, both of these kinds of theatre must
be valued and presented. With Tchom di Morgado, OTACA made the case
that Santiago Island history belonged on the festival stage and in the
theatrical canon of Cape Verde. Because OTACA performed the play at
an international Lusophone theatre festival, it also made the case that
Santiago Island’s past was integral to Lusophone transnationalism more
broadly.
Mãe Preta: Performing the memory of drought
At Mindelact 2005, Cape Verdean history returned to the stage, but

this time it was a Portuguese troupe spinning the tale. Foucault (1980)
warns that once subjugated knowledges are disinterred and ‘put
into circulation,’ they run the risk of reappropriation by dominant
discourses (86). This is what I suggest happened with the oral history
of drought on Maio Island when it fell into the hands of a Portuguese
theatre company unfamiliar with the subtle nuances of that history. By
omitting these nuances from the stage version, the theatre company,
perhaps unwittingly, displaced the Cape Verdean past with its own
artistic vision.
Maio Island has long been one of the poorest, least populous, and
most inward-looking islands in Cape Verde. It receives most of its
food and materials from nearby Santiago Island. For centuries, the
island’s vast salt mines made it a stop-off for ships passing through to
Europe and the Americas. However, when the salt trade declined in the
mid-1800s, the economy never recovered.26 Because of its punishing,
barren landscape, Maio Island was a penal colony for much of its
colonial history. The isolation of the island made it a veritable jail
during drought: hungry islanders used to watch in despair as ships
from Santiago Island with relief supplies were turned back because
of rough seas.27 Portugal did not do everything it could when Cape
Verde was suffering from drought in the colonial era: perhaps because
of its own economic instability, the Portuguese government looked on
in silence while famines claimed 15,000 Cape Verdean lives per year
during the drought of 1947–48.28 On Maio Island, 274 islanders died,
about 20 percent of the population (Carreira 1984). Yet little has been
written about that desolate time on Maio Island. Oral histories are
thus the main way to access that historical knowledge. One such story
held dramatic appeal for Portuguese playwright and director Nuno
Pino Custódio, who reworked a Maio Island oral history for a touring
production that eventually landed at the Mindelact festival.
The story of Mãe Preta began at Mindelact 2004, when Custódio was
invited to give a four-day playwriting workshop. One of his students
was Ney Tavares, an amateur Cape Verdean theatre artist, who told
Custódio during a break, ‘I also write plays.’29 Tavares then described
his play, Mudjer Trabadjadera (Working Woman; Crioulo), about his late
grandmother’s desperate attempts to procure food and medicine for
her ailing child on Maio Island in 1948, a story his grandmother told
him often. Fascinated, Custódio told Ney that his theatre company
would mount it and asked Tavares to e-mail him the script. Custódio
was not impressed with Tavares’s text but was enthralled by the story.
He resolved to work from the oral history to write his own play, Mãe
Preta (Black Mother). After several calls to Tavares to discuss the details
of the story, he worked with Portuguese actress Sandra Horta to build
the theatrical concept. In November 2004, a 25-minute children’s
version of Mãe Preta debuted in primary schools across Fundão, the
municipality near Lisbon where Custódio’s company, ESTE, is based.
Soon after that, a full production toured to over 20 cities in Portugal
and Spain, including Coimbra, Tomar, Salamanca, Setubal, and Lisbon.
In September 2005, Mãe Preta circled back to Cape Verde for Mindelact.
While it did enjoy great success at Mindelact, Mãe Preta contains
a series of misunderstandings and cultural stereotypes. It thus illustrates
the hazards of interculturalism in Lusophone venues where Portuguese
participants still play dominant roles in artistic exchanges. In this case,
funding from the former metropole also played a role in circulating
the colonial history of Cape Verde. Instituto Camões, a Portuguese-
government institute, sponsored the production of Mãe Preta at
Mindelact and paid for ESTE’s travel to Cape Verde. Both the production’s
financial backing and its director thus represented a more dominant
culture than that of Cape Verde, a situation that posed significant risks
to the subjugated knowledge the performance attempted to convey.
Mãe Preta is a one-person show in which Sandra Horta plays Filomena
(the ‘black mother’ of the play’s title) and a number of secondary
characters. She wears a mask made from a thick brown plaster that
features large, raised cheekbones, wide white eyes, and a thick band of
red over the lips. At the Mindelact performance, which I witnessed, the
production opened with the stout figure of Filomena against a canvas
backdrop. She sang the Crioulo-language song ‘Mudjer Trabadjadera’

accompanied by onstage musicians. The song, which repeats the
phrase ‘minine na costa’ (child on my back), is Ney Tavares’s: he wrote
it for his play and sent a recording to Custódio, who did the musical
arrangement. Sounds of rain echoed as Filomena dreamt of ripe corn
and peas. Making a boat from paper, she sailed it along the ripples
of a blue cloth, or pano, that she waved over the ground. It became
a boat approaching with food, and Filomena begged it not to turn back.
Tracing a square at center stage with hurried steps, Filomena arrived
at the colonial administrator’s office, where she asked for a job. Horta
conveyed his ‘no’ by lowering her head dejectedly. With her child on
her back, she went to Compadre (Godfather) Sabino’s house. Receiving
water and flour, she returned home to make porridge. When her child
fainted after drinking, Filomena rushed to the health center. Emerging
from behind the canvas with a beard, Horta played a nurse who makes
wicked asides about his starving patients. He gave the child an injection
to wake him up. On the way back home, however, the child reverted to
silence. The play ended with Filomena raising the child’s lifeless body
above her head, crying, ‘Ainda estás no sono, pequeno?’ (Are you still
sleeping, little one?)
Mãe Preta was a poetic rendering of a troubled time in Cape Verdean
history, and it garnered much acclaim in Cape Verde. In his review of
the festival, Cape Verdean journalist Eduino Santos (2005) gave ESTE
four (of five) stars, calling the production ‘beautiful and moving.’
He declared Sandra Horta ‘Best Actress’ of the festival because of her
homage to ‘Cape Verdean mothers who prove their courage during dif-
ficult times’ (29). One Cape Verdean theatre director called Mãe Preta
‘spectacular;’ another said it was ‘one of the best shows ever mounted
at Mindelact.’30 The production’s use of Cape Verdean cultural markers
was particularly admired. For example, Horta mimed making a catchupa
stew, the national dish of Cape Verde. She followed each ingredient
(chicken, flour, broth, corn) with the distinctly Crioulo phrase: ‘Ka tém
(Don’t have)!’ The success of the production was not lost on Tavares,
who was proud that Custódio called him to the stage afterward to
acknowledge him as the teller of the oral history that inspired Mãe Preta.
Tavares later told me informally this was the first time he had been
publicly promoted as a writer.
This comment is evidence of Tavares’s belief that Mãe Preta is his
play Mudjer Trabadjadera translated into Portuguese and not a new
play that Custódio wrote. I have read both texts, however, and it is
clear to me that they are two different scripts. Mãe Preta is a densely
literary, primarily Portuguese-language version that uses abstraction

and symbolism. Mudjer Trabadjadera is a succinct, Crioulo-language
account that employs dramatic realism and a linear narrative. Yet
Tavares’s claim is not unsubstantiated: Custódio used his song, Crioulo
phrases from his play, and many of his plot points. The mother visits
the same people, the administrator, Compadre Sabino, and the nurse,
in the same order, even responding similarly when the administrator
hands her a note instead of a job (My child is not a goat! He cannot
eat paper).31 Yet these contributions were not in the official Mindelact
program, which lists Custódio as director but does not list an author.
Not acknowledging the bearer of an oral history is another way the past
can be displaced.
Festival director João Branco conceded that this was a grave error on
the festival’s program, but he explained that ESTE had not included
Tavares’s name on the list of contributing artists it submitted to
Mindelact to put in the program.32 However, Tavares’s name did appear
on a separate program that Custódio distributed at Mindelact, for which
Tavares was grateful. That program, from Mãe Preta’s tour in Portugal,
lists Tavares as a musical composer and explains that the oral history
he told Custódio had inspired the play. Says Tavares, ‘At least Nuno
[Custódio]’s program gave me my rights.’33
At Mindelact, one’s ‘rights’ are about cultural capital, not about
financial gain. Custódio did not earn money from the production, since
ticket sales cover only the expenses of the festival and performers are
not paid. However, his artistic prowess was heralded in the media and in
the theatre community. This was acclaim Tavares had sought when he
proposed his own play about his grandmother for Mindelact 2005. He
hoped that chances to perform abroad would follow, since ‘foreigners
at Mindelact can later invite you to act in their own countries, like
Portugal.’ But João Branco told him that as an actor, he was not ready
for the main stage.34 Although Tavares could not circulate to Portugal
and the Mindelact main stage, his grandmother’s story could – but only
after being sifted through the imagination of a Portuguese director.
The Mindelact program and the Cape Verdean press described
Mãe Preta as ‘based on a true account of a woman from Maio island’
(A Semana 2005a).35 This constructs authenticity, ‘something that
represents itself as reliable, trustworthy, and accepted’ (Ness 1992: 190),
but it disguises the fact that Matilde Tavares’s oral history underwent
significant changes as it circulated to the festival venue. First, the
title racializes her. Some of my Cape Verdean friends called the title
intentional exoticism, since most Cape Verdeans self-identify as Crioulo
(Creole), not as Black.36 Tavares also objects to it. While his title of
‘working woman’ signifies labor, Custódio’s title foregrounds race. He
believes that this continues the tendency of Portuguese colonialists
to reify difference by referring to Cape Verdeans as pretos and negros
(Blacks). He noted the same tendency in the black mask. For Tavares,
the mask called attention to the racial difference between Filomena and
the non-Black actress who portrayed her.37
For Custódio, the black mask merely reflects his training in commedia
dell’arte theatre and his belief that character development should
happen ‘from the outside in’ instead of the Stanislavskian ‘inside
out.’38 He explained that he chose the title because the play debuted in
Portugal, where ‘Black’ signifies Africa.39 Performance scholar E. Patrick
Johnson (2003) would call this an instance of ‘authentic’ blackness
becoming a ‘trope manipulated for cultural capital’ (3). In fact, the
term ‘black mother’ sharply contrasts with the name Tavares and his
siblings called their grandmother, Matilde. Since their grandmother and
mother raised them together, they called Matilde ‘old mother’ and their
mother, Albertina, ‘young mother.’40 ‘Black mother’ emphasizes race at
the expense of Matilde’s astounding parenting abilities: she raised her
eight children and Albertina’s five children over a period spanning the
two worst droughts in Cape Verde in the twentieth century (1941–43
and 1947–48) (Carreira 1984).
Mãe Preta also conceals the backbreaking labor Matilde performed
during the drought. I learned about this when I traveled to Maio
Island in October 2006 to visit Ney Tavares and interview his mother,
Albertina. In Mãe Preta, Filomena constantly calls herself a ‘mulher sem
trabalho’ (woman without work). Yet the Matilde of Albertina’s memory
rose at dawn every morning and walked to the mountains of Figueira,
about four kilometers from her home. There, she would transport rocks
on her head to a nearby construction site, all while carrying her baby on
her back. Afterward, Matilde would make three long trips to the Vila, the
major town of Maio, carrying water to sell at the salt mines.41 Tavares’s
title, ‘working woman,’ honors Matilde’s labor. In Mãe Preta, fantasy is
substituted for work: Filomena visualizes an elaborate banquet, filling
her mind with food to quiet her empty belly. The play thus evidences
a certain failure to imagine the lengths to which people went to survive
the trauma of drought. While the fantasy scene in Mãe Preta suggested
a passive response to these dire circumstances, Matilde’s actual life
history is that of a woman with a clear sense of agency who worked
hard to feed her children. This is an example of how an international
stage may depoliticize memories of colonial times.
Certain transformations in the representation of the Cape Verdean

mother in Mãe Preta can be attributed to the anti-realist aesthetic
Custódio chose for his staging.42 For example, actress Sandra Horta
moved in a very stylized manner. In one poetic moment, Filomena
dared the elusive raindrops to fall like a tempest. To act this out, she
lowered her body in a jerky, mechanical fashion until she was almost
on her knees, reciting with each movement: ‘Here’s one drop, pim!
Here’s another, pim! Another one, pim, pim!’ Because of her overstated
movements, Filomena often drifted into caricature, while the Mindelact
audience responded with surprised laughter.
More controversial was the production’s representation of the Black
female body. Horta’s costume had stuffing in the bosom and the
buttocks that transformed her slender figure into a stout body with
a protruding behind (Fig. 3). To explain this choice, Custódio referred to
the ‘principle of the opposite’: in theatre, it makes a stronger statement
to create an image that contradicts what one wishes to convey. She is
starving, but she is plump. There is a drought, but we hear rain fall-
ing. There is no food, but she talks of feasts and catchupa. Custódio
attributes this principle to Hegelian philosophy and Brechtian theatre.43
His description echoes Diamond’s (1997) synopsis of the Brechtian
dialectic as ‘a “zigzag” of contradictions’ (48). One interpretation, then,
is that Filomena’s round figure, embodied by a thin White actress, is an
example of ‘mimesis in syncopated time,’ in which the one performing
the mimesis is distinctly and purposefully out of sync with the one who
is mimed (103).
Yet the image of the African mother in Mãe Preta is also reminiscent of
historical associations Westerners have problematically made between
full figures and Black females. Sander Gilman (1985) analyzes the
nineteenth-century exhibits in Europe of Sarah Bartmann, the ‘Venus
Hottentot.’ He notes how scientists claimed that her large buttocks
were evidence of bestial sexuality and ranked her near the ape in the
biological hierarchy. Large buttocks on Black women became an
established stereotype. Homi Bhabha defines stereotype as an association
that ‘vacillates between what is always “in place,” already known, and
something that must be anxiously repeated’ (1994: 95). In Portugal, the
image of the African mother as a pear-shaped black woman exists in
tourist culture. On the banks of the Douro River of Porto, a touristy res-
taurant called Filha da Mãe Preta (The Black Mother’s Daughter) features
an image of a Black woman who could be Filomena’s twin (Fig. 4).
Epitomizing what bell hooks calls ‘eating the other’ (1992: 21), the
restaurant commodifies the Black female image, offering it to tourists
Figure 3 Sandra Horta dramatizes the oral history of Matilde Tavares in ESTE’s
Mãe Preta, a tribute to Cape Verdean mothers who have struggled to feed their
children during times of drought. The 2005 Mindelact International Theatre
Festival, Cape Verde Islands. Photo: João Barbosa, courtesy of the Mindelact
Association.
for consumption. This image is anxiously repeated, as per Bhabha, in

Custódio’s production. His historical imagination drew less from oral
history than from an iconography of an African other that was already
known. The result was a displacement of the past with a well-worn
stereotype rather than a productive recasting of the past.
Performing a stereotype can be an effective way to open up an
honest dialogue about race – as long as those participating can openly
challenge each other (Johnson 2003). Such a dialogue can happen only
when the stereotype is recognized as such. Custódio’s enthusiasm for
the ‘principle of the opposite’ seems to prevent him from seeing the
Black mother stereotype he recycles. Yet many Cape Verdean spectators
accepted Horta’s performance and the play as realistic representations.
Actor Dany Santos from Maio said that he recognized the history and
Figure 4 A sign hanging outside the restaurant Filha da Mãe Preta (the Black
Mother’s Daughter) along Porto’s Douro River in northern Portugal. Photo by
the author.
culture of his island in what he saw.44 Mindelo director Herlandson

Duarte called the piece ‘pure’ Cape Verdean, meaning that Custódio
captured a Cape Verdean sentiment so well that it was as if he were Cape
Verdean himself.45 Albertina Tavares told me that when Ney Tavares
showed her my DVD recording of Mãe Preta, ‘I saw the woman with
a baby on her back and I recognized my mother and began to cry.’46
I do not suggest that these impressions are wrong. Rather, I contend
that the festival setting can impede frank evaluations of historical rep-
resentation, since a veneer of authenticity may paper over important
transformations in the oral history being staged. In Mãe Preta, the fact
that a Cape Verdean mother’s courageous struggle was being celebrated
resonated emotionally with Cape Verdeans in attendance, particularly
mothers.47 Undoubtedly, this helped override – or perhaps render

irrelevant – some of the distortions that were produced. Further, the
theatrical device of the mask produces an abstraction, which perhaps
allowed spectators to read any number of associations onto it. Unlike
the OTACA production, which used a historical imagination in service
of marginalized voices in the history of Cape Verde, the Mãe Preta
production used it to mute those voices to some degree, displacing the
colonial past of Cape Verde in favor of aesthetics.
Tavares’s own attitude toward the Mãe Preta performance was
decidedly mixed. While he did feel some resentment toward Custódio
for not properly crediting his contribution to the script, he also felt
great satisfaction that a theatre production to which he did contribute
was so warmly received at Mindelact. This ambivalence is emblematic
of personal relationships that unfold under the banner of lusofonia: it is
difficult to characterize them as either ‘good’ or ‘bad;’ they are simply
shot through with the ambiguities and power imbalances that are
remnants of an extensive colonial history. And even though Custódio’s
version of Matilde’s story was the one the Mindelact festival authorized,
this did not leave Tavares without additional recourse. In newspaper
interviews in Cape Verde, Tavares went on record as saying that Mãe
Preta was his play (A Semana 2005a). I call this ‘reverse appropriation,’
a way to reclaim the oral history he himself could not perform on the
main stage of the festival. Tavares went straight to the media to claim
the cultural capital he felt the festival program had denied him. He
also requested a copy of my DVD of Mãe Preta so he could submit it to
the Portuguese embassy to support his application for an artist’s visa to
study theatre in Portugal.
Tavares’s refusal to be silent about his right to stage Matilde’s oral
history proved fruitful. Festival director João Branco slotted Tavares’s
production of his original play, Mudjer Trabadjadera, for the Mindelact
2007 Festival Off program. I attended the performance and noted that it
contained more realism and melodrama than Mãe Preta and proceeded
at a slower pace. Spectators seemed to watch it attentively and certainly
applauded generously (if not with the same degree of enthusiasm that
they tend to show for the quicker-paced, comedic skits that are nor-
mally performed at Festival Off). Branco later told me informally that
he thought it was Tavares’s strongest performance yet, evidencing hard
work on his part as both actor and director. Cape Verdean spectator
Tambla Almeida spoke appreciatively to me about the performance
of Mudjer Trabadjadera, saying that the slow pace accurately captured
the unhurried rhythm of life on Maio Island. After the production,
a glowing Tavares told me that he was ‘cheio de orgulho’ (full of pride).

The measure of his success, perhaps, was that he was able to recast the
past in a way that he believed paid homage to the memory of his grand-
mother Matilde.
Kimpa Vita: Performing the memory of prophecy
At FESTLIP 2009, the Grupo Elinga Teatro (the Elinga Theatre Group)
of Angola staged an original piece about the Kongolese prophetess
Kimpa Vita (1684–1706). Elinga’s play targeted the religious, military,
and mercantile dominance of the Portuguese in the Kongo kingdom of
that era. Thus, Kimpa Vita: A profetisa ardente (Kimpa Vita: The Burning
Prophetess) is a distinctly postcolonial play even though it is technically
set in the precolonial period. The early setting of the play demonstrated
that Elinga wished to revisit the very beginnings of the Lusophone
transnational community so it could examine the underpinnings of
contemporary relations.
Kimpa Vita was wrapped in discourses of authenticity similar to the
history plays about Cape Verde I discussed above. The FESTLIP program
presented this description of Elinga’s play: ‘The true story of an Angolan
woman who believed she was St. Anthony and was condemned to
death by burning (like Joan of Arc) by the Inquisition.’48 The refer-
ence to Joan of Arc was clearly a universalizing move. Yet José Mena
Abrantes, a White Angolan who is the artistic director of Elinga and one
of Angola’s most noted poets and playwrights, has said that he chose
this play for FESTLIP specifically because it spoke to Angola’s particular
past, especially the exportation of Angolan culture via the slave trade,
and because it was ‘exotic’ enough to appeal to an international festival
audience.49
Yet unlike the Cape Verdean history plays performed at Mindelact,
Elinga does not present its productions as stable versions of history.
Instead, Elinga uses fantasy to foreground the constructed nature of
the historical narratives it presents. The production of Kimpa Vita
was openly playful with the unwieldy loose ends of the past and the
ideological implications of various interpretations of history. For exam-
ple, after the Elinga actors took their bows at FESTLIP 2009, Abrantes
came onstage and slyly told the audience that the troupe’s story about
Angola’s past contained some inverdades (untruths) for the sake of
dramaturgy, which elicited good-natured laughter and applause from
spectators. Indeed, Elinga’s modus operandi is to constantly interrupt
notions of historical ‘authenticity’ by freely combining official histories,
oral accounts, and artistic fantasy in order to collapse the distinctions

among these kinds of knowledge. This method is implicitly political
because it suggests that current realities in the Lusophone world, like
history itself, are socially constructed and subject to change. Similar
to OTACA, the liberties Elinga takes with history are done to bring
previously marginalized African voices to the fore. Its use of fantasy
is thus another way of productively recasting the past at Lusophone
festivals.
The Elinga theatre troupe was formed in Luanda, the capital of Angola,
in 1988 in the midst of the nation’s devastating 22-year civil war. Many
of the plays it has performed focus on an equally turbulent time in the
early history of the Kongo kingdom, an area that encompasses present-
day Angola, Congo-Brazzaville, and the Democratic Republic of Congo.
Historians note that this kingdom’s legacy is particularly rich because
a strong oral tradition coexists there with an ample storehouse of writ-
ten documents generated by Portuguese settlers, Italian priests, other
European visitors, and literate Kongolese.
Yet there are sometimes deep contradictions between the ‘official’
record and oral tradition (Thornton 2011).50 To underscore the tensions
among different versions of the past, Elinga uses theatrical devices
that present history as open-ended. For example, the troupe employed
meta-theatre in its best-known play, Sequeira, Luís Lopes ou o Mulato dos
Prodígios (Luís Lopes Sequeira, or the Wondrous Mulatto), which it per-
formed at the 1997 Mindelact International Theatre Festival. The play is
about a controversial military leader, the son of a Portuguese commander
and an enslaved Black woman, who defeated three powerful African
kingdoms – Kongo, Ndongo, and Matamba – in the space of sixteen
years (1665–81). During the play, a cluster of Angolan actors sit onstage
and speculate about the reasons for Sequeira’s strange death: he appar-
ently rushed into enemy fire in his final skirmish with the Matamba.
The central question is whether he was a traitor to his people or
a hero for ultimately uniting the three kingdoms that would one day
become the nation of Angola. As the actors depart from their circle
onstage to act out various possibilities for his life and death, donning
period attire and props as needed, they begin to lose track of what
they have read in historical texts about Sequeira and what they have
invented through improvisation. Elinga’s production thus signaled
that intertwined Lusophone histories merit an approach that questions
the past as it is enacted. This approach became doubly significant
because the play debuted at an international festival. Since it was
a co-production with Cena Lusófona, a Portuguese association devoted
to promoting Lusophone cultural exchanges, and staged in Mindelo,

a port city that bears the memory of ships traveling from Angola to
Portugal to Brazil during the transatlantic slave trade, the performance
evoked a time when the destinies of these countries were connected in
traumatic ways (Mitras 2004).
Fantasy makes possible the elastic take on history that Lusophone
colonial histories demand. Abrantes, who writes most of Elinga’s
plays, describes Kimpa Vita as ‘meia fantasia’ (more like fantasy), since
it draws more from speculation than the written record generated by
Italian priests who lived in the Kongo.51 From an Africanist standpoint,
Abrantes made a prudent choice, since books that cleave too closely to
the priests’ eyewitness accounts, such as John Thornton’s The Kongolese
Saint Anthony (1998), have been critiqued as biased, Eurocentric, and
unmindful of African oral tradition about the prophetess’s life (Bockie
1998). Abrantes drew only selectively from Thornton’s book to write
Kimpa Vita, adding characters or lines of dialogue to augment his fantas-
tical narrative.52 Elinga thus was able to highlight for an international
Lusophone audience the elements of the prophetess’s story that the
theatre company deemed most crucial or topical, whether or not those
aspects are prominent in the written record.
Kimpa Vita’s life as it is presented in written documents certainly
lends itself to speculation. Born in 1684 of noble Kongolese origins,
Dona Beatriz, as her parents called her, grew up in a time of political
turmoil. Twenty years earlier, the Kongo kingdom had been defeated
by Portuguese troops. That battle left a power vacuum that extended
into Kimpa Vita’s lifetime, when three different men laid claim to the
Kongo throne. This political quandary informed Kimpa Vita’s prophesy-
ing. In 1704, she awoke from a grave illness and professed herself to be
possessed by the spirit of St. Anthony. She said that the saint wanted
Dom Pedro IV, one of the claimants to the Kongo throne, to leave his
mountainside dwelling and reinhabit São Salvador, the former Kongo
capital, and reinstate the kingdom. While Dom Pedro was initially
receptive to the movement Kimpa Vita created, the Capuchin priests
in Kibangu convinced him that her cult posed a threat to Christianity
and to his power. Under the king’s directive, the priests burned Kimpa
Vita at the stake with her male lover. They spared the lives of her child
and her most loyal follower, an old woman named Mafuta, who was
also a seer.53
Today, Kimpa Vita is championed by governments and local
communities in many African nations as a visionary who fought European
control of African sovereignty and religious practices.54 However, Elinga’s
performance of Kimpa Vita at FESTLIP turned that message into a spe-

cific commentary on Lusophone postcolonialism. It marked her oppo-
nents as Portuguese, even though Kimpa Vita was persecuted by Italian
priests in the written record.55 In the production, the main adversaries
of the prophetess were a Portuguese padre in black robes (played by
White Angolan actor Ferdinando Montevecchi) and his sidekicks, a mer-
chant and a soldier, who were dressed in buffoonish colonial costumes
with puffy sleeves and white tights. By contrast, Kimpa Vita, played
with youthful charisma by Anabela Vandiane, presented a graceful fig-
ure (Fig. 5). With a colorful cloth elegantly draped across one shoulder,
she led her coterie of Black female followers in spirited stomping and
swaying during the possession scenes as soft drumming and Kikongo-
language singing emanated from offstage musicians. Her insistence
Figure 5 Kongolese prophetess Kimpa Vita conveys her visions about return-
ing a Kongo king to power. Anabela Vandiane in Elinga’s Kimpa-Vita: A profetisa
ardente. FESTLIP 2009, Rio de Janeiro, Brazil. Photo: Rogério Resende, courtesy
of Talu Produções.
that indigenous spirituality could be blended with Christianity pro-

duced some piercing postcolonial statements. In a telling moment, she
explained the holy trinity to her patriarch uncle, who sat on a stump
austerely smoking a pipe. Piqued, he retorted that military men, mer-
chants, and priests were also ‘three in one. And it’s this “one” that needs
to get out of here!’ (Abrantes 2009: 22).56 Turning the Church’s theol-
ogy against it, the uncle named the various powers that constituted
the emerging colonial authority as an increasing threat to the Kongo.
By identifying that threat as Portuguese, Elinga reminded the FESTLIP
audience of the religious and cultural intolerance that marked the pres-
ence of the Portuguese in the Kongo kingdom over several centuries,
even though Portugal actually played a negligible role in Kimpa Vita’s
personal story.57
Elinga also veered from the historical record in its representation of
Kimpa Vita herself. In the production, the character relied mainly on
words to convey her message, whereas the Vatican documents emphasize
gesture and the prophetess’s unique way of moving. Capuchin priests
wrote that she ‘walked on the points of her toes, without hardly
touching the ground with the rest of her feet’ (Louis Jadin quoted in
Covington-Ward 2008: 111); she even encircled the Kongo king on tip-
toes during her first audience with him (Thornton 1998). It is curious
that Abrantes did not direct Vandiane to adopt these postures in the
production. The historical Kimpa Vita’s ritualized gestures symbolized
her particular power as a local priestess, power that won her private
audiences with the king and with Italian missionaries (Covington-Ward
2008).58 But Elinga’s play relies on lengthy dialogues between Kimpa
Vita and her female followers or the Portuguese priest and his conspira-
tors.59 This is because Abrantes, following Greek tragedians, believes
that theatre is best communicated through the spoken word.60 It is also
possible that a lack of emphasis on Kimpa Vita’s gestures diminished
the potential for the festival audience to read her character through the
lens of stereotype or exoticism, whether or not this was the theatre com-
pany’s intention. However, the production did use gesture at a critical
moment in the play: the first possession scene. With a circle of women
gathered around her on a dimly lit stage, Kimpa Vita prayed on her
knees in hushed tones to St. Anthony. At the conclusion of her prayer,
she touched her head to the ground three times. By the second time
her head touched the ground, St. Anthony, dressed in a brown friar’s
robe, had stepped out from the shadows. This head motion is part of the
recorded past of the historical Kimpa Vita. When the prophetess entered
a chapel to meet with Capuchin priest Bernardo de Gallo, she kneeled
before a covered statue of the Virgin Mary and touched her head to the
floor three times (Thornton 1998). In Elinga’s production, Kimpa Vita’s
embodiment of a mystical Kongolese gesture had the power to make
St. Anthony appear. In this case, historical fantasy enhanced the official
history of Kimpa Vita.
While the production opened with a sharp focus on the role of
Portugal in the colonial threat to the early Kongo kingdom, it closed
with a nod toward Brazil. In the final few moments of the play, Kimpa
Vita’s aged follower, Mafuta, predicted a destiny for the prophetess’s
son that resonated with Brazil’s liberation history. After Kimpa Vita
mounted a block onstage and stoically succumbed to her death while
bathed in soft red light that subtly suggested flames, Mafuta, played by
veteran Elinga actress Anacleta Perreira, darted furtively into a forest
with Kimpa Vita’s baby, which she had plucked from the fire.61 There
she encountered one of Kimpa Vita’s female followers. With a long
shawl draped across her hunched-over body, Mafuta handed the
child over to the younger woman. Struck suddenly with a vision of
the child’s future, she raised an arm mystically and declared that he
would one day be transported across the ocean and encounter strange
new lands, where he would grow stronger, gather others to him, and
become a great leader who liberates his people and founds a new king-
dom: ‘He will be called Jemmy . . . or Zumbi, I can’t see it very clearly’
(Abrantes 2009: 49).62 In one imaginative stroke, Mafuta predicted that
Kimpa Vita’s child could grow up to become one of two celebrated
freedom fighters in the Americas: Jemmy, an enslaved Black who led
the 1739 Stono Rebellion in South Carolina, or Zumbi dos Palmares,
the most famous military leader of Palmares, Brazil’s legendary free
Black settlement.
Elinga’s new ending to Kimpa Vita’s story was a fantastical extension
of the prophetess’s legacy. While official histories do not support a gene-
alogical connection between Kimpa Vita and Jemmy or Zumbi, the proph-
etess’s message was clearly relevant to the slave trade that was then
ravishing her homeland. Her call for Dom Pedro IV to restore the Kongo
kingdom sought an end to the civil wars that ultimately aided the
European slave trade, since the Kongolese often enslaved political rivals
and sold them at Portuguese posts. Many were then transported to the
Portuguese-controlled city of Luanda and exported abroad (Thornton
1998). Thus, in the early eighteenth century, the human resources of
the Kongo were being depleted daily while the number of Kongolese
in the New World was increasing, particularly in South Carolina and
Brazil.63
Enter historical fantasy. Abrantes realized that Kimpa Vita’s son

would have been 33 at the time of the Stono Rebellion, so he created
an imaginary bloodline that stretched from Angola to South Carolina.64
The connection to Zumbi was more far-fetched. Historical accounts
suggest that Zumbi was born in Brazil in 1655, almost 50 years before
Kimpa Vita’s son was born. Moreover, by the height of Zumbi’s mili-
tary command in the 1670s, when he fended off numerous Dutch and
Portuguese attacks, the settlement of Palmares was mainly occupied not
by Central Africans but their Creole descendants in Brazil (Anderson
1996). Despite such patent inconsistencies with the historical record,
Abrantes affirmed these diasporic links to Jemmy and Zumbi with a deft
fantastical touch.
Elinga’s performance represents a more interventionist version of
historical imagination than that of the OTACA theatre company.
Fantasy consciously adds an ideological slant to the historical narratives
it recasts with a wink and a nod. Yet if the anachronistic connection to
Zumbi was one of the untruths Abrantes claimed before the FESTLIP
2009 audience, it simultaneously revealed a larger historical reality:
that Angola’s destiny was increasingly linked to Brazil during Kimpa
Vita’s lifetime. By the seventeenth century, White Brazilians, more so
than the Portuguese, were managing the export of slaves from West and
Central Africa to Brazil. After Dutch forces captured Luanda in 1641,
it was Brazil that defended Portugal’s custody over Angola, sending
troops and governors there to resecure the land (Newitt 2010). Yet Black
resistance was alive and well on both sides of the Atlantic, as Zumbi’s
military prowess and Kimpa Vita’s followers demonstrate. By forging
transnational links between the two historical figures, Elinga capitalized
on Zumbi’s celebrated status in Brazil today.
Within the context of FESTLIP, Elinga’s imagined familial connections
highlighted a new surge of Brazilian–Angolan contact in the present
day. Notions of fraternidade (brotherhood) dominate the rhetoric Tânia
Pires used to rationalize her creation of an international festival expressly
devoted to Lusophone theatre. Kimpa Vita’s fantastical ending affirmed
that project, upholding Pires’s vision of a global Lusophone theatre
community forged by artistic bonds and a common festival space and
undergirded by intertwined histories.
There are, of course, ideological pitfalls in the Angolan performers’
evocation of Lusophone solidarity at FESTLIP. By 2009, Luiz Inácio da
Silva was nearing the end of a presidency that had accentuated Brazil’s
affinities with Africa. Citing Brazil’s large Afro-descended popula-
tion and abundant diasporic cultural practices, Lula used the rhetoric
of familial ties to justify an increased Brazilian presence in African

countries today. Not surprisingly, Lula focused on oil-rich countries
such as Angola, which also offered a shared language and a shared
history as a fellow former colony of Portugal. Angola is in fact the top
target for Brazilian companies investing in Africa; Petrobras, the largest
oil company in Brazil, has been in residence there since 1979 (Barbosa
et al. 2009). While these links between Brazil and Africa are in theory
mutually beneficial, the boom in Brazil’s economy signals that it is
the dominant partner in trade alliances with African countries. This
power differentiation went unmentioned in Kimpa Vita, which relied
upon a rhetoric of family ties to Brazil rather than economic ones.
The production thus sidestepped the fact that links between Brazil and
Angola are not as innocuous as they appear at first blush, given the
specter of Petrobras and oil wealth that haunt them.
When I interviewed the Elinga actors at FESTLIP 2009, they spoke
passionately about their artistic explorations of Angolan history.
Veteran actress Anacleta Pereira explained that many people in Angola
today are unfamiliar with the early history of the Kongo kingdom
and its colonization, a story that is integral to the evolution of the
Angolan nation. Since the Elinga actors learned about historical fig-
ures such as Luís Lopes Sequeira and Kimpa Vita primarily through
performing in Abrantes’s plays,65 Elinga’s theatre serves a pedagogical
purpose for actors in Luanda, and presumably for audiences as well.66
However, African performances of history may have a different function
for Portuguese and Brazilian audience members. As Pereira explains,
international festivals give African artists the chance to dispel the
myths, exoticisms, and ‘crystallized concepts of African identity, Africa,
and tradition’ that many Westerners have.67
Yet historical fantasy, as exemplified by Elinga’s theatre, also creates
new myths for festival stages. These imaginative renditions of colonial
histories accord with the artists’ broader perspectives of African history,
specifically what should be left out or added to the narrative. By
recasting the past in a way that highlights marginalized African voices,
African theatre troupes such as Elinga productively reshape the history
that informs Lusophone transnationalism today.
Conclusion
The performances discussed in this chapter reveal that African history

is never simply a retelling of stories, whether those stories come from
the historical record, from folk histories, or from artistic fantasy. In
this case, theatre artists from Cape Verde, Portugal, and Angola crossed
paths in festival spaces and jointly renegotiated their respective national
histories and their relationship to them. Through the sheer embodi-
ment of those stories in festival venues that privilege a transnational
Lusophone community, they also created new collective memories
about the colonial legacies that they and their audiences share. The
performance of these histories also narrated the identity politics that
came to the fore during colonial occupation and persist today. Both
Mãe Preta and Kimpa Vita raise questions about the agency Black
African women have exercised to shape their destinies and those of
their communities. Since other African plays at Mindelact and FESTLIP
posit answers to those gender questions, it is to those performances that
I turn in my next chapter.
4
African Women on Festival
Circuits: Recasting Labor Roles and
Female Sexuality
At the 2004 Mindelact International Theatre Festival, Raiz di Polon, the

most celebrated theatre-dance troupe in Cape Verde, staged Duas Sem
Três (Two without Three), a choreographic fantasia about two women
who lose their virginity early. They are later abandoned by lovers and
are left to the solitude of housework. This narrative could conceivably
have reinforced gendered discourses of labor and emigration, specifically
the well-worn notion that the movement around the globe of Cape
Verdeans is a story of migrating men and women staying at home (see
Marques et al. 2001). Yet a closer look at the kinesthetic vocabulary
of the piece reveals that the performers offered festival audiences
multiple interpretive possibilities. Many of those interpretive options
significantly recast notions of labor, emigration, and sexuality in Cape
Verde.
For Brazil’s 2009 FESTLIP theatre festival, the Mozambican theatre
company M’Bêu also explored female labor and sexuality. The troupe’s
production of O Homem Ideal (The Ideal Man) was about a poor
Mozambican woman’s quest for the perfect partner. The play is an
allegory about Mozambique’s predicament in a global economy that
highlights the risks that confront both African women and nations
who are economically dependent. Evidence suggests that the festival
framework prompted some spectators to attend mainly to the love story
at the expense of the political allegory. Yet it was the love story plot that
enabled M’Bêu to pinpoint how gender atrocities such as sex traffick-
ing prop up today’s global economy. Thus, in the festival context, even
a misreading of the political allegory had the potential to highlight the
urgent gender issues embedded in the play.
In this chapter, I examine how performances centered on African wom-
en’s quotidian activities – their daily work regimens, their associations
97
with other women, and their sexual practices – are profoundly affected
by festival contexts. At first glance, such performances may reify
notions of African women as bearers of national ‘authenticity’ who
maintain the household customs that keep patriarchal structures in
place in their home countries. Yet theatre productions often create
nuanced countertexts that challenge popular notions of gender and
sexuality in Africa, and international festivals provide opportunities for
performers to put those new ideas into motion. As performers launch
themselves onto festival circuits, cultural discourses travel with them
and become waylaid, detoured, and rerouted along the way. Artists
may thus disseminate transformed versions of deeply ingrained cultural
assumptions about gender as they circulate.
The two performances analyzed in this chapter illustrate how
individual festival events in a common transnational circuit may be
in dynamic dialogue with each other. Besides FESTLIP, M’Bêu also
performed O Homem Ideal at Brazil’s other major Portuguese-language
theatre festival, FestLuso in Teresina, Piauí in 2009. Four years after
Raiz di Polon staged Duas Sem Três in Cape Verde for Mindelact, the
company performed it in Brazil for FESTLIP. In 2011, Raiz di Polon
returned to FESTLIP to receive the festival’s annual award to an artist or
company that has made significant contributions to Lusophone thea-
tre.1 Prestigious awards and multiple festival appearances may amplify
a production’s cultural interventions, lending more credence to the
artistic statements it makes. This is especially true on the Lusophone
festival circuit, where performers encounter each other repeatedly at
festival venues, which enables them to engage in evolving cultural
dialogues about productions they have seen over time. A comparative
analysis of gender-focused theatre across Lusophone African countries
makes possible a better understanding of how festival circuits that target
a single transnational language community ‘create new geographies
of affinity and politics of association in the present’ (Moorman and
Sheldon 2005: 35). The productions examined here reject lusofonia’s
essentialist notions of cultural uniformity that was generated by an
earlier era of Portuguese expansion. Instead, they locate Lusophone
intercultural connections in the present moment and in shared festival
spaces.
African feminism and festival frameworks
Much contemporary scholarship on gender and feminism in Africa

presents careful study of African women’s everyday practices, kinship
Recasting Labor Roles and Female Sexuality 99
structures, and labor as ‘correctives’ to the Eurocentric assumptions

about Western feminism and gender studies.2 When Western feminists
construct African women as subject to universal patriarchy, they
make presumptions about female subordination that may not hold
true in local contexts. Oyèrònké Oyewùmí (2004) points out that
mainstream feminist scholarship is rooted in Western notions of the
nuclear family, despite its claims to the contrary. Her analysis of Yoruba
kinship patterns shows that status depends more on age and insider–
outsider status than on gender and opposes the notion that marriage
necessarily subjects Yoruba women to subservient positions (Oyewùmí
1997).3 Similarly, Arnfred’s (2004) research on matrilineal cultures in
the north of Mozambique reveals that motherhood is empowering
to local women, despite the fact that they were targets of misguided
NGO programs that taught them that they were inherently repressed
by patriarchy. Lewis (2004) urges Africanist scholars to counter donor-
driven and government-sponsored research that ‘ignore[s] the minutiae
of women’s labor by basing development programs on skewed notions
of what this labor actually entails’ (27–28).4 Whether the discourse is
Western feminism or development agendas, then, Africanists who study
gender maintain that attending to women’s actual practices should be
the basis for gender paradigms about Africa.
The Cape Verdean and Mozambican performances I discuss in this
chapter do just that. They stage the quotidian practices of wash-
ing clothes, searching for work outside the home, and negotiating
stressful relationships with male partners, thus exploring the impact
of socioeconomic factors on African women’s labor and sexuality. Yet
the performances’ focus on emigration and globalization connect these
local acts to broader transnational patterns. Performance thus offers one
way to trace the impact of ‘macro processes of globalization and trade
liberalization’ on individual people and households, especially among
Africa’s poor populations (Mwase 2007: 66). For example, O Homem
Ideal shows how a Mozambican woman’s futile search for work sends
her into a downward spiral to prostitution.
Yet there are risks in launching such performances on festival circuits.
In festival settings, they are performed for international audiences who
may read them as definitive of the performers’ national culture rather
than reflective of a particular local reality. For example, Ric Knowles
(2004) cites two Scottish productions that successfully made ‘culturally
specific feminist interventions’ when they were performed in their
home venues in Glasgow and Edinburgh (182). At Toronto’s DuMaurier
World Stage Festival in 1996, however, many festival spectators focused
on how the productions conveyed an ambiguous conception of

‘Scottish’ theatre as a whole.5 Holledge and Tompkins (2000) call this
the ‘international sign language’ that festival markets construct when
they commodify performances, a process that transforms them into
empty signifiers of their home cultures (158).
There is even more at stake when female bodies are doing the
representing. Since women are often viewed as the symbols of nations
themselves (Anthias and Yuval-Davis 1989), their presence onstage
may signify ‘national authenticity’ to international audiences who
are unfamiliar with the local context of a play. For festival-goers, the
image of Cape Verdean women performing housework or gathering
firewood onstage may reify preconceived notions about what the lives
of Cape Verdean women are like, even though the lives of the actresses
portraying these gender roles are very different. Even more problematic
is the fact that international spectators tend to perceive Africa as one
homogenous cultural space. I found that many Brazilians who attended
FESTLIP had this view. By casting women into the roles of stay-at-home
laborers and ‘victims’ of male lovers who desert them, the productions
discussed in this chapter ran the risk of perpetuating the notion that
women in Cape Verde, Mozambique, and Africa as a whole are always
and everywhere the same.
Yet when performances on festival circuits defy audience expectations,
they may be able to create new paradigms of African women’s labor
and sexuality. Black feminists have long argued that new theoretical
concepts of gender should spring from women’s quotidian practices
(Collins 1990; hooks 1990; Madison 1998). Since the performances
discussed here deal in the quotidian, they offer receptive spectators new
ways of conceiving gender and sexuality in Africa. Reception theorist
Marco De Marinis (1987) claims that arousing an audience’s attention
at the theatre depends upon the successful manipulation of various
dialectics: the novel and the known, the strange and the familiar, the
unexpected and the predictable. When the frustration of spectator
expectations turns on the reversal and transformation of gender roles,
festival productions may successfully recast notions of African women
and cultural ‘authenticity.’
Duas Sem Três: The aesthetics of breaking with ‘tradition’
Raiz di Polon (Roots of a Cottonwood Tree) was founded in 1991 in

Praia, the capital of Cape Verde. Among its founders were Mano Preto,
its current artistic director, and Bety Fernandes, one of the dancers in
Duas Sem Três. The group has devoted itself to dança contemporânea
(modern/contemporary dance) and has developed an aesthetic that
combines traditional Cape Verdean dances, such as batuko and funaná;
innovations in the conventional performance codes of such dances;
lively theatrical moments composed of gesture, spoken word, and
song; and impressionistic narratives that eschew straightforward, realist
interpretations. The company is popular in Cape Verde, especially in
Praia, where it offers free dance classes in the city center to children and
adults. Raiz di Polon also has an extensive touring record. Before Duas
Sem Três appeared at Mindelact in 2004, the dancers had performed
it at festivals and dance venues in the United States, Brazil, Portugal,
Germany, the Netherlands, and seventeen African nations.6
Duas Sem Três is based on a poetic text by Santiago Island musician
and writer Mário Lúcio Sousa.7 The text describes two nameless Muses,
one of the city and the other of the countryside. Their reputation as
the most beautiful women on the island spreads, driving men almost
to insanity. As the Muses grow older, their men go off to war, emigrate,
or marry others. They begin to take solace in each other’s company.
The title of the piece, ‘Two without Three,’ hints at why the men did
not marry them. In Portuguese and Cape Verdean Crioulo, losing one’s
‘three’ is a euphemism for losing one’s virginity.8 Thus, the two Muses
are not virgins. In certain rural communities in Cape Verde, this might
taint the women’s reputations and preclude marriage.
Dancer Bety Fernandes described Duas Sem Três as an homage to the
Cape Verdean woman’s ‘way of being.’9 Yet in many ways, the dance
piece defies expectations of what a ‘typical’ Cape Verdean woman
should be or do. Motherhood is often seen as empowering to Cape
Verdean women. It can be a strong symbol of female identity, even if
a woman’s children are by different fathers and she is raising them by
herself, as is often the case in Cape Verde, where polygyny is widespread
(Carter and Aulette 2009). Indeed, the icon adopted by the Organization
of Cape Verdean Women (Organização das Mulheres de Cabo Verde;
OMCV) emphasizes the primacy of motherhood on the islands: two ears
of corn encircle a woman who has a child on her back, a hoe in her right
hand, and a book under her left arm. Whether she moves in the realm
of agriculture or education (or both), it is the child who centers her. Yet
despite the primacy of motherhood in Cape Verdean culture, the Muses
in Duas Sem Três are not mothers. They are women who discover their
beauty and sensuality in their youth and later undertake household
labor while dancing and singing playfully together. Duas Sem Três thus
creates a new paradigm for female autonomy.
In other ways, the performance reinforces the image of Cape Verdean

women as tied to the home. For a touring piece, there is perhaps a certain
logic in depicting African women as ‘traditional,’ since this is what
outsiders to the culture might anticipate seeing. This was evident in the
short blurb about Duas Sem Três written by Mark Depputer, a Belgian
who was formerly the artistic director of Danças na Cidade (Dances in
the City), now called Alkantara, a cultural institution that has organized
annual dance festivals in the Belém Cultural Center in Lisbon, where
Duas Sem Três debuted in 2002.10 Depputer wrote:
Women have a special place in Cape Verdean culture. In a country of

[male] emigrants, it’s the women who maintain traditions and assure
their survival and continuation. Batuko [dance] is an impressive
example of the powerful contribution of the African woman to her
continent’s culture. From this context arose the idea of transforming
the female imaginary into a duet performed by the Raiz di Polon
dancers. (Depputer 2004 [2002])11
As Anne McClintock (1995) notes, conceptions of the nation as

a ‘modern-day Janus,’ with one face looking forward and one looking
back, often takes on a gendered subtext. Cape Verdean men are
associated with emigration and mobility, a ‘forward-looking’ aspect of
nationhood, while women are linked to tradition and stasis, an aspect
of nationhood rooted in a nostalgic past (358–59).12 Depputer’s text
falls into this trap. Perhaps he had a financial motive for portraying
Cape Verdean women in this way. Because his institution sponsored the
creation of the piece, it received 20 percent of the profits from Duas Sem
Três’s bookings in Europe after the Danças na Cidade festival. Depputer
thus had a vested interest in marketing the piece to foreign audiences,
at least some of whom were presumably expecting to see ‘traditional’
African women onstage.13
Depputer’s text was reprinted in the program for the 2004 Mindelact
festival, illustrating how gender discourses can attach themselves to
performances and travel festival circuits with them. However, such
discourses often provide an overly simplistic or incomplete picture of
a locality’s gender relations. It is certainly the case that migration has
been a formative aspect of Cape Verdean nationhood. During the slave
trade, people were compelled to travel to and from the islands, and later
they were sent to the cacau plantations of São Tomé during Portuguese
colonialism. Today, many Cape Verdeans voluntarily emigrate to the
United States and Europe (Batalha and Carling 2008).14 Yet what slips
through the cracks of Depputer’s text – and of much Cape Verdean music
and literature that presents emigration as a male practice – is that women
have long participated in Cape Verde’s well-trodden migration routes.
Although the American whaling boats that stopped at the islands from
the nineteenth through the mid-twentieth centuries recruited mainly
male crew members for their navigations to New England, women began
joining the resulting diasporic communities in the United States in the
late 1800s (Pires-Hester 1999). And while it is true that in the 1960s and
1970s, men constituted most of the influx of Cape Verdean workers
arriving in Portugal because of labor shortages in that country (Batalha
2008), more women emigrated from Cape Verde than men in the dec-
ade after independence and men and women now migrate in more or
less equal numbers (Lobban and Saucier 2007).15 Today, Cape Verdean
women of all socioeconomic classes are on the move. Young women
compete for slots at universities in Portugal, Brazil and other South
American countries, Russia, China, and elsewhere. Many middle-aged
women work as rabidantes, petty traders who travel to Senegal, Brazil,
Portugal, or Holland to buy clothes, shoes, and cosmetics to resell at
a profit back home (Marques et al. 2001). Some scholars attribute the
feminization of Cape Verdean migration to a lack of employment pros-
pects on the islands and a growing market in Portugal, Italy, and Spain
for domestic workers (Lobban and Saucier 2007).
The two dancers who perform in Duas Sem Tres are women who travel
widely. Bety Fernandes tours constantly with Raiz di Polon to Europe,
South America, and mainland Africa. When I was doing my fieldwork
in Cape Verde, Rosy Timas was studying dance full-time in Lisbon. In
fact, the two women created Duas Sem Três in Lisbon in concert with
Portuguese choreographer Margarida Mestre. This raises a question:
Why did these Cape Verdean ‘women who move’ choose to depict
Cape Verdean ‘women who stay put’ in the theatre-dance piece they
co-created? Through my ethnographic work with Raiz di Polon, I came
to understand that the choreographic movement creates a countertext
to the discourse of male emigration in Depputer’s program notes.
This countertext is bolstered by Timas and Fernandes’s own global
movement, which was also mentioned in the program. Thus, spectators’
careful attention to the piece’s choreography and international trajec-
tory would conceivably undercut the image of the static, ‘traditional’
African woman foreign audiences might expect to see.
For the Cape Verdeans who attended Duas Sem Três at Mindelact, the
performance potentially interrupted an age-old national narrative. In the
popular imagination in Cape Verde, Santiago has long been associated
with the African pole of the nation’s creolized culture. Batuko dancing,
which features a circular shape, call-and-response singing, and rapid
hip movements, is widely viewed as a ‘survival’ of mainland African
dances.16 Batuko is among the cultural practices identified as badiu,
which in Cape Verde refers to the people of Santiago Island, the form
of Crioulo spoken there (which includes more loan words from African
languages), and the island’s music and dances.17 While batuko was
periodically prohibited during Portuguese colonialism for its sexually
explicit movements and association with African culture (Carter and
Aulette 2009), after independence the Cape Verdean government began
championing batuko dance as part of its ‘re-Africanization’ agenda in the
1970s and 1980s (Lobban 1995). Many São Vicente islanders resent what
they perceive to be the government’s continued privileging of badiu
culture as ‘authentically’ Cape Verdean. Adding to this regional rivalry is
a city/country divide: Mindelo city dwellers often view badius as ‘hicks’
because many communities on Santiago Island are rural and poor.
On the surface, Duas Sem Três seems to anchor the two women to
the badiu universe and its accompanying social biases. Many of the
settings in the theatre-dance piece are strikingly rural and suggestive
of Santiago’s wide expanses of countryside, particularly scenes where
the two women gather firewood. However, the piece shifts in and out
of the Santiaguense world as the women segue seamlessly from batuko
dancing into Brazilian samba, blues rhythms, and dances reminiscent
of São Vicente Island. Thus, even though Duas Sem Três largely inhabits
the cultural and topographical landscape of Santiago Island, it refuses
a fixed badia identity,18 releasing the women from prescribed categories
of gender, ethnicity, and region in Cape Verde.
Duas Sem Três had the potential to disrupt gender and cultural dis-
courses largely because of the dance troupe’s aesthetic, which seeks to
transform ‘traditional’ Cape Verdean culture. Over the many months
I did ethnographic research with the Raiz di Polon dancers, I observed
many instances when they recast the gender codes of Cape Verdean
dance. At one rehearsal, they developed a sequence inspired by batuko
music in which a ring of dancers encircled company member Luís da
Rosa, who had swaths of white cloth around his waist that extended to
the surrounding dancers. Since batuko is typically danced by women and
features a female solo dancer in the middle of the circle, I was curious
about this gender reversal. Bety Fernandes later explained to me, ‘This
is contemporary dance. We can’t follow the rules.’ Presumably, Raiz
di Polon’s flexible approach to Cape Verdean dance forms encourages
spectators to think of gender as malleable, capable of being recast in
performance and in the everyday lives of the Cape Verdean women to

whom Duas Sem Três pays tribute.
My work with Raiz di Polon epitomizes my methodology of
combining co-performer witnessing (Conquergood 2002) with a material
analysis of festival frameworks (Knowles 2004). At Mindelact 2004
and in summer 2005, I observed and interviewed the dancers. Later,
I actually became a student in the company’s dance school in Praia
(from April to July 2007). During my fieldwork, I interviewed Bety
Fernandes twice and spoke with her informally on numerous occasions
(the other dancer, Rosy Timas, was then living in Lisbon). In what
follows, I weave Fernandes’s commentary on the dance piece into my
analysis of it. My performance analysis focuses on several key themes
I observed while watching Duas Sem Três at Mindelact 2004: shifts in
locality indicated by the women’s adaptation of non-Santiago Island
dances, new configurations for female-to-female relationships, and the
destabilization of class signifiers. My discussion of the performance also
draws on insights I gleaned from my participation in various dance
classes with the company that illustrated the cultural significance of
certain moments in the performance.
The piece began in near darkness. Two women stood at opposite
corners of the stage, their backs to each other. Bending their upper
bodies forward and backward in sync, as if blown by the wind, the
women began a simple, two-toned whistle in harmony with each other.
Bety Fernandes: ‘Here we’re getting to know each other through the air. Our
bodies are saying, “Receive my breath.” We did some research [for the piece]
on São Vicente. We went to a place with lots of wind. Our postures repre-
sent trees swaying.’19 Standing at the upstage right corner, Bety whirled
around to face Rosy’s back, leaping a few steps closer to her. The two
began to sing softly ‘Musa, Musa’ (Muse). Facing each other center stage,
they blew noisily in the other’s direction, twirling their bodies around in
response. Turning to the front, they whistled out into the audience, as
if inviting them to join the dialogue. Their lower bodies gyrating, they
began to perform how their pubescent bodies were developing, sliding
their hands over their breasts and their swinging hips as they chanted
lines about adolescence from Sousa’s text.
Suddenly, they removed the identical kerchiefs they were wearing.
Tossing them high into the air, they exploded into funaná, a partner
dance native to Santiago that is typically danced by a male and female
couple. Tearing across the stage, they first performed the rapid two-step
alone, arms held up waltz-style as if dancing with imaginary partners.
Next, their bodies joined together, first back to back, then Bety dancing
behind Rosy with her arms wrapped around her, beating the funaná
tempo on her stomach. Bety Fernandes: ‘This shows how women call
attention to themselves and their bodies and how men take notice.’ They
then accelerated into a rapid leap-frog-like movement: one hurdled
the other’s bent-over body and then shimmied backward between her
legs, repeating the sequence in turn, over and over. Bety Fernandes: ‘This
part shows insistence. The women espera informaçon (wait for information
[about their men]). They hear news about the other woman [the other Muse
living on the island]. The whole piece represents a time when, for women, your
life was lived just for a man and the high point was marrying.’
The women then retreated to the back of the stage to lie down next
to a pile of branches, one arm extended up to form a silhouette against
a sunset background. On a recording, the women’s voices say: ‘But
little by little, information began to grow scarce.’20 Rising to a kneeling
position, the women began gathering the sticks into bunches. Bety
picked up a pano cloth from the floor and tied it around her waist, as a
woman from the countryside would do; Rosy draped hers around her
neck European-style, acquiring a more urban air. Balancing the firewood
bundles on their heads, they walked to the front of the stage, turned
to the side, and swayed forward and backward in sync with each other.
Bety Fernandes: ‘Waiting. Anguish. The dry wood represents times of drought
in Cape Verde.’ Each woman began to trace a path around the stage as
Sousa’s recorded voice recites, ‘With no news, time runs more slowly
and arrives more quickly.’
As we watched my video recording of Duas Sem Três together,
Fernandes explained this first part of the performance: ‘Men are present
in the piece from the beginning to the end, because all of the women’s
actions are in response to the presence or absence of or hope for men.’
While it is clear that the women were waiting anxiously for word
from their lovers, what struck me most was the web of kinesthetic
communication the women wove with each other throughout. Whistling,
leapfrog movements, chanting, and funaná dancing are all stylized ways
of speaking with a partner through the body. During one particular
dance class with Raiz di Polon, I learned more about how this corporeal
communication functions.
Notes from the field: 21 April 2007
At class tonight, we took turns walking down the center aisle of the room
with a partner who would basically mold or guide our body’s motions by
putting a hand on the small of our back or pushing down to indicate that
we should fall to the floor or giving us a little boost with their hands to
indicate that we should spring up. They basically drove our bodies to move
a certain way. Initially, I had trouble relaxing and figuring out what to do
with my body on the spot like that. Then Mano paired up the inexperienced
dancers with the experienced ones. He told me to go down the aisle with
Nuno [a member of the Raiz di Polon company]. Nuno did something
interesting in between our turns: even while we were waiting in line to go
again, he kept prodding my arm up with his or giving my shoulders a little
nudge, just to test how relaxed and responsive I was. After our last time
down the aisle, he turned to me and said, ‘Espera informaçon’ (Wait for
information). I said that, yes, I have a tendency to anticipate how to move
my body next, and he said that it’s better to wait for the information his
body is giving mine.
In this example, I was the one ‘waiting for information’ from a man.
Nuno told me to follow his indications about how to move. This is
perhaps a corporeal enactment of how machismo operates in male-to-
female relationships in Cape Verde: the male takes on the dominant
role. Yet there were other kinds of pairings in that class. Sometimes
a female student would drive a male student’s body or one female would
drive another. I began to see Rosy and Bety’s corporeal entanglements in
Duas Sem Três in the same light. Since they seemed to take turns doing
the driving, they were in a constant mode of ‘waiting for information’
from each other’s bodies. Thus, in Duas Sem Três, ‘espera informaçon’
has a double meaning. On a literal level, it describes women waiting
for news from departed men. On a corporeal one, it illustrates two
women learning to move in sync with each other. The Muses respond
to a newfound female companionship and the messages their bodies
are sending. Their motions gesture toward a burgeoning relationship
in which the dominant/subordinate rules of machismo do not apply.
Other moments in the performance vividly illustrate the birth of
this new coalition between females. During the leapfrog sequence, the
dizzying repetition of upward and downward movements creates the
illusion that the women are giving birth to each other in a perpetual
cycle. The women seem inextricable from one another. This symbolizes
the possibility of gender solidarity across class boundaries, mainly
because class, as an abstract concept, is made and unmade throughout
the piece. When the women toss off their lenços (the kerchiefs covering
their heads) before launching into funaná, they cast off an accessory
that can carry the stigma of low social origins when worn outside the
house (Meintel 1984). Later, when one ties the pano (cloth) around her
waist and the other ties it around her neck, they reinvent themselves as
a provincial countrywoman and a cosmopolitan city lady, respectively.
However, both carry firewood on their heads, a task linked to rural,
poorer settings. When the semiotic signs of their apparel clash with those
of their labor, the two Muses reveal the arbitrary nature of class signifiers,
paving the way for a more egalitarian alliance between women.
After disrupting class signifiers, the two women rework gender
norms during the funaná dance sequence. Cape Verdean choreographer
António Tavares (2005) calls funaná a seduction game in which the
rapid tempo of the side-to-side hip movements interacts playfully
with the amount of space between the two dancers, who are typically
a man and a woman facing each other with hands clasped together
waltz-style at shoulder height. In Duas Sem Três, the women direct their
performances of sensuality to each other, in stark contrast to the ear-
lier moments in the piece when they cupped their breasts and swung
their hips for invisible male admirers. Transgressing the gender codes of
funaná, they entwine their female bodies, subverting the signification
of the dance form’s Latino influences and machista inflections (Tavares
2005). This is a more egalitarian version than funaná conventionally
danced, wherein the man typically leads a woman. In this version, the
two women lead each other.
Fernandes explained to me that their intention in creating the piece
was not necessarily to convey a lesbian relationship but a growing
platonic bond between women.21 Yet the entanglement of their two
dancing bodies does offer same-sex desire as an interpretive possibility
for spectators. It is thus instructive to consider how that possibility
might have resonated with Cape Verdean spectators. Because of the
archipelago’s history with Portuguese colonialism, Cape Verdean society
is heavily influenced by Western Catholicism and its conservative
stance toward homosexuality (nearly 80 percent of Cape Verdeans are
Catholic).22 The islands’ social mores are likewise influenced by nearby
West African cultures (Arenas and Quinlan 2002). It is well known
that in many African countries there is social intolerance, and in some
cases, legal repercussions, for alternative sexual lifestyles. For much of
Cape Verde’s history, homosexual acts were punishable by fines and
even prison. That disappeared from the law after a revision to the
Penal Code in 2004;23 today, no laws in Cape Verde can be construed
as discriminatory toward sexual minorities. Notably, 2004 was the
same year that Raiz di Polon performed Duas Sem Três at the Mindelact
festival. It was thus a critical moment when public perception of
homosexuality was conceivably changing in Cape Verde.
São Vicente, the home of Mindelact, has long been regarded as

the island in Cape Verde with the most open attitude toward diverse
sexualities. It is quite normal to see drag queens strolling through the
Mindelo town center. Lesbians in Mindelo also have a comparatively
easier time with being ‘out’ than their counterparts on Santiago Island,
which has a reputation for being more conservative. While some
lesbians on Santiago are open about their sexuality (especially in more
populous spaces such as Praia, Assomada, and Tarrafal), others who
choose to live discreetly can take years to discern the codes, identities
of other lesbians in their areas, and the correct meeting places.24 Yet
despite local differences in the level of tolerance, gays throughout the
archipelago still experience widespread social discrimination, and even
random acts of violence.25 Duas Sem Três, which offers subtle hints at
same-sex desire, thus has tremendous social significance since it may
help sway the Cape Verdean public toward a greater acceptance of
sexual diversity.
How might festival audiences have perceived the female-to-female
dance sequence in Duas Sem Três? International spectators at Mindelact
2004 consisted mainly of Brazilian and Portuguese artists, since no
mainland African theatre companies were present that year. In the
Lusophone realm, Brazil is undoubtedly the country with the greatest
level of tolerance toward homosexuality; the first lesbian and gay
organization there, Somos, arose in the late 1970s. Today such
organizations are prevalent throughout the country, and sexual
minorities are highly visible in popular culture, especially telenovelas
and parades for both Gay Pride and Carnaval. In Portugal, identity
politics rose to prominence only in the 1990s with the advent of AIDS
activism, but now that country as well is home to numerous gay organi-
zations and cultural activities (Arenas and Quinlan 2002). Brazilian and
Portuguese spectators might therefore have been even more receptive to
the possibilities for same-sex desire in Raiz di Polon’s performance than
Cape Verdean audience members present at Mindelact.
Dance theorist Colleen Dunagan (2005) hypothesizes about the
process of performance reception. She explains that as people move
through the world, they retain tactile and muscular memories of
gestures, movements, and postures, each of which is infused with an
affective quality and a cognitive perception. An individual’s repertoire
of motion memory, which is culturally specific, is activated when
she observes a dancer embodying any movement in her own corpus.
Dancers thus transmit both to each other and to spectators the abstract
concepts encapsulated in their gestures. Any audience member who
had previously danced funaná (presumably most of the Cape Verdean

spectators) would have specific mind-body associations with the
movements. Watching the dance unfold between women can disrupt
the narrative normally mapped onto it, that of a male–female con-
quista (‘conquering’ or ‘courting’) situation. The story of Cape Verdean
men seducing women with a suggestive hip movement is rewritten
as women use the same corporeal language to solicit each other’s
companionship.
Later in the piece, the two Muses, still carrying firewood on their
heads, shimmied to center stage in the quick, staccato one-step char-
acteristic of batuko dance. Eschewing the typical circular formation of
batuko, they chanted the phrase ‘boca d’água a tua’ (your watery mouth)
to each other angrily, their volume rising with the accelerating tempo
of their gyrating hips until they reached a frenetic climax. In conven-
tional batuko, this is called rapica tchabeta, when the female song leader
reduces her call-and-response to a single phrase and the women in the
circle accelerate the percussionist beat, which they produce by pound-
ing on rolled-up cloths in their laps (Hurley-Glowa 2007). In Duas Sem
Três, the dancers’ escalating chanting climaxed in an actual altercation
with each other signaled by piercing accusatory shrieks and wildly
gesticulating arms. Bety Fernandes: ‘Here, we’re nearing the end of our lives
and we’re filled with emotion. It’s a lament. “I didn’t marry. I prepared for
that, but it didn’t happen.”’ As the firewood dropped to the floor, the
Mindelact audience cheered and whistled appreciatively. In a dance
class with Raiz di Polon, I experienced a similar scene of angry chaos.
Notes from the field: 26 April 2007
Tonight, Bety suggested we go back to the exercise Mano had invented

a few classes back (where we make groups at each of the room’s four
corners and two people from opposite sides take turns either crossing each
other in the middle or pirouetting off to the right). She wanted to get a
pattern down so that each individual in the group took his or her turn and
then each group together did the switches and crosses with the group across
from them. Chaos erupted: everyone started shouting and arguing about
how to get it right. We never resolved how to do it. Alfredo (another student
in the class) turned to me and said, ‘This is why a police force has only one
chief. If there are lots of leaders, you can’t get anything done.’ It seemed
out of sync with the rest of the class: if we were supposed to be training in
group dynamics, why couldn’t we listen to each other about how to make
this exercise work?
Dance class that night quickly devolved into tumult. In proposing

a new exercise and joining in the argument about how to perfect it,
Fernandes used her role as a leader of the troupe to transform the
ambience of the class. Shouting is its own expressive language, one
that Bety used effectively onstage (in Duas Sem Três) and off (in class).
In class, it may have had gender implications. Since Bety was at the
time the only female among five very vocal core company members
practicing in Praia, she may have occasionally felt that she needed to
shout in order to make her voice heard. In Duas Sem Três, shouting
expresses the anguish the women feel when they realize they have
been abandoned by their men and have become social outcasts. They
had surrendered their virginity early and had not married, which, as
Bety Fernandes suggests in her narrative, triggers a crisis of self. Yet this
chaotic moment is merely the starting point of the piece’s denouement,
which is best expressed thematically as ‘change.’ In the final sequence,
they find alternate solutions to their predicament. They begin to form
a coalition with each other through the cadences of household labor.
As we practiced in dance class so often, they learn to move together.
After the batuko dance sequence and its heated scuffle, the Muses scur-
ried to the front of the stage. On a recording, their voices sang, ‘Muda,
Muda,’ a riff on the opening chant of ‘Musa, Musa.’ Bety Fernandes: ‘This
part has two meanings. “Muda” can mean “mute,” without noise. There’s
no more information to receive [about men], so we’re staying quiet. But
“muda” also means “change,” or a movement from one place to another.’
Suddenly, the spotlight shifted left, signaling a change in setting.
A banana dangled from the ceiling, as Bety dragged a large metal
washbasin into the light and Rosy followed with a vacuum cleaner. Rosy
playfully lip-synced into the vacuum’s hose as a blues song played in
the background, Bety swishing her mop inside the basin in time to the
song’s sliding notes.26 Bety Fernandes: ‘First, I go to the city to dance the
blues with Rosy.’ The music then switched abruptly to a quicker-paced
coladêra, a Cape Verdean partner dance that Bety danced with her mop
while Rosy rhythmically dashed a scrub brush against a washboard.
Bety: ‘Then Rosy goes to the countryside to dance a coladêra with me.’
Next, the women reeled into a breathless samba, a Brazilian dance
adopted by Cape Verdeans for their own Carnaval tradition, which takes
place primarily in Mindelo. When the samba music stopped, they faced
each other center stage and threw their mops and brooms down. They
danced the colá San Jon, a partner dance linked closely to São Vicente
Island. Dancing a step to the side, away from their partner, they then
swung inward so their two bodies bumped against each other. In the
piece’s final moments, the women dragged a long piece of white mesh
from offstage and wrapped it around themselves, connecting their two
bodies (Fig. 6). Alternating wild laughter with quiet calm, they repeated
the open-ended question, ‘They didn’t marry me because . . . ?’ Bety: ‘It
ends with playfulness. You didn’t get married, but you won’t die. You’ll find
a way to be happy.’
In this final half of the performance, the Muses recast narratives of
mobility. First, the household labor sequence is a corrective – in the
best tradition of African feminism – to the gendered equation in
Depputer’s program notes of women ‘maintaining traditions’ and ‘staying
put.’ As Fernandes explained, the Muses visit each other in their city
and country homes because ‘taking things to other places’ is a way
to preserve dance traditions.27 In other words, travel, not staying put,
keeps performance modes alive. And in Duas Sem Três, it is women who
are doing the traveling. This is clear from a series of shifts in music and
locality. In the first part of the piece, the women perform dances linked
to Santiago Island (funaná and batuko), but in the second part they tap
into music with a more global reach (blues and samba). Both of the
latter are cosmopolitan forms of music that transcend the national
Figure 6 Bety Fernandes and Rosy Timas wrap themselves up in a long white
piece of mesh resembling a wedding veil in Raiz di Polon’s Duas Sem Três. Photo:
João Barbosa, courtesy of the Mindelact Association.
spaces in which they were born. Similarly, the dancers themselves do

not remain on the islands but keep Cape Verdean dance alive by taking
recast versions of it to other places as they tour and perform on festival
circuits. In fact, the section on Raiz di Polon in the program for the
Mindelact 2004 festival featured a long list of cities the company had
toured to, including São Paulo, Lisbon, Amsterdam, Berlin, Brussels, and
Dakar. Festival-goers who read the Muses’ blues and samba movements
in conjunction with Raiz di Polon’s travel log could perceive a narrative
of the mobility of Cape Verdean women in the world that starkly
contrasted with Depputer’s rhetoric of male emigration.
At the national level, the sequence of dances posed a challenge
to standard narratives of regional identities in Cape Verde. When
the samba and the colá San Jon began in the play, the mood altered
noticeably. Lights brightened the stage and the dances and recorded
music suggested that we had been transported from Santiago Island,
where the piece began, to Mindelo, on São Vicente Island. Whereas
samba evokes Mindelo’s vibrant Carnaval celebrations, the colá San Jon
is firmly tied to festive processions performed for saints’ days on São
Vicente and neighboring Santo Antão Island (Rodrigues 1997). As they
created the piece, Timas and Fernandes did research on dances from
both Santiago Island and São Vicente Island. The piece thus rejects
a primary focus on either of Cape Verde’s two main cultural poles,
which challenges essentialist discourses about them. As Kesha Fikes
(2006) notes, the badiu racial identity is often represented as stable in
historical and popular discourses in Cape Verde: badius are presumed
to be ‘blacker’ and more African. Yet when the dancers create island
identities onstage by performing a confluence of dance moves from
each island, they reveal the identities to be social constructs. Cape
Verdeans who attended Mindelact would have been unable to pinpoint
a singular regional identity for the Muses, since the dancers moved
seamlessly from Santiago to São Vicente Island dances without any
interruption in their characters’ stories.
The household labor sequence also called into question typical
assumptions about African women and domestic work. This was the
segment of Duas Sem Três that garnered the most attention from
spectators during Raiz di Polon’s tours. In South Africa, for example,
a young man asked company members if the dangling banana was
a phallic symbol for the male oppression hovering over the dancers’
heads as they performed arduous housework.28 Yet Fernandes stressed
to me that their intention was not to enter the polemic of male versus
female power.29 Indeed, the South African man overlooked a crucial
aspect of the labor scenes, one that Eunice Ferreira (2005) noticed in her
performance review of Mindelact 2004: ‘The women [in Duas Sem Três]
transformed the mundane chore of carrying firewood into a symbol of
grace and beauty, and expressed humor and joy in a battle of household
instruments’ (276). The key word is ‘transformed’ and the key concept
is female agency.
The dance scenes reject the notion that domestic labor is isolative;
they infuse work with lighthearted play between friends. They thus
present an alternative to a standard narrative about Cape Verdean
women and work. For example, Carter and Aulette (2009) looked at
rising unemployment in Cape Verde (the result of globalization and
the IMF’s structural adjustment policies), increased emigration by males
seeking work abroad, and the Cape Verdean women left behind. For
the poor women they surveyed, domestic and wage labor were purely
survival strategies in tough economic circumstances.
While such bleak stories about the home front certainly ring true
for many Cape Verdean women, Duas Sem Três constructs the equally
viable narrative of shared domestic labor between two female friends
who have formed a reciprocal support system. The Muses perform their
housework in playful solidarity with each other. They thus transform
the image of the Cape Verdean woman performing compelled household
labor into that of a woman who has chosen to run her own household
and who furthermore has chosen to become a dancer and singer in her
home.
Fernandes’s lifestyle reinforces that interpretive choice. She once
explained to me that in Cape Verde, family duties, boyfriends, and
pregnancy can all result in women being ‘shut in the house’ instead
of availing themselves of theatre and dance opportunities. Neither her
parents nor her grandparents, who raised her jointly, would allow her
to join local dance groups. In time, she persuaded them to let her do so.
Later on, she gave up her job teaching adult literacy classes when Raiz
di Polon began to be offered world tours. She said to herself, ‘At this
moment in my life, I have to dance.’30 At the time of my fieldwork, she
was the only professional female dancer in Cape Verde; she was mak-
ing her living exclusively from dance.31 Through her own life and her
imaginative construction of the domestic realm in Duas Sem Três, Bety
recasts narratives of the labor of Cape Verdean women and disperses
them globally on festival circuits.
The performance’s final example of cultural transformation is the
last tableau, which solidifies earlier gestures toward new configura-
tions of female coalitions. When the Muses drape the white mesh
around themselves, they bind themselves together. This is perhaps

a new form of a Cape Verdean ‘help tie,’ or a non-familial bond that
establishes mutual emotional and economic support among individu-
als. ‘Help ties’ are important in Cape Verde; godparents are the most
common example. In Cape Verde, it is crucial to choose an appropri-
ate godparent for one’s child, since that person will also bear financial
responsibility for the child’s well-being (Solomon 1992). The new
relationship is often cemented at a large baptismal party the godparent
throws for the baby, usually at her or his own expense. Conceivably,
the scene with the white mesh that closes Duas Sem Três is a new kind
of ‘help-tie’ ceremony that unites the women in a mutual pledge of
support. Fernandes corroborated this; she told me that the dance
piece documents a historical transition in the self-sufficiency of Cape
Verdean women: ‘Before, women lived only for men. Now we live for
our [female] friends.’32
Because homosexuality is still a social taboo in Cape Verde, a more
radical reading of the final tableau emerges if the women are interpreted
as actually marrying. When Raiz di Polon performed Duas Sem Três in
London, a woman asked in a talkback session if the Muses were lesbians.
While Fernandes replied that this was not their intent as choreographers,
she did explain that the performance is meant to address the female
universe, which includes both heterosexual and lesbian women. Thus,
she did not preclude the possibility of reading women’s desire for each
other in the performance. Indeed, the visual image creates the space for
audience members to imagine a same-sex union. The white mesh they
wrap around each other was in fact made from a bunch of wedding
veils sewn together.33 The church wedding that the veil signifies may
be implausible in Cape Verde, where two women could not actually
marry in a Christian church. However, the final image could propose
a common-law union between the two women. In Cape Verde, such
unions between men and women are much more typical than church
weddings, which primarily happen among the middle to upper classes.
Therefore, the image of two women entangled in wedding veils has the
potential to challenge the heteronormativity that dominates common-
law unions on the islands.
Duas Sem Três also acts as a corrective to certain strains of feminist
scholarship on Africa. In her introduction to an early anthology on the
subject, Gwendolyn Mikell defined African feminism as ‘heterosexual’
and ‘pro-natal’ (1997: 4). Responding to trends in Western feminism
that privileged diverse sexualities and pro-choice stances, Mikell
defended African women’s right to choose male–female unions and
motherhood without sacrificing their feminism. Some feminists later

called into question the essentialism of Mikell’s statement (Lewis 2004).
This debate revealed that African feminism cannot be reduced to a single
definition. Duas Sem Três also complicates the notion that African
feminism is monolithic. It offered international festival audiences
images of childless Cape Verdean women who reveled in each other’s
company and hinted at the possibility of same-sex desire. The Raiz di
Polon dancers thus affirmed that female empowerment in Africa can
take numerous forms.
On the Lusophone festival circuit, Duas Sem Três became part of
a larger discussion about gender and feminism in Africa. When the
piece circulated to Rio de Janeiro for FESTLIP 2008, it broadened the
geographical scope of the discussion. A year later, the Mozambican
troupe M’Bêu offered another paradigm for African feminism at FESTLIP,
one that was heteronormative and rooted in the nuclear family. When
these two performances are read as a dialogue across festival spaces and
time periods, they subvert any attempt to establish firm categories for
African women’s labor and sexuality.
O Homem Ideal: Gender and labor productivity

in a global era
At the production of O Homem Ideal at FESTLIP 2009, which I witnessed,

video images of a busy Maputo roadway unfolded on the back wall of
the performance space, an intimate black box theatre (SESC Mezanino)
in Copacabana. The film showed chaotic traffic lanes, white commuter
vans bursting with urban passengers, and crowds streaming through
open-air markets. It also showed the lone figure of a slender, middle-
aged African woman dressed in a Western-style pantsuit hugging bags
to her chest and clutching others piled on her head as she gazed into
the traffic with a bewildered air, waiting for her chance to cross. The set
consisted of a makeshift bar and islands of black cubes for restaurant
tables. A barman on a stool watched the woman’s progress on the
screen and called out to her to cross the street. Suddenly, the woman
from the video, Deolinda, appeared in the flesh onstage. Her dialogue
revealed that she was from a rural area but had recently relocated to the
city. She began to address a series of sculpted clay heads on multilevel
podiums scattered on the stage. They represent her past lovers, and
their names allude to Mozambique’s history of continental alliances:
Afrinio, a brawny man who pleased her sexually and gave her children;
Euros, who fulfilled her everyday needs but forbade her to speak her
mind; Américo, a rich suitor who showered her with gifts until she
displeased him; and Anísio (Asia), whose intentions she does not trust.
As Deolinda explained that she was seeking the ‘homem ideal’ (ideal
man), she was joined by an actress in a long white dress who played
her Conscience. The Barman told her she could stay at the establish-
ment for free if she agreed to act as the restaurant’s ‘taster’ and to strip
for male clients. Her Conscience, however, urged her to talk with her
suitors and forge an equal partnership with one or more of them rather
than submit to the risky, degrading tasks the Barman demanded in
exchange for his charity.
O Homem Ideal simultaneously examined household politics and
international relations. Playwright and director Evaristo Abreu first
wrote it as a monologue and then expanded it into a piece for three
actors while he was in residence in Germany for the ABC Augsburg
Brecht Festival in 2008. Before circulating the show to Rio de Janeiro for
FESTLIP 2009, M’Bêu had performed it in Germany, in five provinces
in Mozambique, and in the capital, Maputo, which is also the play’s
setting. Interestingly, the inspiration for the play came from its lead
actress, Yolanda Fumo, who suggested a story line about Mozambican
women and all of the efforts they undertake in their daily lives. Abreu
latched onto Fumo’s idea but thought the play would have broader
appeal if it addressed both male-female dynamics and, allegorically,
relations among various continents.34
O Homem Ideal is a good laboratory for investigating the intersection
of African theatre with gender and globalization. Like the nation of
Mozambique, Deolinda must either rely on powerful partners (mainly
those located on other continents) or receive aid and loans that come
with strings attached: we might think of the bar as a kind of IMF or World
Bank. The play’s dual signification resonates with several recent themes
in gender theory. Following Carla Freeman, Sue-Ellen Case (2007) argues
that feminist analyses of the global should illustrate how embodied
sexual subjects participate in creating local and global flows and are
not merely the victims of such flows. M’Bêu’s play does just that. At the
level of the love story, Deolinda is urged to begin dialogues that would
make more equal gender relations possible on the home front, while the
play’s political allegory slyly reveals how the global economy relies on
poor women’s participation in informal labor markets and sex traffick-
ing, or what Sassen (2007) calls ‘countergeographies of globalization’
(26). By exposing how globalization has a disproportionate impact
on Africa and African women, the play illustrates that flows of global
capital are indeed embodied and often gendered female.
In some ways, the reception of the play might suggest that the
performance failed as a dual critique of gender roles and globalization.
The gender commentary seemed to have come across more clearly to
spectators than the focus on international relations. Brazilian academic
Ricardo Riso’s (2009) review on his blog about Lusophone African
literatures and cultures focused mainly on the predicament poor Black
women from rural areas face when they are forced to migrate to big cities
by economic necessity and the suffering they encounter at the hands
of men who disrespect them. Only in passing did he mention that the
names of Deolinda’s lovers (Euro, Afrinio, Américo) alluded to ‘the
external exploitation suffered by Mozambique.’35 Two Brazilian women
who commented on Riso’s blog post commended him for his astute
appraisal of the production’s gender focus but said nothing about the
political allegory. Similarly, when I discussed the production informally
with small groups of FESTLIP participants while eating meals with
them during the 2009 festival, I noted that many of them interpreted
O Homem Ideal strictly as a love story and missed the political allegory
altogether. For example, Luci Mota from the Cape Verdean theatre
troupe Solaris told me that she thought the play was about ‘a woman
looking for a man.’ When I mentioned the metaphor of continental
alliances, she was surprised. I had similar experiences when I discussed
the production with actors from Angola, Brazil, and Guinea-Bissau.36
While these Lusophone artists found the political allegory opaque,
two of them also found the love story unappealing because of its clichéd
portrayal of African women. Over an informal conversation at lunch,
Angolan actress Anacleta Pereira described Deolinda as ‘a woman who
plays the victim even though she chooses to get involved with men
who mistreat her.’ Both she and Luci Mota implied this was a tired
theme in African theatre. The two actresses found an onstage depiction
of a disempowered African female distasteful. It is true that the plot is
deeply enmeshed in the patriarchal, heteronormative framework of the
nuclear family. It presents a discourse of female oppression that African
feminists such as Oyewùmí (2004) have rejected in favor of a view of
gender and sexuality in Africa as relational and dependent on con-
text (see also Amadiume 1987). Indeed, Mota and Pereira appeared in
other FESTLIP 2009 productions that rejected any formulaic notion of
woman as ‘victim.’ Pereira performed in Elinga’s staging of Kimpa Vita
(see Chapter 3), while Mota starred in Solaris’s production of Psycho,
an avant-garde depiction of two eccentric women bravely confronting
their fears of sex, germs, and crowds. These productions ensured that
diverse versions of African feminism appeared onstage at FESTLIP 2009.
Despite its lukewarm reception by various festival participants,

I suggest that the cultural interventions of O Homem Ideal mattered
because of the play’s location on the festival circuit. FESTLIP situates
the African theatre it showcases in a broader Lusophone context. By the
time of O Homem Ideal’s showing in Rio, then Brazilian president Luiz
Inácio da Silva had, in effect, declared Brazil to be the homem ideal, or
ideal trading partner, for Mozambique and indeed, for all of Africa. Yet
M’Bêu’s play worked against that agenda by ultimately suggesting that
Mozambique could build new egalitarian partnerships with any number
of countries on various continents, including other African countries.
O Homem Ideal is thus an example of how an African play can pose
a challenge to ideologies espoused by the government of the country
hosting the international festival, producing the intercultural tension
and global elbow-rubbing that Anna Tsing (2005) refers to as friction.
The gender implications of O Homem Ideal also merit further consider-
ation. In the play, Deolinda stands in for Mozambique or, more broadly,
any country dependent on the IMF and the World Bank.37 By relying on
a metaphor of ‘woman as nation,’ the performance begs an engagement
with the role women have played historically in Mozambique’s national
history. Like others in Africa, Mozambique’s liberation struggle was
driven by socialist leaders who placed gender at the core of their revo-
lutionary agendas. Both Samora Machel and Amílcar Cabral, the iconic
leaders of anti-colonial movements in Mozambique and Cape Verde,
maintained that women’s emancipation was integral to nationhood
and should be part of their countries’ liberation from colonialism
(Machel 1974; Cabral 1979 [1975]). Both movements situated women
in leadership roles in their parties and even armed female soldiers for
battle. The emphasis on gender and liberation of these two countries is
a compelling reason to examine their postcolonial theatre about women
jointly, since it underscores how transnational communities are based
as much on common historical processes as they are on geography or
language (Moorman and Sheldon 2005). While Duas Sem Três advocated
women’s autonomy using dance, O Homem Ideal used the character
of Deolinda to advocate women’s financial independence from men
and the nation’s economic autonomy from the IMF.38 Deolinda is thus
a strong reminder that even decades after independence from Portugal,
Samora Machel’s famous phrase a luta continua (the struggle continues)
still applies to Mozambican women and to the nation itself.
While Mozambican feminists applaud the FRELIMO party for forging
a path to women’s emancipation during the liberation movement,
many point out that its practices ultimately reinforced the gender
division of labor. Isabel Casimiro notes that during the struggle against
colonialism, FRELIMO gave women in Mozambique’s liberated zones
the tasks of preparing food for combatants, doing household work,
and caring for infants. Despite FRELIMO’s pretensions to gender parity,
then, party leaders expected women to continue to perform ‘invisible’
domestic work (including reproductive labor) in addition to the paid
labor the party advocated for them (Casimiro 2004). The party thus
ignored gender inequities at home while centering their rhetoric mainly
on waged labor (Sheldon 2002), demonstrating the blind spot about
gender that is typical of many economic movements, both socialist and
capitalist.
Such notions of gendered labor have persisted into the new
millennium in Mozambique, so they were ripe for recasting in O Homem
Ideal. As she was talking to her Conscience, Deolinda voiced her frus-
tration about the unpaid labor women are expected to perform. She
complained that women are always busy with household tasks and
that men refuse to help; all they do is complain about noisy children
and dinners not ready on time. While she spoke, the barman, played
by Elliot Alex, sat on a stool blowing bubbles with a wand and making
paper airplanes, seemingly oblivious to her rant. The FESTLIP audience
erupted in laughter, signaling their recognition of the scene’s gender
critique. Conceivably, this prepared them for the transformed images of
female labor in the next scene. As the lights dimmed on the stage, filmic
projections showed snippets of African women doing diverse work
tasks: carrying water on their heads, waiting tables, washing dishes,
hanging laundry, building a fire, cooking, gathering fish at the seaside,
and, finally, getting out of a car with a briefcase in front of a hotel.
Alongside more familiar pictures of African women doing domestic and
rural labor, then, the production abruptly introduced an image of an
entrepreneurial African woman dressed in a business suit. Presumably,
all of these images could represent the same working woman, exposing
the fact that women’s double duty – at home and in the public sphere –
is what keeps the global economy going.
O Homem Ideal also reaffirmed troubling aspects of FRELIMO’s
earlier nationalist ideology. The party’s policies in the immediate post-
independence years emphasized the nuclear family as the bedrock of
society (Casimiro 2004). Women were steered out of public life, and
their roles as mothers and housewives were emphasized (Sheldon 2002).
The love story in O Homem Ideal does not question patriarchal family
structures; Deolinda does not waver in her resolve to find a male partner
to support her and her children. Heterosexuality is also unquestioned in
the play: even Deolinda’s Conscience cannot see beyond heteronorma-

tive frames. When Deolinda mentions that her ex-lover Américo had
taken back all the gifts he had given her when she disagreed with him,
her Conscience replied that the only way to combat male domination
is to band together so they can collectively control one man instead
of each woman trying to control a man on her own. Essentially, she
suggests something like polygyny, at which Deolinda balks: ‘You’re
telling me that I should share the same man with others – you’re crazy!’39
Here Deolinda is objecting to a common relationship structure in
urban Maputo, where men often have mistresses outside their primary
partnerships (Manjate et al. 2000). In one sense, the Conscience is
problematically upholding male privilege to take on multiple lovers, an
option that is far less socially acceptable for women. Understandably,
Deolinda finds this proposal distasteful.
In another sense, her Conscience might be proposing a more radical
sexual solution wherein women can work together to attain more power
collectively within a polygynous situation. Viewed in this light, Deolinda
is the one who seems unprogressive, since she is stubbornly locked into
a romanticized notion of an ‘ideal’ monogamous relationship with one
man who would somehow solve all of her problems. Indeed, all of the
solutions the play puts forward for Deolinda seem to be locked into
patriarchal and heterosexual matrices. The play’s major plot points
are thus more in line with outmoded nationalist ideologies about the
nuclear family than with current feminist paradigms in Mozambique,
which emphasize women’s diverse experiences with class, race, ethnic-
ity, and sexual orientation (Casimiro and Andrade 2010).
Yet through the lens of political allegory, the play produces a more
radical social critique of the impact of globalization on Africa in general
and African women in particular. The opening footage of a perplexed
Deolinda on a congested highway conjured the image of an African
nation floundering in the fast-paced traffic of today’s global commerce.
By calling out to her to cross the street, the barman acted like the IMF
or the World Bank, encouraging African nations to open their already
vulnerable markets to foreign trade.40 The barman’s surveillance
continued as more footage appeared later, showing images of Deolinda
searching fruitlessly for work in various urban spaces, finally finding
acceptance at an artists’ collective where she learned to sculpt the clay
heads that now adorn the bar. He then eavesdropped as she and her
Conscience discussed Deolinda’s past lovers. Accusing Euros of severing
her from her rural family and traditions in order to embrace ‘modernity,’
Deolinda described how out of place she felt in her city clothes, laden
down with suitcases and ‘in debt up to [her] neck.’41 By targeting Euros,
the play identified European colonialism as the precedent for today’s
inequitable free market trade, symbolized by Deolinda’s disempowered
state in her new urban environment.
The play also critiques foreign aid, which compels recipient countries
to follow the policies of donor countries as a condition of receiving
loans or grants. Creeping up behind a clay head wearing a cowboy hat,
Deolinda imitated Américo’s macho voice: ‘Listen up! Whoever’s not
with me is against me!’42 As a US spectator, I immediately interpreted
this as a reference to George W. Bush and his famous post-9/11
declaration, ‘either you are with us, or you are with the terrorists’
(2001). Yet Abreu and his actors later reminded me that Américo rep-
resented both North and South America. Presumably, then, the play’s
critique extended to the host country of the festival, Brazil. In other
words, one could interpret the passage as a cynical assumption that
the Brazilian government is going to expect something in return for
its increased presence on the African continent in recent years – and
whatever it is, it will benefit Brazil economically more so than African
countries. Finally, Deolinda turned her attention to Asia, gossiping with
her Conscience about how Chinoca (China) was suddenly courting
Afrinio (Africa): ‘What could that family want with Afrinio now,
when they’ve never shown interest before?’43 Here, she articulates the
suspicion that both African and Western countries have toward China,
which has increased its industrial activities in and trade partnerships
with African nations in recent decades (see Zeleza 2008). Throughout
these scenes, the barman’s close watch over Deolinda symbolizes the
tendency of the World Bank to survey and prey on vulnerable nations
with troubled pasts.
By the time the barman approached Deolinda with an offer of free
food, she had run out of employment options and viable partnerships
that could provide economic support. At first, she recoiled: ‘You just
want to get me in debt so you can later collect interest on me.’44 Her
response here echoes that of the Mozambican government in the early
1980s, when the socialist economy was beginning to collapse. Even
in that crisis situation, Mozambique preferred financial autonomy
over succumbing to the World Bank and the IMF, which were heavily
influenced by the United States. By 1986, as the country spiraled deeper
into civil war, the government was forced to spend precious resources
to combat the rebel movement RENAMO.45 Broke and out of options,
the FRELIMO government abandoned socialism and embraced the free-
market reforms and structural adjustment programs (SAPs) that the IMF
and the World Bank stipulated as conditions of loans (Newitt 2002).

O Homem Ideal parodied this shift in the Mozambican government’s
policies: Deolinda eventually consented to be the restaurant’s ‘taster,’
even though she knew this decision might harm her if the food proved
unsafe. This provided the most theatrical moment in the production:
Deolinda slowly brought a muffin to her lips while her Conscience
and the barman leaned in to watch (Fig. 7). Yet by the end of the play,
Deolinda was openly asking for more of the food the barman offered,
completely abandoning her suspicions. She was thus firmly entrenched
in the charity trap: the recipient cannot choose what he or she gets; he
or she can only receive what is offered.
It is here that O Homem Ideal’s political allegory had implications
for gender and globalization. By aligning an at-risk African nation
with a woman whose well-being was threatened by imprudent aid
measures and lending agreements, the play particularized the impact
of global capital on real human beings. In the play, Deolinda signified
a Mozambican Everywoman. She represented both urban and rural
Figure 7 Elliot Alex plays a barman tempting a desperate Mozambican woman

Deolinda, played by Yolanda Fumo (R), to become his restaurant’s official taster,
while her Conscience, Isabel Jorge (L), looks on in disapproval in M’Bêu’s O
Homem Ideal. FESTLIP 2009, Rio de Janeiro, Brazil. Photo: Rogério Resende,
courtesy of Talu Produções.
settings; her lime-green pantsuit identified her as a Maputo city-dweller,

but her speech revealed her upbringing in the countryside. She was
thus a visual reminder of the gender-specific effect SAPs have had on
all Mozambican women since the 1990s. Since then, the World Bank
has mandated privatization of everything from agriculture to health
care, and the number of government services has decreased while
food prices have increased at a rate that is not commensurate with
the salaries of wage workers and salaried employees. Women have had
to find new sources of income because of the decrease in state sup-
port for their children’s education and their husbands’ imperiled jobs.
Further, many poor women began working in the informal sector, such
as in street markets, while continuing to do household work (Sheldon
2002). Deolinda’s turn to ceramics and ‘tasting’ symbolizes the fact that
many Mozambican women must pursue multiple part-time jobs in the
informal sector in order to support themselves and their families.
The solution that Deolina’s Conscience proposes also takes on a more
complex meaning in the context of the political allegory. If Deolinda
represents Mozambique, the suggestion of her Conscience that she
unite with others to confront Américo’s (the US and Brazil’s) dominance
is a suggestion that Mozambique should enter into alliances that would
level the playing field between poorer nations and the nations that have
the power in a global economy. A concrete example of such an alli-
ance might be the Southern African Development Community (SADC).
Mozambique is a member of the SADC along with fourteen other nations
that have pledged to work together to boost the region’s economy and
security. The play’s message thus dovetails with Africanist scholarship
that advocates that African governments rely on regional organizations
such as the SADC in order to combat global inequalities (Mwase 2007;
Zeleza 2008). Ultimately, then, the proposal of the Conscience had
both reactionary and progressive connotations: in the love story, it
potentially affirmed patriarchal privilege and heteronormativity, while
in the political allegory, it suggested that if marginalized nations could
embrace solidarity, it would improve their economic prospects, and
by extension, the economic prospects of women workers. In essence,
the play critiqued African nations for not embracing new solutions in
a radically altered economic context.
The play ended with a focus on prostitution. In desperation, Deolinda
eventually asked the barman for a contract stating she would at least
be granted health insurance and board in exchange for being the taster.
But the contract the barman offered stipulated that she would perform
all services he asked her to do for his clients. ‘Are you asking me to sell
my body?’ she cried, to which the barman responded, ‘You’re the one
who said it!’46 The final moments of the production reached a frenzied
climax as Deolinda donned a skimpy red dress and mounted a black box
to begin a striptease. The barman raised his voice in a steady crescendo as
he barked orders at her to take off more clothes and dance sexily for the
male clients. Standing in for the clients are the clay heads of Deolinda’s
suitors, Euros, Américo, Afrinio, and Anísio, which the barman had
lined up in front of her so they could watch her sexual performance
and moral degradation. The Conscience, meanwhile, tried to override
the barman’s harangue by telling Deolinda to stop the show and begin
dialogues with her suitors anew: ‘If you stay with one of them and try
to understand him, you can draw out the best in him and even discover
characteristics that you like in each one of them.’47 While Deolinda at
first protested that dialogue was too difficult, the play ended with her
sitting down and saying she had to think things through.
In this last scene, the play presumably accuses the Mozambican
government of prostituting itself. Because it cannot escape the debt
trap of international lending institutions, it must submit to increasingly
degrading conditions, losing economic and political autonomy after
35 years of independence from Portuguese colonialism. Yet the very
nature of the allegory speaks to the gendered impact of globalization.
Sassen (2007) points to the connection between the increasing number
of women from developing nations who have entered sex traffick-
ing circuits and the growing debt and unemployment in their home
countries. When the number of public sector jobs and social services
are slashed because governments must use revenue to service debt and
wages for industrial jobs drop because of competition from foreign
imports, there are few alternatives for women workers. They must find
income to provide health care, food, clothing, education, and housing
for their children. Often the sex trade appears to be almost the only
alternative for them. In fact, the IMF or World Bank may invisibly bolster
the sex industry by supplying loans to develop tourism, which only
increases the demand for prostitutes. In Mozambique, women increas-
ingly turned to sex work in the 1990s, since they could make ten times
the amount factory workers made (Sheldon 2002). In addition, South
Africa’s rising sex tourism industry makes Mozambican women and
children vulnerable to border smuggling (UNESCO 2006). Thus, O
Homem Ideal implies that women are forced into the sex trade as an
indirect result of the Mozambican government’s prostitution of itself
to the IMF, the World Bank, and the global economy. This was made
visible in the sexualization of Deolinda’s body, which was exposed as
she stepped onto the black cube to exhibit her flesh for FESTLIP’s inter-
national audience.
Implicitly, the performance asked whether developing nations and
African women can find a way out of this dilemma. Sassen (2007) argues
that government debt forms new circuits of sex work that often use the
same infrastructure as formal markets in the global economy. Regarding
the position of African nations, Mwase quotes former Tanzanian
president Julius Nyerere’s 1998 speech:
There was a time when a developing country or leader could say

‘No’ to the IMF or World Bank. But no leader of a highly indebted
poor country . . . can with impunity say ‘No’ today. . . . So a time
comes when the leader is forced to accept a neo-colonial status for
his country in return for a financial bailout from its international
creditors. This is the case today in many countries in Africa. (quoted
in Mwase 2007: 67)
Yet Mwase immediately follows up by saying that civil society

organizations (CSOs) – the media, citizen groups, activists, and NGOs –
can ‘restore Africa’s credibility and honor’ by advocating for good
governance, transparency in aid transactions, and better treatment of
the poor in the context of the crippling social impact of SAPs (67).
In O Homem Ideal, the Conscience seemed to invoke the positions
of these CSOs. Actress Isabel Jorge played her as a street-smart agitator
who stridently opposed the barman’s proposals and urged Deolinda to
protect her own interests. Leaning into Deolinda at the restaurant table,
she whispered in her ear to ask the barman for a labor contract and
then turned away in disgust as Deolinda signed a contract that denied
her pay for being a taster and demanded sexual services from her. The
Conscience is thus the kind of moral compass Mwase asks CSOs to be
for African nations facing pressure from the IMF. When she prodded
Deolinda to negotiate better partnerships with her suitors, including
Anísio (Asia), she echoed Paul Zeleza’s (2008) call for CSOs to mitigate
the impact of Chinese industrialization in Africa by pushing for more
humane working conditions and environmental measures. Through
the Conscience, then, the play offers an interesting compromise: while
African nations may not be able to opt out of the global market, they
can opt for diplomatic strategies that will improve their positions within
that market.
The Conscience also underscores certain principles of African
feminism. By casting two middle-aged Black Mozambican women as
Deolinda and her Conscience and by having them constantly confer

with each other, M’Bêu illustrates how female-to-female coalitions can
help women grapple with complex gender issues. Since the Conscience
stands in for CSOs, she also embodies feminist scholar Desiree Lewis’s
(2004) claim that civil society in Africa is better equipped than the
state to advance gender parity at the local and national level. At
international festivals, political theatre may be adept at prompting
journalists and bloggers to take on the role of CSOs and stir up criti-
cal thinking about issues presented onstage. Even though he did not
attend to the continental allegory in the play, blogger Ricardo Riso
(2009) did pass on O Homem Ideal’s message about the impact of the
global economy on women from developing countries: ‘The play
questioned if the current neoliberal world, with its excessive greed that
subjects millions of people to live in subhuman conditions, is in fact
the ideal one.’48 His review thus clarified the allegorical connection
between the ‘ideal man’ and the ‘perfect world’ and helped his read-
ers understand the interconnections between the gender and political
meanings of the play.
Bloggers are integral to a festival’s aftermath because they can jolt
spectators out of the apathy they may have experienced when actually
watching the production. Playwright Evaristo Abreu posits that audi-
ence members who view O Homem Ideal without reading the political
allegory are willfully blind: ‘Many people prefer not to look at the
metaphorical and political aspect of the piece, either because they are
distracted from what is actually going on in the world or because they
prefer to see what is most transparent [the love story].’49 Yet the FESTLIP
audience’s non-verbal responses to the play indicated that they could
be alerted to its deeper meaning, perhaps with prompts from reviews
or the blogosphere. For example, the audience laughed uproariously at
many of the jokes that had a double meaning, such as when Deolinda
protested the restaurant’s hand-outs by telling the barman she felt like
a ‘trash can’ for all the food he was going to throw out anyway. The
laughter showed that the audience at least grasped the absurdity that
one person’s waste is another’s aid, whether or not they could read the
bar as the IMF or ‘Américo’ as US or Brazilian aid to Mozambique.
Significantly, FESTLIP 2009’s overall framework is what probably led
many spectators to read mainly the love story plot in O Homem Ideal. First,
the description of the play in the printed program contained no allusion
to its political nature. Deolinda was simply characterized as a woman
seeking the ‘ideal man.’ In the absence of directives from the printed pro-
gram, however, festival attendees may take their interpretive cues from
other themes at the festival that year. As Schoenmakers (2007) persua-

sively argues, festivals encourage spectators to make connections among
diverse theatre productions on the program that they might not make
if they saw those same productions outside the festival context. FESTLIP
2009, for example, also featured Cortiços, a Brazilian theatre-dance piece
that targeted racial and sexual subjugation in Brazil. Performed by the
Belo Horizonte-based theatre company Luna Lunera, the production was
a rendering of Brazilian novelist Aluísio Azevedo’s late-nineteenth-century
naturalist masterpiece O Cortiço (The Slum), which pinpoints a moment
in Brazil’s pre-abolition history (circa 1870) when poor Portuguese immi-
grants flooded Rio de Janeiro’s workforce alongside Black and mixed-race
Brazilians. Cortiços highlighted the constant threat of sexual aggression
underlying interactions between a White Portuguese landlord, João
Romão, and his Black mistress, Bertoleza. In a climactic scene, Romão’s
white body writhed maniacally with Bertoleza’s on the floor. When
Romão finally turned Bertoleza, an escaped slave, in to the police, he
foregrounded the racial and gender violence lurking beneath intertwined
Lusophone histories. Spectators who saw both Cortiços and O Homem
Ideal at FESTLIP could thus trace a trajectory of Black female exploitation
from slavery to the current global era. Since this interpretation depends
on viewing Deolinda as a specific Mozambican woman rather than
as a stand-in for the Mozambican nation, comparisons of festival
performances at 2009 may have highlighted the exploitation inherent in
O Homem Ideal’s love story in a productive way but also problematically
clouded the political allegory of the play.
Conclusion
International theatre festivals offer opportunities for African theatre

artists to challenge discourses of gender, nationalism, and globalization
before audiences familiar with these realities from a broad range of
cultural and geographic perspectives. By tracking how a festival frame-
work may impact these artistic statements, we can better understand
how circulation works in tandem with artists’ intentions to recast
notions of migration, economic globalization, and gender from African
perspectives. In the case of Duas Sem Três, the female dancers in Raiz di
Polon could use diverse choreographic repertoires to juxtapose a narra-
tive of women’s global movement against the story of male emigration
featured in the blurb in the festival program. In O Homem Ideal, M’Bêu
presented a vision for Mozambican foreign diplomacy that was in
tension with the idea of Brazilian–African relations then espoused by
the government of the festival’s host country, Brazil. While original

performances devised to specifically address gender might accomplish
this important task of reformulation, other theatre companies may
propose cultural transformations via adaptations of already known
plays and novels, particularly those from the Western world. I take up
that alternate mode of recasting cultural discourses in the next chapter.
5
Adaptation and the (Trans)Nation:
Creolized Shakespeare,
Intercultural Cervantes
It is difficult to imagine a theatre festival in any part of the world today

not including at least one ‘chestnut’ from the Western canon. When
I attended the Grahamstown Arts Festival in South Africa in 2007,
the main stage featured an adaptation of the Orpheus myth, while
the street theatre boasted an adaptation of Euripides’ Medea as well
as an adaptation of a play by Molière. Writing about festivals such as
the DuMaurier World Stage in Toronto and the Edinburgh festival in
Scotland, Ric Knowles (2004) notes that classics are often favored at
festivals because they already have ‘transcultural authority or resonance’
(183). This allows festivals to cash in on cultural cachet and attract
important sponsors. Lusophone theatre festivals are no exception to the
rule. At FESTLIP 2009, a Portuguese production of Beckett’s Happy Days
shared space on the program with Angolan dramatizations of colonial
trauma. At the Mindelact International Theatre Festival, visiting troupes
have performed adaptations of Waiting for Godot, Romeo and Juliet, and
Of Mice and Men, and new Cape Verdean adaptations of Shakespeare
often debut there. Seemingly, international festival programs are
destined to read like a ‘Who’s Who’ of the Western theatre canon, even
when they also include alternative genres and new plays.
What potential do festivals hold for theatre directors who wish to
transcend the imperialist cultural baggage attached to these canonical
Western works? The reputation that theatre festivals have of being
elitist and capitalistic would appear to work against that intention.
In fact, one stream of scholarship presumes that the ‘name brand’ of
Shakespeare functions primarily to commodify non-Western theatre
traditions and facilitate their export into global markets (Kennedy 1993;
Thurman 2006; Yong 2005; Zarrilli 2007). According to this line of
thinking, arts festivals have a Midas-like tendency to commodify local
130
Creolized Shakespeare, Intercultural Cervantes 131
performance traditions for voyeuristic spectators seeking a glimpse of

the exotic, thus undercutting the potential for intercultural Shakespeare
productions to make potent social statements.1 However, I argue that
international festivals that target specific transnational communities
offer theatre directors unique opportunities to fashion adaptations that
become channels for genuine intercultural dialogue with audiences and
each other. Festivals in the Lusophone world foreground the kinds of
cultural connections that are made possible when participants have
similar language backgrounds. Adaptations connected to these festival
contexts thus have particular dialogic potential.
This chapter highlights three such productions. Two are Cape
Verdean adaptations of Shakespeare performed in Crioulo at Mindelact.
Rei Lear (King Lear), which was directed and co-adapted by João Branco,
the artistic director of the festival, appeared at Mindelact 2003. Sonho
de uma noite de verão (A Midsummer Night’s Dream), conceived by
young Cape Verdean director Herlandson Duarte, debuted at Mindelact
2005. Duarte’s production transformed Bottom’s play-within-a-play
into a searing critique of Mindelo audiences and the structures of
authority that prop up the Mindelact festival. These two adaptations
of Shakespeare preceded a heated debate between the directors that
had a vibrant afterlife in Cape Verde’s healthy blog culture and the
local press.
The final adaptation I examine here is a 2009 stage adaptation of
Cervantes’s novel Don Quixote performed in Maputo, which blended
the Spanish story with references to Mozambican history. While the
production was not staged for a theatre festival itself, the adaptation
was a direct result of the cooperative work of a fledgling Mozambican
troupe and a theatre company from Spain’s Basque country, who
first met and performed together in 2004 for the short-lived Festival
d’Agosto in Mozambique. In their bilingual (Spanish and Portuguese)
adaptation of Don Quixote, the Basque and Mozambican actors found
common ground across cultural and racial lines as minority subjects
with similar embattled histories.
It is important to note that the intercultural work these adaptations
accomplished happened only after the moment of the respective festivals
had passed. They are thus excellent examples of festival aftermath.
Festivals have tremendous potential to sustain profound cultural
discussions over many years because they take place regularly and because
they generate an archive of productions and memories in particular
communities. For example, the two Shakespeare adaptations I examine
here triggered an intergenerational cross-cultural debate that enabled
a Portuguese and a Cape Verdean director to negotiate positions of power

within the local theatre scene, critique each other’s performance methods,
and articulate opinions on the role of audience in the selection process at
Mindelact. The dialogues that arose in the Mindelo community after the
performances of these two adaptations illustrate how festival productions
continue to prompt new reverberations as time passes. This is similar to
Daphne Lei’s (2011) explanation of the learning process triggered by failed
intercultural experiments staged at international festivals in Taiwan: ‘My
hope is that . . . self-reflection, recognition, and appreciation of one’s own
culture would form a continuous flow out of the productions and back into
the cultural reservoir for future theatrical endeavors’ (585).
The Cape Verdean and Mozambican examples discussed here show that
beyond improving the quality of artistic interactions across cultures, festival
aftermath may also create new opportunities for younger theatre troupes to
stage performances on their own terms, both inside and outside of festival
contexts. When festival aftermath gives Cape Verdean and Mozambican
theatre artists added control over what they perform, as well as when and
where their future productions are staged, it reveals how festivals may
accomplish the postcolonial goal of evening out power imbalances among
participating artists from different national backgrounds.
Shakespeare in Cape Verde: Festival culture, colonial

legacies, and creolization
Shakespeare adaptations are often seen as cash cows that bolster the
already considerable revenues of arts festivals. The Mindelact festival,
however, does not fit that paradigm. It is not a profit-making venture:
ticket sales go toward the festival’s operational expenses, the organizers
are all volunteers, and performers are not paid. Mindelact is not in
the category of festivals that function as global conglomerates, which
feature packaged cultural products and attract throngs of affluent
tourists unified only by a ‘formalist interest in theatre itself’ (Knowles
2004: 181). Like other small-scale festivals in peripheral spaces on the
globe, Mindelact attracts a specific spectatorship. Local Mindelo theatre-
goers, Cape Verdean performers attending from other islands, and
visiting artists from other countries, many of them Portuguese speaking,
constitute the roughly 220-member audience that attends the nightly
main-stage shows. Since many of these spectators come armed with
a high degree of cultural literacy about Cape Verde, they are more likely
to recognize the social intervention a Shakespeare adaptation may set
in motion than they are to buy into its cultural cachet.
Within this kind of festival context, Shakespeare’s plays do more

than signify Western imperialism. Rather, as Yong Li Lan (2005) writes,
Shakespeare may also function as a ‘trade route, an international stage
on which the partialness of our cultural identities, and the history of
their collocation, is dramatized’ (548). In other words, Shakespeare’s
plays may serve as conduits for reformulating, re-envisioning, and
reinventing national identities. This approach does not ignore the
fact that performing Shakespeare, even in a heavily adapted way,
always already confirms his canonical status and perpetuates his
cultural authority (Döring 2005). Nor does it overlook the real-
ity that a seemingly endless stream of scholarship on intercultural
Shakespeare productions adds to the ‘information retrieval’ about an
already ‘burned-out Bard’ (Bharucha 2004: 4). Rather, taking Sonia
Massai’s (2005) cue, I acknowledge that performances of Shakespeare
are always embedded in the existing power dynamics of a particular
context. This maze of authoritative structures, which resonates with
Bourdieu’s notion of the cultural field, ‘determines what it is possible
to say about or do with Shakespeare’ in any given space and time
(Massai 2005: 6).
Cape Verde’s cultural field is intimately related to its complex colonial
heritage. Crioulo-language versions of Shakespeare’s plays, which are
translations of Portuguese translations from the English, are fascinating
vehicles for charting the path from Portuguese colonialism, with its
legacy of hand-me-downs from British culture and colonial formations,
to postcolonial identities in Cape Verde. Scholars writing on Lusophone
postcolonialism have grappled with these legacies by calling into ques-
tion the relevance of postcolonial theories drawn from Anglophone
histories and literatures. In a generative essay, Portuguese scholar
Boaventura de Sousa Santos (2002) strove to differentiate hybridity
and power negotiations in the Lusophone colonial context from Homi
Bhabha’s theories (1994), which are rooted in a British colonial context.
Claiming that Portugal could only enact a ‘subaltern colonialism’ on the
African continent because of its own long-term economic dependency
on Britain (9), Santos locates Portugal somewhere between the colonial
master and the slave or, as his essay title indicates, ‘Between Prospero and
Caliban.’ For Santos, the term ‘Prospero’ refers either to European coun-
tries in their former roles as colonizers, or their current state as former
colonial powers. Paradoxically, even while Santos warns Lusophonist
scholars against thoughtlessly borrowing theoretical paradigms from
Anglophone postcolonial contexts, he himself adopts a Shakespearean
metaphor to characterize the Portuguese colonial predicament.2 Santos’s
vocabulary reveals the degree to which Anglophone cultural referents

have infiltrated Lusophone epistemological frameworks.
Traces of a second-hand colonial discourse that was inherited from
England are evident even in Portugal today.3 For example, Francesca
Rayner (2007) detects a deferential tone in the marketing of certain
contemporary Portuguese Shakespeare productions, such as the staging
in 1998 of Rei Lear by Teatro Nacional D. Maria II. Rayner notes the irony
of Lisbon’s national theatre using the rhetoric of British authenticity to
sell the production, even inviting in a British guest director to lend it
‘a veneer of English . . . respectability’ (144–45). This obsequious attitude
toward British culture perhaps reinforces Santos’s (2002) claim that
Portuguese national identity is shaped by a persistent preoccupation
with its peripheral status vis-à-vis the major European economic powers
and cultural centers.
This same inferiority complex is conceivably what drove the Portuguese
government to collaborate with Brazil in the mid-1990s to form the
Community of Portuguese-Speaking Countries (CPLP) (see Chapter 2).
The formation of the transnational alliance was perhaps precipitated
by Lusophone anxiety over Anglophone hegemony in Africa; it took
place shortly after Mozambique joined the Commonwealth in 1995.
Certainly, the influence of the CPLP pales in comparison to that of the
Commonwealth or even that of La Francophonie, France’s version of
language-based transnationalism, which Guinea-Bissau joined in 1979.
According to Santos, the CPLP’s economic weakness and political
inefficacy are perhaps what make it possible for the lusofonia project to
accomplish productive intercultural exchange:
Unlike the English and French Prosperos in their respective com-

monwealths, the Portuguese Prospero has not been able to impose
his hegemony. Not only has he contended for hegemony with
his former colony – Brazil; he has also been unable to prevent some
of the new countries from integrating ‘rival’ language communities,
as is the case of Mozambique and Guinea-Bissau. Since the hegemony
of the latter communities has amounted to the legitimation of
neocolonialism, the weakness of the Portuguese Prospero opens
enormous potentialities for democratic and truly postcolonial
relationships. (Santos 2002: 35)
One might question, however, to what extent it is possible to separate

ideology from cultural exchange. Recall that the Portugal-based theatre
association Cena Lusófona was formed in the mid-1990s, the same time
frame when the CPLP was forming its policies for strengthening social
and economic bonds among Portuguese-language countries (CPLP
1996). Although he acknowledges that this correlation might invite
accusations of imperialist intent, artistic director António Augusto
Barros stresses that Cena Lusófona’s aim is not to assume a ‘colonizer’s
role’ and ‘impose a language’ but to celebrate cultural continuities and
linguistic diversity among Lusophone nations.4 This is also the rheto-
ric of the Mindelact festival, which embraces Cape Verdean troupes’
use of Crioulo in festival productions rather than demanding that
all its theatrical performances be performed in Portuguese. However,
the prominence of Shakespeare’s plays in Cape Verde today – both
at Mindelact and in João Branco’s introductory theatre classes in
Mindelo – perhaps suggests an alternative way that Western hegemony
may be transmitted through pedagogical structures and festivals in
postcolonial African countries.
Significantly, Cape Verde’s colonial education system favored not
Shakespeare but ‘classic Portuguese literature’ (Anjos 2002: 93); students
read plays by Almeida Garrett and novels by Eça de Queirós in school.5
Yet given Britain’s vast cultural influence on the Portuguese metropole,
which informed Branco’s theatre training, Branco’s preference for
Shakespeare adaptations is perhaps a conflation of two empires and
a reframing of them in a postcolonial context. His six-month introductory
theatre class, which is offered yearly in Mindelo and is composed of
students of high school age and older, covers acting techniques, character
development, and Western theatre history. Branco’s curriculum materi-
als identify Greece as the cradle of ‘universal’ theatre and authors such as
Shakespeare, Molière, and Beckett as ‘universal’ playwrights.6 His coding
of the theatre universe as White, Western, and male has been reinforced
by Mindelact’s festival fare, which has long featured performances of
European and North American ‘classics,’ many of which are performed
by visiting Portuguese and Brazilian troupes. Thus, Cape Verde’s festival
culture ensures that Western canonical plays, with those by William
Shakespeare at the forefront, regularly travel to Cape Verde.
Whenever Shakespeare crosses the threshold of a festival, itself
a shrine of rules, rigid schedules, and economic strictures, the cultural
field of power intensifies. In Cape Verde, Mindelact enjoys a coveted
position as the darling of national and municipal governments and the
financial beneficiary of international associations such as Cooperação
Portuguesa. This has generated resentment among some local theatre
groups. During my fieldwork in Cape Verde, local actors and direc-
tors often informally told me anecdotes about how they asked local
governments to fund their theatre projects, only to be refused with the

statement that ‘we’re already supporting Mindelact.’ Others said that
Cape Verde’s Ministry of Culture presumes that the financial support it
gives to Mindelact trickles down to all the theatre groups in the archi-
pelago. My contacts said that because of this, the ministry feels that it is
absolved of responsibility for supporting other theatre activities in Cape
Verde. But that presumption is not correct, since not all theatre troupes
on the islands apply to Mindelact and not all applicants are accepted.
Thus, while the Mindelact festival has garnered international prestige
for the nation, it also functions to determine who gets access to the
country’s already limited arts funding. Small wonder, then, that less-
established Cape Verdean theatre directors, such as Herlandson Duarte,
might use the Shakespeare name and the Mindelact stage to call into
question the festival’s position of dominance. His critical commentary
on Cape Verde’s theatre scene is an example of how adaptations
may pay service to a national agenda, rather than merely reinforcing
Western hegemony.
João Branco’s ‘creolizations’ of Western plays is another example.
‘Creolization’ is Branco’s preferred term for the adaptation of Western
plays by his company, the Theatre Group of the Mindelo Portuguese
Cultural Center (Grupo de Teatro do Centro Cultural Português do
Mindelo; GTCCPM). Branco (2004) maintains that creolizations of
foreign texts are distinctly Cape Verdean because of changes made to the
time period, location, and story details and because of how the Crioulo
language transforms the production. In its 2000 production of Médico à
Força (Doctor in Spite of Himself), GTCCPM transformed Molière’s play
about a quack doctor into a satire about upper-crust Mindelo society.
For Rei Lear, Branco focused on the issue of inheritance disputes and
used the adaptation to draw parallels between the carving up of Lear’s
kingdom and similar situations in Cape Verde, where numerous siblings
(often from different mothers) vie for the money and land fathers leave
behind when they die.7
Branco explained to me that creolizations of Western plays buoy
Cape Verdean theatre by introducing new aesthetic and thematic
references.8 This rationale is in line with the more sanguine connota-
tions attributed to the term creolization in some scholarly and cul-
tural discourses (Hannerz 1997). Other theorists, however, argue that
defining creolization simply as cultural mixing evacuates the term of
its specific links to the violence and loss that occurs during colonial
conquests and occupation (Fernandes 2006; Mintz 1996). Simply put,
syncretism does not happen on a level playing field; power hierarchies
dictate what is kept and what gets discarded when cultures mix. Perhaps
Branco’s position as a Portuguese theatre director working in Cape
Verde obscures this reality to him, enabling him to view creolization in
purely celebratory terms.
In Cape Verde, however, creolization already signals conflict. For
example, Herlandson Duarte resisted applying the term creolization to
his production of Sonho de uma noite de verão in 2005. Rather, he insisted
that the production was simply Shakespeare’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream
performed in Cape Verdean Crioulo. The difference is subtle yet impor-
tant. While Branco’s notion of creolizing classics suggests a wholesale
cultural translation to a Cape Verdean worldview, Duarte’s rhetoric
promises only a linguistic translation. Nevertheless, Duarte’s adaptation
was perhaps more explicitly national in that it shaped Shakespeare’s
drama into a social critique leveled primarily at theatre practitioners
in Cape Verde. The Mindelact festival thus provided the ground for
a contestatory moment by a young theatre director who confronted
issues of creolization from a much different perspective than Branco.
My investigation of the two Shakespeare adaptations in Cape Verde
followed different paths. In summer 2005, I happened to be staying
at the Mindelo cultural research center where Solaris was rehears-
ing Sonho de uma noite de verão. This felicitous circumstance afforded
ample opportunity for me to observe, question, misunderstand, and
seek clarification about the ways Herlandson Duarte shaped the
mechanicals’ play-within-a-play into a potent social critique. Later,
I became interested in analyzing Branco’s Rei Lear, which had achieved
a certain local fame after its debut at Mindelact 2003, in tandem with
Duarte’s Sonho de uma noite de verão. This comparative approach also
made sense since the Midsummer adaptation was first conceived as
Duarte’s final project for Branco’s 2004 introductory theatre class, for
which all the graduating students devised 20-minute adaptations of
assigned Shakespeare plays. I was able to see Sonho de uma noite de verão
on the main stage at Mindelact 2005. For my analysis of Rei Lear, which
debuted at a festival edition preceding my fieldwork period, I rely on
a videotape of the production, interviews with Branco and others, and
media articles about how it was received.
Rei Lear: Creolization, media, and body politics
Patrice Pavis (1989) describes ‘translation for the stage’ as a process in

which an adapter appropriates a source text by closing a gap between
the language of that text and the language of a target culture (25).
Branco’s approach to creolizing Shakespearean drama involves pointing

its linguistic and semiotic signifiers toward a Cape Verdean reality.
His Rei Lear adaptation reveals the slipperiness of applying the term
creolization to adaptation. Creolizing in the context of Cape Verdean
theatre could mean transforming a foreign play into a mosaic of
the Cape Verdean Crioulo identity, but when Branco performs that
intervention, he usually chooses cultural markers from the particular
context of Mindelo. Thus, for Branco, creolizing Shakespeare means
indirectly engaging the politics of locality on the islands.
Since moving to Cape Verde in 1992, Branco has had a number of
leadership positions in the local theatre scene. He has been the artistic
director of Mindelo’s branch of the Instituto Camões (the Portuguese
cultural center); he directs Mindelo’s most active theatre company,
GTCCPM; and he co-founded the Mindelact Association and its accom-
panying festival. Branco is also the author of the only comprehensive
book on Cape Verdean theatre history, Nação Teatro: História do teatro em
Cabo Verde (2004). In this work, he established the first system of cat-
egories for studying Cape Verdean theatre texts. He includes GTCCPM’s
long list of creolizations of Western plays in his chapter on new themes
in Cape Verdean playwriting, signifying his firm belief that such
adaptations are inherently national.9 As artistic director of Mindelact,
Branco also exerts a high degree of control over the themes of the
festival, the productions that appear there, and modes of presentation
that theatre companies use at the festival, all of which may construct
interpretive frameworks for individual performances.10 He has also used
his position as artistic director to cultivate rules of theatre spectatorship
and set norms of taste for festival audiences.
Rei Lear and its accompanying media rhetoric provide a good example
of how a Shakespeare adaptation may bolster an artistic director’s
command over a festival’s proceedings. In March 2003, just six months
before the debut of Rei Lear at the Mindelact festival in September,
the Mindelact Association awarded its annual theatre merit prize to
the Mindelo theatre-going public. Branco called Mindelenses the ‘best
public ever’ and praised their sharp critical sense, which he claimed has
been shaped in part by the fact that many audience members attend the
Mindelact festival every year (A Semana 2003). A few months later, the
Cape Verdean press heralded Rei Lear as a clear highlight of Mindelact
2003 even before the first performance. One journalist celebrated
the fact that Shakespeare, ‘the best playwright of all time,’ would be
presented in Cape Verde, while another applauded the translation of
‘great European classics’ into the Crioulo tongue (Expresso das Ilhas
2003: 3; Fortes 2003c). By emphasizing both the cultural cachet and

the nationalist appeal of Rei Lear, the press bestowed a large stock of
the Mindelact festival’s cultural capital that year on Branco and the
GTCCPM theatre troupe. This line of media coverage presaged the
popularity of the production among Mindelo audiences. Following on
the heels of an affirmation of the ‘good taste’ of Mindelo spectators,
the pre-performance hype for Rei Lear prompted Mindelo’s elite theatre-
goers in advance to applaud GTCCPM’s adaptation.
The process of drawing a target audience toward a source text may
thus operate even outside the boundaries of the staged adaptation.
In this case, media rhetoric, coupled with a festival director’s own
opinions about good ‘taste’ in theatre, helped win over a Cape Verdean
audience in advance. Branco considers audience appreciation crucial
for the adaptations he produces, especially since Shakespeare’s plays
are not taught in the national high school curriculum and are therefore
unfamiliar to many Cape Verdeans. As he explains it, GTCCPM has the
responsibility to perform transcultural translation, beginning even with
the title of an adaptation. For example, Rei Lear’s subtitle, Nhô Rei já bá
cabeça (The King’s Head Has Gone), uses a quintessential Crioulo phrase
to convey leadership and madness so that Cape Verdean audiences
can grasp the play’s theme before even entering the theatre.11 This
is what Pavis (1992) calls a ‘reception-adapter,’ or an amendment to
a script that illuminates unfamiliar aspects of the play’s ‘source culture’
for the target audience (16). Reception-adapters are evidence that we
must think of adaptations as creations in and of themselves. As Linda
Hutcheon notes, adaptations are stories that run parallel to source texts
rather than being merely derived from them, since the ‘adaptive faculty’
means mastering the skill of melding new ideas and connotations with
previously existing ones (2006: 174).
On the surface, Rei Lear contained fewer reception-adapters than many
of Branco’s other creolizations, such as his 1998 production of Romeu
e Julieta, which pitted Mindelo families from rival neighborhoods against
each other. Rei Lear is a rare example of a GTCCPM creolization that is
not explicitly placed in a Cape Verdean context. Key plot points were
not adjusted to fit the country’s history (Cape Verde has never had
a king, for example), and the mise-en-scène did not conjure up an image
of island culture. Lear’s gold jewelry and crown created an abstract
vision of royalty. The white masks the three sisters held in front of
their faces, Goneril’s Medusa-like hairstyle, the eerie rattling tones that
accompanied scene changes, and the somber hues of the set suggested
a surreal theatrical motif. Historical epochs were deliberately confounded:
the Fool rapped his rhymed verses like a modern-day hip-hop artist, but
his floppy hat and patched costume suggested an early modern court
jester.
Yet the reception-adapters that Branco added at the thematic level
of the play gestured to a national setting. After identifying inherit-
ance disputes as the common thread that connected Shakespeare’s
tragedy to Cape Verdean society, Branco and his co-adapter, Mindelo
journalist and actor Fonseca Soares (who also played Lear), cut the
play significantly in order to focus on such disputes and their impact
on the nuclear family. They lopped off the war and the subplot about
Edmund’s sedition. The Fool and Kent became quasi-protagonists,
taking on dialogue from deleted characters (Edgar, Edmund, and
Gloucester). These excisions rendered the storyline truer to Cape
Verdean history. The islands have never seen a war: their independ-
ence struggle was waged on mainland Africa, in Guinea-Bissau. Natural
disasters, mainly droughts, are what have killed masses of Cape
Verdeans, especially the elderly, over the centuries. In Rei Lear, a storm
substitutes for drought, but the effect, the death of the elderly, is the
same. The adaptation reduced King Lear’s colossal body count to one:
Lear himself. The final tableau depicts a Cordélia who must continue
the family’s legacy in the aftermath of familial conflicts and natural
disaster, which translates to a Cape Verdean reality easier than the
battles of Shakespeare’s last scenes.
In many respects, the Crioulo-language dialogue of Rei Lear made
a particularly strong nationalist statement at Mindelact. In 2003,
the Mindelact festival featured an unprecedented number of thea-
tre groups from other Lusophone countries. That year, the Union of
Luso-Afro-American-Asiatic Capital Cities (UCCLA) gave its annually
awarded title, Capital of Lusophone Culture, to the city of Mindelo.
The Mindelact Association thus scheduled more Portuguese-language
productions than usual to attract funding from that organization. The
Cape Verdean press emphasized the heightened Lusophone presence,
referring to the distinctly ‘Lusophone flavor’ of the festival that year
(Horizonte 2003; Fortes 2003a). Therefore, Branco’s decision to mount
a Crioulo-language production that year instead of catering to the many
Portuguese-speaking attendees conveyed how important he felt it was
to present individual performances in the context of specific national
cultures instead of ignoring differences in the service of lusofonia.
Within the Mindelact context, the Crioulo language interpellates a spe-
cific national audience in the larger Lusophone crowd, rendering Cape
Verdeans the most capable receivers of the production’s meaning, since
Crioulo is not easily intelligible to Portuguese speakers (see Lobban and

Saucier 2007).
Yet the particular form of Crioulo that Branco used in Rei Lear also
called attention to local differences in Cape Verde. The dialogue of the
adaptation evidences the coarse rhythms and consonant-dominated
tones that characterize Crioulo from São Vicente Island, identifying all
the characters as explicitly Mindelense. Branco’s (2004) explanation
for why he uses this kind of Crioulo in such adaptations, which
he calls ‘Shakespearean Crioulo,’ indirectly suggests that he feels
that Shakespeare’s dialogue can best be rendered in São Vicentian
Crioulo in his adaptations. He describes ‘Shakespearean Crioulo’ as
having a ‘different sentence structure than what we hear every day
in quotidian life, a different sonority, a more accentuated poetic
quality’ (363).12 To honor the lyricism of Shakespeare’s original text,
Branco explains, Shakespearean Creole ‘re-invents Crioulo’ and often
‘creolizes’ Portuguese words (F.F. 2003).13 According to Branco, then,
‘Shakespearean Crioulo’ is more Portuguese-sounding than other
variations of Crioulo. Since a Portuguese-inflected Crioulo is linked
explicitly to the São Vicente Island variant in the north,14 the notion
of ‘Shakespearean Crioulo’ potentially excludes more African-derived
variants, such as the badiu form spoken on Santiago Island in the
south.15 Thus, the linguistic palette of Rei Lear is deeply engaged in the
politics of locality that maintain a North/South divide in Cape Verde’s
Afro-European culture.
A closer look at the path some of Rei Lear’s dialogue takes as it moves
from Shakespeare’s English text to the Portuguese translation Branco
and Soares worked from to the Crioulo language illuminates another
significant feature of the adaptation: the corporeal texture it adopts
throughout. One example is that in the Cape Verdean Lear, the king
constantly frames his madness as a deterioration of his actual head. In
Shakespeare’s text of King Lear, Lear’s ominous words before the storm
are, ‘O fool, I shall go mad!’ (II.4.238). Álvaro Cunhal’s (2002) Portuguese
translation, which Branco and Soares consulted for their Crioulo ver-
sion, renders this line as ‘Enlouqueço, bobo, enlouqueço!’ (I’m going mad,
Fool, I’m going mad!).16 The Crioulo version reads: ‘Um ti ta vrá dod,
bobe, um ti ta bá cabéça!’ (I’m going mad, Fool, my head is going!).17
This conveys a particular mind–body connection that is intrinsic
to the Crioulo language. As Cape Verdean linguist Dulce Almada
Duarte notes, Crioulo uses the Portuguese word for ‘head’ (kabésa/
cabeça) in a way that the Portuguese language does not, as a reflexive
pronoun that refers to one’s self. This is a residue from certain mainland
West African languages that contributed to the formation of Crioulo.

For example, to express suicide in Crioulo, one would say ‘Maria mata
kabésa’ (Maria killed her own head) (Duarte 2003: 62). Thus, in the
Crioulo-language Rei Lear, the king losing his ‘head’ takes on a shade
of meaning that gets at the very core of insanity: Lear is gradually
losing his very essence, his own self. Shakespearean Crioulo can thus
never entirely exclude its African etymologies. Here, the head-self con-
nection, a linguistic survival from the African mainland, contributes
to the meaning produced by the mise-en-scène. In the production, the
Fool further emphasized this mind-body link by interacting physically
with Lear’s head whenever he discussed the king’s madness (Fig. 8). In
one instance, he mimed cutting it open to see if there was anything
inside.
Figure 8 Nuno Delgado (the Fool) interacts with the head of Fonseca Soares
(Lear) in GTCCPM’s 2003 production of Rei Lear. Photo: Luís Couto, courtesy of
the Mindelact Association.
In making these scenic choices, Branco created work that is in line

with Pavis’s theory of adaptation, which advocates for directors and
actors to consider corporeality when crafting adaptations. Pavis (1989)
writes, ‘Theatre translation is never where one expects it to be: not in
words, but in gesture, not in the letter, but in the spirit of a culture’ (42).
Branco’s staging of Lear extends Pavis’s theory, since it lends symmetry
to word (head/crown), metaphorical meaning (self/sanity), and gesture.
However, other staging choices Branco made contributed a raw sensual
feel to the production, which perhaps reifies stereotypical associations
of African and Africa-descended peoples with the body. For example,
the Fool’s rap performances drew attention to the lower body in ways
that are similar to how hip-hop performers use their bodies, such as
when he grabbed his crotch before beginning a rhymed passage. Also,
when Lear referred to Goneril’s hypothetical children, the actress turned
her profile to the audience to reveal an actual pregnant body.
How may these intensely corporeal moments have resonated with
what non-Cape Verdean visiting artists, such as those coming from
Portugal or Brazil, might have expected to encounter during a visit
to Africa? In a documentary about Mindelact 2005, Portuguese actor
and playwright Nuno Pino Custódio, who attended in 2003, spoke
admiringly about Rei Lear’s Crioulo dialogue and the production’s
sensual feel. He suggested that Cape Verdean actors perform well under
these circumstances because of intrinsic differences between African
and Western theatre, the latter of which is ‘more connected to the
intellect,’ according to Custódio (Moreira 2005). Custódio’s comments
come dangerously close to reiterating a ‘West and the Rest’ mind/
body binary that is a relic of colonial thinking. His observations also
raise questions about Branco’s positionality as a Portuguese director
staging a Cape Verdean adaptation for a global Lusophone audience.
Did he, self-consciously or not, craft the production to cater to cultural
outsiders’ desire for a creolized Lear that substitutes corporeality for
a more cerebral approach? If so, that would flirt with the much-
theorized tendency of intercultural Shakespeares to exoticize African
cultures for Western viewers.
The Cape Verdean Lear thus suggests a crucial amendment to
Pavis’s notion of adaptation as an act of pulling a source text toward
a target audience. A festival audience is always multilayered: Cape
Verdean spectators may intuit the cultural nuances of the head–self
connection, whereas other Lusophone spectators may interpret the cor-
poreal references in an essentialist way. Thus, the adapter planning for
a festival venue may engage in a kind of cultural tug-of-war, heaving the
source text toward the host country’s national audience during some
moments, toward the specific spectatorship of the host city at others,
and toward international attendees at others. At festivals, the ‘target
audience’ is forever shifting, forging differing interpretations of the
adaptation as it moves.
While Branco’s Rei Lear offered differing interpretive possibilities to
the festival’s heterogeneous audience, Herlandson Duarte’s production
of Sonho de uma noite de verão for Mindelact 2005 meticulously
addressed the Cape Verdean theatre community. Sonho had a distinctly
unsensual feel to it, causing one Portuguese attendee to call the
production ‘cold.’18 Duarte seemed to have taken the sensual aspect
out of one of Shakespeare’s most beloved romantic comedies, in
which fairies and humans alike indulge their illicit sexual fantasies,
and replaced it with social critique. Spangler (2010) would call this
the best kind of postcolonial adaptation, since its purpose was ‘not to
celebrate intercultural hybridity for its own sake, but rather to locate
a critical voice within it’ (95). It is also adaptation for a different purpose
than Branco’s. Instead of drawing a Shakespearean text closer to Cape
Verdean culture, Duarte made Shakespeare ventriloquize the Solaris
theatre company’s prescriptions for Cape Verdean theatre.
Sonho de uma noite de verão: Meta-theatre and the

art of tactical resistance
Herlandson Duarte, a graduate of Branco’s 2004 Mindelo theatre course,

was only nineteen years old when he made his directorial debut one
year later on the Mindelact main stage with Sonho de uma noite de verão,
his Crioulo-language adaptation of Midsummer. Although in some ways
he is Branco’s protégé, Duarte has gradually sought to distance himself
from the approach of his former mentor to theatre and spectatorship.
Whereas Branco uses reception-adapters to usher Cape Verdean audi-
ences into the world of his adaptations, Duarte considers this a form of
coddling that does not challenge spectators. For example, while Duarte
generally admired the staging of Branco’s Rei Lear, he also critiqued
what he calls facile comedic choices, such as depicting the Fool as
a rapper.19 This criticism is emblematic of Duarte’s overall perspective
on the state of contemporary Cape Verdean theatre: he thinks it is too
reliant on comedy and not sufficiently invested in provoking audience
members to engage in critical evaluation of the art they witness. Duarte
insists on an aesthetic designed to leave audience members ‘shaken
up’ or perplexed when they exit the theatre. Sonho de uma noite de
verão achieved this objective at its Mindelact 2005 debut. Matilde Dias
(2005), a Cape Verdean journalist and blogger, characterized audience
reception of Sonho as follows: ‘The performance text seemed cold, and
many people left the theatre without fully understanding the story.’
This is a far cry from GTCCPM’s sensibility that adaptations should
perform transcultural translation for Cape Verdean audiences. The
two adaptations also present an intriguing instance of genre-bending:
in Branco’s hands, King Lear, a Shakespearean tragedy, became more
comedic; in Duarte’s hands, Midsummer Night’s Dream, a comedy, albeit
a dark one, took on shades of tragedy.
Edouard Glissant (1989) discusses issues of genre at length in his
important essay on Caribbean theatre, ‘Theatre, Consciousness of the
People.’ For Glissant, theatre can shape, critique, and interrogate nation-
hood only when it comes ‘from the people.’ Such a theatre would place
folkloric performance modes (or ‘street scene[s]’) at the center of a staged
performance (195), thereby subjecting them to critique by discerning
spectators. Glissant asserts that this brand of theatre is crucial to
formerly colonized nations because it can productively replace the
genre of tragedy which, from his perspective, is an alienating cultural
import. Considering that Glissant is also critical of highly educated,
cultural elites who rely on ‘colonial handouts,’ such as Western plays,
in their construction of theatre, one might expect him to be doubly
suspicious of Duarte’s melding of the tragic genre and a Shakespearean
comedy in an island culture not unlike the Caribbean. However, within
international theatre festival venues, adapting Shakespeare’s plays is
a viable option for postcolonial theatre directors who want to create the
kind of consciousness-raising theatre that Glissant theorizes. Glissant
seeks a theatre that possesses an ‘internal capacity to challenge and
refute’ and impels spectators to ‘discuss . . . the significance of the per-
formance’ (217). Duarte’s production of Sonho fit this bill.
Instead of the folkloric modes that Glissant recommends, the Solaris
theatre troupe relied on a strategy of ousadia, a Portuguese term mean-
ing ‘boldness’ or ‘daring.’ Duarte first used this term in 2004, right after
he joined forces with other graduating actors from Branco’s theatre
class to form a troupe. He announced publicly that the pillars of the
new Solaris theatre company would be ‘a qualidade artística e ousadia
criativa’ (artistic quality and creative daring) (A Semana 2004). The
Cape Verdean press latched onto the term ousadia, applying it to all
of Solaris’s subsequent productions, including Julietas (Juliets), a loose
adaptation of Romeo and Juliet that merged Shakespeare with bibli-
cal lore. The production, which debuted in Mindelo in March 2005,
featured two women kissing (a first in Cape Verdean theatre), bathing

in blood, and masturbating with the decapitated head of John the
Baptist. The performance was particularly risky because lesbianism is
still a relatively taboo topic in Mindelense society.20 Although Julietas
was a much-anticipated production (tickets sold out a week before the
debut), the Mindelo public demonstrated a resistance to its subject
matter. As Duarte recalls, one local reviewer disparaged it as a blatant
‘commercial for homosexuality.’21 Solaris, however, did not concern
itself with public opinion as they were preparing the production. In
fact, Julietas formed part of the group’s pointed refusal to do the kind of
‘low comedy’ that they believe Mindelo audiences crave. Before Julietas
debuted, they issued this warning on the Mindelact Association’s
homepage, ‘Whoever expects to see a traditional Crioulo comedy, a play
that makes people laugh, can forget it, because our show goes in a com-
pletely divergent direction.’
The crux of the matter is whether or not comedy can be considered
a form of pandering to a theatre audience. Solaris actors told me that
after Branco saw Julietas, he cautioned them not to turn their backs
to the Mindelo public. Significantly, Branco did not commission
the overtly ousada Julietas for Mindelact 2005. What he requested
from Solaris instead was Sonho de uma noite de verão, a much tamer
Shakespeare adaptation that Duarte had first presented, in an abridged
version, for his final directing project for Branco’s class. As I watched
Solaris’s rehearsals for Sonho, it became clear to me that Duarte resisted
having to debut this particular play on the main stage not because it
was by Shakespeare but because it was a comedy. This resistance became
manifest in his overall scenic approach to Midsummer and the critical
alterations he made to the mechanicals’ play-within-a-play. As Duarte
explained to me, the social critique embedded in Sonho is aimed at all
theatre-goers who equate seeing theatre with ‘sitting back and laughing’
and at the Cape Verdean artists who cater to this desire.22 Thus, while
Rei Lear’s debut was surrounded by a celebration of the ‘good taste’ of
the festival public, Solaris’s adaptation let no one off the hook.
Solaris’s Midsummer Night’s Dream posed a significant challenge to
me as an ethnographer because I could not recognize it as a comedy.
From the gravity of the actors’ speeches to their lethargic motion to the
gloomy piano sonatas haunting scenic interludes, the production had
a somber palette. Most remarkable is the final scene at the Duke’s court,
when the servant-class players stage the tragedy of Pyramus and Thisbe
as an actual tragedy rather than Shakespeare’s farcical rendition of one.
When I first observed the ending at a rehearsal, my initial reaction was,
‘They’re missing the point. Bottom’s play is supposed to bring down

the house.’ My mistake was in assuming that the actors were misun-
derstanding the text rather than deliberately reading against its grain.
Indeed, Solaris carefully crafted new dialogue in order to convey the
court’s explicit demand for a comedic performance. In an early scene in
the adaptation, Duke Tezeu and his nobleman, Filostrato, command the
two palace slaves, Neca Fundo and Chico Bico, who substitute for Peter
Quince’s team of day laborers, to rehearse a play for Hermia’s impending
wedding. Filostrato warns that it had better not be a tragedy or drama
because the court ‘kré ari, ari, ari’ (just wants to laugh and laugh and
laugh).23 The duke reiterates that their play must be a comedy, ‘e bem
divertide!’ (and a very funny one). If the slaves do not obey, the penalty
is death: their heads will go to the crocodiles. Significantly, the slaves
do not comply with the authoritative demand for a comedy, a situation
that replicates Solaris’s stance against comedy in Mindelo theatre.
Interestingly, the Solaris actors never clarified for me who exactly
Duke Tezéu and Filostrato were meant to represent in the Cape Verdean
theatre world. Elton Silva, who played Robin, told me, ‘The court is
Mindelact.’ Nuno Costa, who played the Bottom character, said, ‘No,
the court is the Mindelo public.’24 Yet the distinction between the
Mindelact Association and the Mindelo public seems immaterial since
Mindelact claims to have shaped its audiences and their spectatorial
tastes. Further, the Mindelact Association, like all festival programming
boards, needs to be responsive to audience demand. What is significant
is that Solaris’s commentary on comedy preferences was readable in the
production. Silva remarked that anyone in the Cape Verdean arts circle
would recognize the line ‘the court just wants to laugh and laugh and
laugh’ as a critique.
Also significant is that Solaris directed the thrust of this message to
an insider community: Cape Verdean theatre artists. The international
audience present at the Mindelact festival was merely incidental; the
advantage for Solaris of staging its critique at Mindelact was that the
festival venue allowed its message to reach the widest spectrum of Cape
Verdean theatre artists. Here, a meta-theatrical intervention, more than
the choice of a theatre language, determines that the implied audience is
a national one. Dias’s online review of Sonho, which appeared at a time
when her Lantuna blog was widely read in Cape Verdean artistic circles,
confirmed the readability of the critique to Cape Verdean insiders. She
singles out the scene with Duke Tezeu, Filostrato, and the two palace
slaves as a pointed statement to the Mindelo theatre community,
particularly because the slaves do not succumb to the demand for
comedy. As Dias (2005) notes, Solaris did the same thing with Sonho:
since the actors presented a somber version of a Shakespearean comedy
that did not make anyone laugh, they refused to capitulate to the
demands of the Mindelact festival and Mindelo audiences.
Yet clarity and entertainment, Dias continues, were not Solaris’s goals.
The goal instead was ousadia, and the two scenes that best conveyed
Solaris’s objective were the ones in which the slave characters perform
Pirámo e Tisbe. In these scenes, Solaris signaled its appropriation of
Shakespeare’s text for its own act of resistance to local theatre practices,
to comedy as a genre, and to the Mindelact festival’s selection process.
Act II depicted Neca Fundo and Chico Bico meeting in the forest to
rehearse (Fig. 9). Neca exclaimed, ‘It’s always the same! We’re always
Figure 9 Nuno Costa and Marco Freitas rehearse a scene from Pirámo e Tisbe in
the forest in Solaris’s Sonho de uma noite de verão, a Crioulo-language version of
Midsummer Night’s Dream. The 2005 Mindelact International Theatre Festival,
Cape Verde Islands. Photo: João Barbosa, courtesy of the Mindelact Association.
the only ones who show up. There’s almost no time left and we haven’t
rehearsed once. At this rate, the show we’re going to present is “the
slave in the crocodile’s head.” What’s worse, that’s a tragedy!’ This first
critique was directed at what Solaris perceives as a weak work ethic in
the Cape Verdean theatre community: some actors continually miss
rehearsals or show up hours late.25 After these new lines were inserted
in Shakespeare’s scene, the slave characters shifted back into the play’s
dialogue to perform the inane love scene between Pirámo and Tisbe.
Neca dropped to one knee to tell Tisbe that her breath is like an ‘odious’
flower. Chico, as Tisbe, stood with a green cloak draped around him like
a long dress and directed a beatific smile at Neca.
This absurd tableau, one of Solaris’s rare concessions to staging
comedy, did indeed make the Mindelact audience laugh. Yet when the
players repeated the love scene for the court in the final scene, it was no
laughing matter. Visually, the tableau was the same: Neca on his knees,
Tisbe standing and cloaked in a green cape. However, the mood was
completely revised. Sober lighting shrouded the scene, and Tisbe and
Pirámo delivered their professions of love in somber Portuguese rather
than the playful Crioulo they used while rehearsing in the woods.
Duke Tezéu and his court watched in stony silence as Pirámo and Tisbe
dramatically pierced their chests with a sword. This is a far cry from
Duke Theseus’s jovial, mocking commentary that constantly interrupts
the lovers’ hilarious death scene in Shakespeare’s text. Solaris’s version
transformed Shakespeare’s comic ending into high tragedy. The last
line in Sonho revealed the slaves’ punishment for disobeying the court’s
demand for a comedy. Filostrato said menacingly, ‘Your heads are going
to the crocodile!’ – after which the stage went abruptly dark. With
this ominous conclusion, the Solaris actors perhaps foresaw the stark
repercussions of their own refusal to perform comedy in Mindelo, such
as the possibility that spectators would stop coming to their theatre.26
If, as Kevin Wetmore (2002) suggests, successful adaptations rearrange
the cultural codes of the original play to create a text that speaks to
its target spectators, asks them new questions, and addresses pertinent
issues, Solaris’s new questions were about audiences themselves, daring
them to engage in self-reflection about their own spectatorial practices.
Duarte has resisted using the term adaptation to describe Sonho, since
Solaris did not explicitly transplant the story of Midsummer Night’s
Dream to a Cape Verdean setting. No local markers were evident:
the actors wore Greek togas and all references to Athens remained
intact. Rather than an adaptation, Duarte called their performance
a straightforward translation into Crioulo. In an interview, I pressed
him further on this, reminding him of the significant alterations he

had made to Shakespeare’s text, particularly in the play-within-a-play
scenes. Subsequently, Duarte and I decided that perhaps Solaris’s perfor-
mance was most aptly termed a transformation of Shakespeare’s text.27 In
other words, the group had transformed Shakespeare into a vehicle for
advancing their own theatre philosophy.
I see Solaris’s recoding of Shakespeare’s meta-theatre as a veiled cri-
tique of festivals themselves. Solaris’s choice to depict Neca and Chico
as palace slaves rather than urban laborers completely alters power
relationships in the play. Authority hovers over the rehearsal process
in the form of Filostrato and the Duke. Also, in Solaris’s version, the
court orders Neca’s play, whereas in Shakespeare’s original text, Bottom
enters a contest to perform at court. This critical alteration speaks
to the difference between an artistic director soliciting a production
for a festival main stage and selecting it from a range of submitted
proposals. In Mindelact’s early years, festival representatives went to
various islands to watch the work of theatre groups in order to evaluate
quality and appropriateness for the Mindelact stage. In some cases, the
Mindelact association would request a performance especially for this
purpose.28 To this day, Mindelact annually calls for formal proposals
from national theatre groups who want to perform on the main stage.
Yet more often than not, the artistic director will simply ask a theatre
group for a specific play. This was the case with Sonho, which originated
in coursework with Branco. Duarte hinted to me that if it had been up
to him, he would have chosen a different play.29
Significantly, Solaris’s critique of festival audiences and festival poli-
tics was subtle. It was in the spirit of what de Certeau calls a tactic, or
a tiny ambush launched discreetly by a subject who lacks the social
or cultural power to engage in an outright, strategic assault (1988).
Far from taking offense, Branco bounded onto the stage after Sonho de
uma noite de verão and congratulated Duarte, declaring that Cape Verde
had gained a prodigious directing talent in the young artist. However,
the production set in motion a series of dialogues between Branco and
Duarte about theatre and audience in Cape Verde. This was perhaps
foreshadowed by the fact that Dias concluded her performance review
of Sonho with a clear distinction between Solaris’s role in Mindelo
theatre and the role of Branco’s theatre group: ‘On the one side, there
is “comédia crioula” [Creole comedy], represented by the Portuguese
Cultural Center’s theatre group [GTCCPM], and on the other, there is
Solaris, with its more visually-oriented stage conceptions, which are
bold and not at all innocent’ (Dias 2005). With this, Dias enunciated
a gap between the two directors that would widen over the next two
years. Yet it was from the space of this discord that Sonho’s ability to
provoke a ‘revaluation from the inside,’ in Glissant’s terms (1989: 217),
became clear.
The dissonance that marked the relationship between Duarte and
Branco in the ensuing years crystallizes the potential pitfalls of the
lusofonia discourse in the postcolonial Lusophone world. Far from
marking a harmonious exchange of ideas between two members of
‘brother nations,’ their dialogue became increasingly accusatory and
contentious. Yet, as Rustom Bharucha (2004) notes, conflict that sur-
faces within intercultural encounters is actually a positive sign that
differences have not been dissolved in a hegemonic agenda. The
most visible installment of the directors’ debate about spectatorship
occurred on Solaris’s blog in August 2006. Duarte posted an entry called
‘Termómetro teatral em São Vicente’ (Theatre Thermometer in São
Vicente) in which he suggested that because Mindelo theatre-goers have
not been exposed to provocative performances that serve a valid social
function, they have ‘rudimentary’ evaluation skills to which Mindelo
theatre groups cater by measuring the success of a production by the
guffaws it provokes in the house. Duarte also cited a lack of genuine
artistic debate within the theatre community.30 Branco posted the sole
comment on the blog entry. He disputed the assumption that laughter
always indicates an uncritical, unthinking spectator and the idea that
theatre can exist without taking into account audience taste, which
he claimed could only be developed through ‘quality’ theatre. Finally,
Branco claimed that Duarte’s call for more engaged artistic dialogue was
directly contradicted by his own recent actions of going straight to the
press to air his concerns about Mindelact instead of discussing them
face to face with the artists involved.
This online exchange was a direct result of an incident that had
occurred earlier that summer. In June 2006, Solaris went public with its
critique of Mindelact’s selection process. In an editorial in Cape Verde’s
major newspaper, it announced that it had been the only Mindelo theatre
group to receive a letter from Mindelact explaining the procedures for
submitting a proposal for the 2006 festival edition, whereas other
Mindelo troupes had been directly invited to participate. In the same
newspaper issue, Branco contended that there was no discrimination
involved and that Solaris had already submitted proposals for two per-
formances. He stated that Mindelact was under no obligation to accept
every theatre group’s proposal (Fortes 2006). The upshot was that Solaris
did not perform at Mindelact 2006, which provoked complaints from
many regular festival supporters who consider their productions edgy

and indispensable to Mindelact.31
Theatre festivals are riddled with asymmetrical power relations
between artist-performers and artist-administrators. However, the
Solaris example reveals that even theatre artists on the lower end of
that power scale can use festival resources to their own advantage.
A festival’s programming committee must ultimately bend to the sover-
eignty of the theatre-going public and the press. Solaris’s absence from
Mindelact 2006 stirred so much controversy that the company received
double billing at Mindelact 2007, where it performed two original
pieces by Valódia Monteiro, the group’s resident playwright: Martur,
about a suicide bomber on the Gaza strip, on the main stage, and Psycho,
a play in which two women confront their phobias of sex, germs, and
public places, for the Festival Off program.32 Neither was a comedy;
neither was a solicited adaptation. Thus, Solaris’s participation in 2007
took place on the group’s own terms.
More important, the group’s double billing was the result of a productive
compromise with João Branco. After Solaris had proposed Psycho for the
main-stage program for 2007, Branco had told them that he preferred
debuts on the main program and noted the group had already staged
Psycho several times in Mindelo. He suggested that they perform Psycho
for Festival Off and bring a new piece for the main stage. This arrange-
ment closed the circle of a vibrant artistic debate that cycled through
two Shakespearean adaptations and their aftermath, engendering a
transformation in the diplomatic and communicative relations between
two Lusophone directors in a shared festival venue and a postcolonial
space. Thus, Rei Lear and Sonho de uma noite de verão may be regarded as
two stops on a cycle that recast festival processes and critical discourses
about theatre and audiences in Cape Verde.
Dulcinéia e o cavaleiro dos leões: Cultural connections

beyond lusofonia
While I was in Maputo in August 2009, I wandered into the city’s most
prominent theatre space, Teatro Avenida, in search of a Mozambican
actress, Sílvia Mendes, who had performed at the Festival d’Agosto
a few years back. I had been told I could find her there rehearsing
for a new show. Slipping into the back row of seats, I watched a
curious scene unfold onstage: an animated, middle-aged European
woman gave spirited stage directions in Spanish, which were then
re-explained in Portuguese by a youthful Mozambican director to a host
of Mozambican actors in their twenties. At center was a tall wooden lad-

der, which the actors hauled around the stage, transforming it variously
into a boat, a podium for formal speeches, or a lookout point. The dense
poetic dialogue became recognizable to me as a take on Cervantes’s
Don Quixote only when I heard Mendes called ‘Dulcinéia.’ I soon
learned that the Mozambican troupe, Luarte, had invited Maite Agirre,
a director from the Basque country in Spain, back to Maputo five years
after a successful collaboration with her at the 2004 Festival d’Agosto.
I scribbled in my notebook, ‘Every international festival, if it has had
an impact, generates aftermath. The aftermath of the moribund Festival
d’Agosto is in this room, and it is not Lusophone but vividly bilingual.’
This was festival director Evaristo Abreu’s vision for the Festival
d’Agosto. He wanted it to be an intercultural theatre venue rooted in
a specific Lusophone country, Mozambique, with ample logistical and
managerial assistance from another Lusophone country, Portugal, but
that was open to a broader cultural and linguistic panorama of theatre
artists. Spanish-language productions are good fits for international
festivals hosted by Lusophone countries, because many Portuguese
speakers can understand Spanish without too much difficulty (although
the reverse is not always the case).33 Festival productions that blend
Spanish and Portuguese dialogue thus expand the lusofonia worldview,
proposing new possibilities for transnational connections and linguis-
tic theatre experiments that remain intelligible to local audiences in
Lusophone nations.
One such example at the Festival d’Agosto 2004 was Celestina, velha
puta casamenteira! (Celestina, Old Matchmaker Whore), a bilingual
(Spanish–Portuguese) adaptation of the classic late-medieval Spanish
text, La Celestina: Tragicomedia de Calisto y Melibea (The Celestina:
Tragicomedy of Calisto and Melibea). Maite Agirre, an actress and play-
wright, wrote the script and asked to be matched with a Mozambican
theatre company for a co-production at the festival. Abreu put her in
touch with Luarte, a novice troupe that was making its debut that year at
the festival. Luarte’s artistic director, Felix Bruno L. Carlos (‘Mambuxo’),
calls Celestina one of the troupe’s most important learning experiences,
since Agirre introduced them to new performance techniques and her
own style of burlesque comedy.34 The Luarte actors kept in touch with
Agirre over the years. When they learned that the Spanish embassy
in Maputo was calling for proposals for joint cultural projects with
Spain, they saw an opportunity to bring her back. While Agirre sought
funding in Spain for travel to Mozambique with a small cadre of
musicians and actors from her theatre company, Agerre Teatroa, Luarte
secured support from the Spanish embassy for their month-long stay in
Maputo and the production costs. The result was Dulcinéia e o cavaleiro
dos leões (Dulcinéia and the Knight of the Lions), a reworking of key
episodes from Cervantes’s famous story that was written by Agirre
but transformed into an intercultural mosaic by the Luarte actors and
director, who added Mozambican cultural references and performance
methods during rehearsals. At the play’s opening night in late August
2009, Carlos told the expectant audience the show was an adaptation
of an adaptation.
Co-directed by Agirre and Carlos, Dulcinéia e o cavaleiro dos leões
reshaped Cervantes’s text into a commentary on an actual intercultural
encounter. This intensely reflexive form of adaptation was partly the
result of trust established between the two theatre companies during
a prior festival setting. The performance was jointly constructed: Agirre
had sketched out the script ahead of time and came to Maputo with
ideas about staging, but Carlos and the Luarte actors expanded scenes
through improvisations at rehearsals and original suggestions. Beyond
making changes to the performance text, Carlos also ardently advocated
for an intercultural presence onstage. Agirre recalled that he often
became impatient for the Basque actors from her company to join them
at rehearsals; she preferred to add them only after her work with the
Mozambican actors had advanced sufficiently.35 Yet the inclusion of the
Basque actors produced the most interesting moment in the adaptation:
a Mozambican Dom Quixote (as it is spelled in Portuguese) comes face
to face with a Spanish one, and the two of them must come to terms
with the other’s existence. There are also two Sancho Panças (Panzas)
but only one female lead, who in this version is often called ‘Doltza,’
a fusion of Dulcinéia and Teresa Panza, the wife of Sancho in Cervantes’s
novel.36
This creative reinvention of Cervantes’s characters added to the
fantastical, abstract nature of the mise-en-scène. The theatre ensemble
variously played Dom Quixote’s neighbors (who attempted to coax him
back to his hometown) and figments of Dom Quixote’s imagination
as he undertook knightly adventures and romantic escapades. The
throng of actors, including Doltza and Sancho Pança, dressed in clown
and hobo attire, with bright red noses, knee-length baggy trousers,
and colorful headscarves (Fig. 10). Their speeches were enigmatic and
their actions often perplexing. For example, when Sancho bravely
declared that he would rule over an island Dom Quixote had promised
him, an old woman yelled at him from the top of the ladder to quit
dreaming and go tend his fields, after which the clown-actors abruptly
Figure 10 Actors from Luarte and Agerre Teatroa play Dom Quixote’s friends
and neighbors in Dulcinéia e o cavaleiro dos leões. Teatro Avenida, Maputo,
Mozambique. Photo: Agerre Teatroa, courtesy of Maite Agirre.
(and inexplicably) dove stage right en masse, landing face down with
the ladder sprawled haphazardly on top of them. Carlos admitted to me
that when the Luarte actors first read the script Agirre had sent them
before her arrival in Maputo, they did not know what to make of it
because it was so different from the serious, realist plays the company
had grown accustomed to devising.37
The tone of the performance, however, was exactly in line with the
carnivalesque nature of the lion episode in Don Quixote that provides
the framework for Agirre’s adaptation. That episode begins with Don
Quixote donning a helmet filled with curds (placed there by his
gluttonous squire, Sancho) and ends with the knight boldly confronting
a lion who, to his surprise, pays him no attention whatsoever (Cervantes
2003). One of a pair of lions en route to the king’s palace on a wagon
driven by an emissary, the lion is a distinct symbol of the Spanish crown:
the shield of Castilla and León has long featured two lions and two cas-
tles. When Don Quixote orders the lion tamer to open the cage so he
can confront the male lion and flaunt his bravery, he is thus confronting
an emblem of the highest authority of the land as well as his own inner
demons. This episode marks a distinct shift in Cervantes’s text, since
his protagonist is facing actual danger, as opposed to his farcical earlier
battles with windmills. Yet it is similarly shot through with delusion.
Even after the lion casually turns his back on the knight and strolls
indifferently back into the cage, Don Quixote interprets the event as
a conquest since he has stood up to an enemy who ultimately retreated.
It is in this episode that Cervantes’s protagonist elects to change his
name from The Knight of the Sorrowful Face to the Knight of the Lions,
the title of Agirre’s adaptation. References to lions and tamers give the
episode a circus-like feel, and the image of Don Quixote with curds drip-
ping down his face from the helmet make him appear like the clowns
that dominate the mise-en-scène of the Mozambican performance. The
lion scene, which was pantomimed by the actors, occupied a prominent
place toward the middle of the adaptation. The clowns’ bodies linked
together in crouching positions on the floor formed the imaginary cage,
with the actors springing apart abruptly when the knight opened the
enclosure to release the invisible beast.
The thematic thrust of the lion episode speaks to the particular postco-
lonial resonance of a Cervantes adaptation staged jointly by Mozambican
and Basque actors. Just as Mozambique is considered a rogue country in
the Lusophone transnational community, the Basque country has long
been considered a resistant and rebellious region of Spain. Originally
a part of the ancient Navarra kingdom, the Basque region possessed
fueros, or entitlements to certain measures of self-rule, which it fought
to retain in the centuries after Navarra’s fusion with Castilla in the late
1300s. The Basque region has long been considered autonomous and
produced a formal political party in the late nineteenth century, the
Basque Nationalist Party (Partido Nacionalista Vasco), which advocates
for recognition of Basques as a unique people with their own distinct
language (Euskara) and culture. In the mid-twentieth-century, a more
aggressive group formed the ETA (Euskadi Ta Askatasuna), which, until
its most recent ceasefire in 2010, waged a campaign of violence for
Basque independence. Despite the divergent aims of Basque political
organizations (only some of whom favor a complete split from Spain),
most Basques share the common goal of defending themselves as
a unique nation and cultural entity within Spain.
In Mozambique, the Cervantes adaptation had an interesting cultural
and political resonance. As a Spaniard, Agirre might represent a domi-
nant culture, but as a Basque, she occupies a minority subject position
in Spain and can thus stand in solidarity with the Mozambican actors
and their own embattled history with imperialism. Over the centuries,
the fates of the Basque and Mozambican people have been tied to the
two imperialist powers of the Iberian Peninsula, from whom they have
fervently sought autonomy. Given those similarities, the collaboration
between the two theatre companies became especially significant.
A Basque director choosing to adapt a renowned Spanish text might
seem curious in light of the Basque country’s fierce nationalism. Agirre’s
theatre company, Agerre Teatroa, takes pride in its Basque background
and has collaborated with numerous other Basque artists over the years.
Yet the troupe also devises creative adaptations of prominent literary
works from Spain and other parts of Europe. In fact, it was an invitation
to perform Celestina, velha puta casamenteira! in Argamasilla de Alba,
the municipality in Castile-La Mancha, Spain, where Cervantes was
imprisoned and is said to have come up with the idea for his famous
novel, that inspired Agerre Teatroa to adapt it (Artez 2011). Dulcinéia
e o cavaleiro dos leões became the first of four versions of Cervantes’s
story that Agirre has staged to date, one of which was performed in
the Basque language.38 Her Spanish- and Portuguese-language adapta-
tion of Cervantes became Agirre’s ‘ticket’ to Mozambique; the project
easily won patronage from the Spanish embassy in Maputo, whereas
a Basque-oriented one might not have. The production did, however,
contain original music composed by the Basque actors and a popular
Basque military march that one of the Agerre Teatroa members had
taught the cast.39
The lion episode that frames the adaptation becomes more significant
when examined within this unique political and intercultural context.
As a revered Spanish text, Don Quixote is a symbol of the centralized
Spanish government against which the Basque country rebels; in that
sense, it is the lion. As a gentle parody of Cervantes’s text, Dulcinéia e
o cavaleiro dos leões is like the sword the Basque actors brandish before
the lion. And just like the lion in the Don Quixote chapter, the Spanish
government seemed indifferent to the critique; after all, its embassy
in Maputo furnished the production and its cultural attaché attended
the opening night. However, a reaction from the Spanish government
was not the point of the evening. As Don Quixote explains at the end
of the episode, the goal in facing the lion was not victory but valor. So
too is the case with the Basque country – even if independence from
Spain never comes, they must still bravely defend their own culture.
In this light, the nods to national autonomy and liberation in the
performance, which seem to refer solely to Mozambique, may resonate
doubly as Basque solidarity with the Mozambican people.
As a spectator at Dulcinéia e o cavaleiro dos leões in Maputo, I paid

particular attention to the Mozambican additions to an otherwise
abstract, comical rendition of Cervantes’s story. How legible were they
when filtered into the Don Quixote myth, with which theatre-goers
in Maputo would have varying degrees of familiarity? My original
assumption was that the visibility of the Mozambican contributions
would signal how successful the two companies were in their goal of
staging an egalitarian cultural dialogue using a European text that was
certainly more familiar to the Basque actors. As I paid closer attention
to the adaptation, however, I noted how the Basque and Mozambican
cultural signifiers seemed to meld together, particularly the audio and
visual cues. For example, the musical score, which was composed
specifically for the production, blended trumpets and drums with the
distinct sound of the timbila, the unique xylophone of Mozambique’s
Chopi people, played by local Maputo musicians. Thus, even in the
midst of the Basque military march performed by the whole cast, the
timbre of the timbila dominated the play’s soundscape. To Mozambican
spectators, this surely signaled a fidelity to their national culture in the
context of the intercultural mélange onstage. To the Basque actors who
understood the significance of the march, however, that moment was
also an instance of Basque nationalism infiltrating a literary text that is
synecdochic of Spain’s national culture, a potential hegemonic threat
to Basque individualism.
Other portions of the performance offered visual prompts about
Mozambique’s liberation movement against Portuguese colonialism,
yet may have carried hidden meaning for Basques. At one point, the
clown-actor ensemble began discussing the books about chivalry that
Dom Quixote had read. They then segued into a dialogue about the
importance of learning stories from all over the world so as to broaden
each other’s cultural outlook, a passage that came from Agirre’s original
script.40 Onstage, however, the clowns’ actions told a specific story. One
at a time, they climbed frenetically to the top of the ladder, shouting
out lines from the text but waving different colored flags, first red, then
green, then yellow. These pan-Africanist colors, which appear on the flags
of Mozambique and many other African countries, shaped the
scene into a commemoration of Mozambican independence. This was
underscored when one of the clowns called the others ‘camaradas,’
the term liberation leaders across Lusophone Africa used for each
other, including Amílcar Cabral in Cape Verde and Samora Machel
in Mozambique. These two leaders’ anti-colonial movements, both of
which were informed by African socialism and communist revolutions
worldwide, kept in close contact throughout the 1960s and early 1970s.
Thus, while the spoken text conveyed a rather trite message about the
importance of cultural exchange through storytelling, the Luarte actors
embodied a particular narrative about resistance to imperialism and
solidarity across former Portuguese colonies in Africa. Significantly,
red and green are also the colors of the official flag of the Basque
country, whose shield blends those two colors with yellow.41 (The
shield, incidentally, also depicts a lion.) Under the guise of making
a postcolonial statement about Africa, then, the adaptation might have
simultaneously been advocating for Basque nationalism. A distinctly
intercultural moment was thus a convenient disguise for a political
statement that might otherwise have been viewed with suspicion by the
Spanish embassy that helped finance the production.
Props may also add layers to a political allegory, as illustrated by the
ladder in Dulcinéia e o cavaleiro dos leões. While the inclusion of the lad-
der in the performance was initially unplanned, it ultimately served
to guide Cervantes’s story across various milestones of Mozambique’s
history and contemporary reality. When they entered Teatro Avenida
to rehearse for the first time, Agirre and the Luarte actors encountered
a wooden ladder that had been left onstage from a recent performance
by one of Maputo’s modern dance troupes. Agirre became captivated by
the ladder and its performance potential and asked the Luarte actors to
secure an identical one to use in their production.42 The ladder then took
on shifting connotations as the adaptation progressed. During the flag-
waving moment, it was a positive symbol of ascendance, of the heights
to which African nations such as Mozambique rose when they shook
off European colonialism. The clowns’ bodies clinging to the ladder also
evoked the wooden sculptures often sold in Maputo’s open-air markets
that depict entwined bodies climbing toward the sky.43 This hopeful
image of a collective movement upward contrasted sharply with the
connotations of cultural hierarchies that arose later in the piece.
A powerful instance of this came with the entrance of a policeman.
Toward the middle of the piece, the Mozambican Dom Quixote, dressed
in a pseudo-knightly fashion in a yellow scarf draped over his head
like a visor and an orange tunic and carrying a walking stick in his
hand, began thoughtfully conferring with Sancho, walking through the
audience and out the back of the theatre as he spoke. While the other
actors huddled around the ladder gesticulating wildly to each other,
Sancho rushed back to the stage crying, ‘O mestre foi embora!’ (The mas-
ter has left!). Suddenly, the shrill sound of a whistle pierced through
the chaos onstage. Audience members craned their heads around to
observe a Mozambican actor with a clown’s nose and formal blue jacket
standing at the rear of the house. While he identified himself as ‘mágico
Merlin’ (Merlin the magician), his jaunty blue cap lent him the appear-
ance of a Maputo police officer. He promised the clowns to use his
magic to bring back their leader, Dom Quixote.
What happened next poked fun at the way culture itself can be
‘policed’ even within postcolonial adaptations. As the sound of Spanish
guitars vibrated from onstage, the house doors swung open for a new
knightly figure who strutted down the aisle. Played by a Basque actor
from Agirre’s company, the Spanish Don Quixote wore a flowing tunic
and a Viking-like helmet. Flanking him was another Basque actor play-
ing a rotund Sancho in clownish red and yellow clothing. When the
Mozambican Dom Quixote reappeared at the back of the house, the two
knights had a comical confrontation. As Merlin (the officer) glanced
suspiciously at the Mozambican knight, whom the clowns onstage
identified as their ‘real’ master, he quipped that if that man was Dom
Quixote, ‘eu sou Samora Machel’ (I’m Samora Machel). Essentially, the
officer invoked the name of Mozambique’s deceased liberation leader,
the embodiment of Mozambican nationalism, to disavow the possibil-
ity of a nationalized Dom Quixote. The police officer, in other words,
preferred the ‘authenticity’ of the Spanish-speaking knight. He thus
illustrated the ways even African subjects may ‘police’ the boundaries of
a Western canon if they do not approve of texts like Cervantes’s being
transformed and localized through adaptation.
The two knights’ reactions to each other, however, told a different
story. At first, they confronted each other apprehensively from across
the space of the audience, the Mozambican one at the back of the
house on the left, and the Spanish one midway down the right-hand
aisle. The Mozambican knight asked the clowns onstage if anyone
needed help from Dom Quixote, gesturing to himself, which caused
the Spanish knight to bellow in confusion, ‘Don Quixote soy yo!!!’ (But
I’m Don Quixote!). At this remark, the clowns onstage doubled over
with laughter, visibly amused by the notion that Dom Quixote could be
anyone other than their master, the Mozambican knight. The two men
then ascended the stage with their eyes glued to each other in suspicion,
meeting center stage as drums rumbled in the background to suggest
that a duel was about to take place. Yet soon after, the mood of the
scene changed: the two knights embraced each other, shook hands, and
went their separate ways, the Spanish one sauntering offstage and the
Mozambican one remaining for the duration of the show. The Spanish
Sancho also stayed, producing a doubling of his character until the end, as
well as a mixture of Spanish- and Portuguese-language dialogue that

further conveyed the multiple cultural sign systems onstage.
In contrast to the policeman’s dismissal of the Mozambican Dom
Quixote, the meeting and parting of the two knights suggested that
Cervantes’s story was equally at home in Mozambique, in Spain, and
in the Basque Country. As Luarte actor Ambrósio Joa later told me in
an interview, it is as if the two knights say to each other, ‘I’m going to
be Dom Quixote in this direction, and you can be Don Quixote in that
other direction.’44 Joa further explained that the two theatre companies
never perceived Cervantes’s story as ‘belonging’ to Spain; rather, it
simply told the story of an adventurer, who in their case became
a Mozambican adventurer. Yet since Basque actors and cultural signs
also entered the mise-en-scène, the adaptation affirmed the possibility
of indigenizing canonical texts in multiple ways, in this case, through
Basque–Mozambican solidarity.
Yet the encounter between the two knights also seemed to comment
on the dialogic potential of the intercultural process, which I see as
linked in this case to festival aftermath. The camaraderie the two knights
established mirrored the mutual respect and affection of the two theatre
companies for each other. I saw this dynamic often at their rehearsals.
As Agirre tossed out ideas in Spanish for the staging, Carlos would
not only repeat them in Portuguese to the other actors but would
also add in his own suggestions and solicit other ideas from the cast.
At no point did I perceive that one director was more in charge than
the other, despite the fact that Agirre had more directing experience
than Carlos. The equitable working relationship between the Basque
and Mozambican artists seemed rooted in trust, which I attribute to
the fact that the two companies met during the 2004 Festival d’Agosto.
The particular constraints of a festival setting – a very brief rehearsal
period, limited time in performance venues, and an international audi-
ence with varying degrees of cultural literacy about the performances –
make for a challenging working environment. Under the right
circumstances, these challenges can unite disparate theatre artists deter-
mined to stage a successful production even under such duress. This is
clearly what happened in 2004 with Luarte and Agerre Teatroa, and the
resulting camaraderie led to the even richer experience of working on
a co-production outside the parameters of a theatre festival later.
Aftermath is an integral part of the festival process, since it may pave
the way for fruitful intercultural collaborations in the future. The Luarte
actors often spoke wistfully to me about the Festival d’Agosto and
admiringly about Evaristo Abreu’s initiative in getting it off the ground.
Many Mozambican actors told me they hoped the festival would one
day return. Yet the festival seems to have already returned in the shape
of Dulcinéia e o cavaleiro dos leões. That co-production proved Abreu’s
initial instincts about the Festival d’Agosto to be correct: intercultural
theatre in Lusophone countries need not stay tethered to the Lusophone
world. Moving smoothly between Spanish and Portuguese dialogue and
indicators of Basque and Mozambican culture, the adaptation captured
the attention and resounding applause of the mix of Mozambican
citizens and Spanish expatriates who attended opening night (the latter
drawn by publicity from the Spanish embassy in Maputo). By rejecting
the linguistic hegemony of the Lusophone world, the Festival d’Agosto
and its aftermath recast Lusophone transnationalism as something mal-
leable, capable of being reshaped by cultural connections that are more
global and more linguistically inclusive.45
Conclusion
The adaptations discussed here became transformative of festival

discourses and practices in Cape Verde and Mozambique. In calling
them transformative, I respond to Julie Sanders’s call for a more dynamic
vocabulary to discuss adaptations (2006). While the noun ‘adaptation’
focuses on an end product, a collection of semiotic signifiers that constitute
the unique cultural syncretism of an adaptation, ‘transformative’ is a
word that summons an action: a spiraling motion that stimulates altera-
tions, provocations, and deliberations within a local theatre community
during the afterlife of an adaptation. These three adaptations lend cre-
dence to new theories of interculturalism that focus on its potential to
generate new and dynamic cultural configurations instead of merely
churning out stationary ‘products’ of two (or more) cultural traditions
coming together.46 As Leo Cabranes-Grant (2011) writes, ‘Cultures are
moving targets: the prefix “inter” should emphasize their becoming,
not their decidability’ (501). For the adaptations examined here, the
directors’ recasting of cultural codes was a form of ‘becoming,’ since
new performance opportunities and greater understanding among
diverse artists arose as a result. Perhaps by thinking about adaptations
as transformative, we can begin to focus more on the valuable becoming
set in motion by directors, actors, and spectators alike.
It is particularly important to dissect this ‘becoming’ within festival
spaces where Western authors such as Shakespeare and Cervantes, for
better or worse, often become the facilitators of postcolonial relationships
among directors from disparate nations and geopolitical backgrounds.
As the adaptations discussed here indicate, these names are not neces-
sarily straightforward signifiers of cultural imperialism. Festival settings,
with their vast collection of international artists, ensure that resulting
adaptations can speak to multiple colonial and postcolonial contexts
at once, thus illustrating how transnational connections are always in
a state of emergence, forever ‘becoming’ one thing, only to radically
transform into another at the next festival or intercultural encounter.
6
Toward a Conclusion: Forum
Theatre in Festival Venues
In late May 2012, Tânia Pires issued a startling press release: Brazil’s
major Lusophone international theatre festival would be canceled that
summer because of lack of funding. FESTLIP’s fifth season had been
canceled, she explained, because the Brazilian Ministry of Culture
and FUNARTE had stopped providing financial support to the festival
in 2011, leaving Pires’s production company, TALU Produções, with
substantial debt. This was a vastly different situation from what had
happened during FESTLIP’s first three years (2008–10), when the
festival was a darling of the Ministry of Culture and a symbol of Brazil’s
renewed commitment to Africa and to global Lusophone connections,
both of which had become national goals during the Lula presidency.
In 2011, Lula’s successor, Dilma Rousseff, came to power, along with
a new minister of culture, well-known singer and songwriter Ana
Buarque. Buarque’s ministry has already caused some controversy.
This was evidenced in an open letter to Rousseff signed by Brazilian
academics, artists, and other citizens that expressed their feelings of
frustration because the new Ministry of Culture had not adhered to
the cultural policies Lula had established and articulated in a National
Plan for Culture. This document had been finalized after an extensive
series of meetings and conferences to reach a consensus on its terms.1
The defunding of FESTLIP was a strong indication of the changing
tides at Brazil’s Ministry of Culture; the final outcome has yet to be
determined.
Pires’s press release heralded a shift in direction for FESTLIP.
While she maintained that the festival was simply postponed until
the next year (it did indeed take place in August 2013), all signs
indicate that the continuation of FESTLIP will depend increasingly
on funding from corporations, such as Oi Futuro, the largest cell
164
Forum Theatre in Festival Venues 165
phone company in Brazil, and indirect state support, such as Caixa,

the national bank of Brazil. This new trend calls into question my
assumption that the Brazilian government is ready to take a leadership
role in Lusophone transnationalism, at least in the cultural sphere. Yet
it also demonstrates that international festivals are valuable barometers
of abrupt shifts in government policies and global diplomatic patterns.
The mercurial nature of festival funding invites a closer look at what
may be going on behind the scenes of cultural programs; it reminds us
that transnational communities are dependent for their very survival
on the ability of governments, local leaders, cultural organizers, and
individuals to continually recast ideological positions and financial
circumstances. What does it mean that the wealthiest theatre festival I
have highlighted in this book has missed at least one year of existence,
while the smallest and least opulent, the Mindelact festival, has run for
nineteen consecutive years? How do we account for the fact that the
Festival d’Agosto in Mozambique has not survived, while the Elinga
theatre company in Angola recently hosted its second Lusophone
international theatre festival? The Angolan festival was supported in
part by Cena Lusófona (cenaberta 2012),2 the Portuguese association
that helped launch the Lusophone festival circuit in the 1990s.
What might these new developments tell us about the fluctuating
status of Lusophone transnationalism and its current driving forces?
In this book, I have provided a snapshot of a Lusophone festival cir-
cuit that I saw solidifying during the first decade of the twenty-first
century, when theatre artists in Cape Verde, Mozambique, and Brazil
were testing the waters of Lusophone transnationalism and exploring
its potential to create fruitful artistic interactions and cultural dia-
logues. Yet it is clear that the ever-changing realities of festivals will
always outpace me, insuring that any conclusions must be provisional
at best.
My aim in this book has been to highlight the myriad interpretive
possibilities a festival framework may elicit for any given performance.
In focusing on performers’ agency in recasting narratives of nation-
hood and transnationalism through theatre performed at international
festivals, I have worked against the conventional logic that much of the
interpretive framework of a festival is a foregone conclusion even before
the actors tread the planks of a stage. What I have uncovered is the
potential of festivals to extend the cultural interventions of performers
by grafting on new layers of interpretive possibilities, even in cases
where the aims of the performers may be at odds with the framework
of a festival. This was the case with both of the women-centered
productions I examined in Chapter 4: Raiz di Polon’s theatre-dance

piece Duas Sem Três carefully reworked the gendered discourses about
Cape Verdean emigration that appeared in the program for the 2004
Mindelact festival, and M’Bêu’s production of O Homem Ideal at FESTLIP
2009 suggested that the economic destiny of Mozambique may lie
beyond the limiting Lusophone transnational network the festival
promotes. When performances chafe against the ideological framework
of a festival, they may produce interesting tensions that introduce new
cultural perspectives to spectators and artists alike.
I have thus defended international theatre festivals as productive sites
for complex cultural dialogues about local, national, and global issues,
particularly when such festivals target a specific transnational community.
Yet they are just as apt to produce cultural misunderstandings, especially
given the hierarchies at festivals in which administrators have more for-
mal power than artists and some participants have more influence than
others by virtue of their socioeconomic background and geographic
location. This was the case in Chapter 5, where I examined how
a Portuguese director and his former Cape Verdean protégé engaged in
a heated debate about the politics of the selection process at a festival.
Chapter 3 discussed the deep cultural divide between a Portuguese ver-
sion of Cape Verdean mothers’ experiences with colonial-era drought
and the actual Cape Verdean oral history that inspired the Portuguese
troupe’s production of Mãe Preta at Mindelact 2005. Throughout the
book, I have maintained that these complex cultural conversations,
whether friendly or contentious, are not confined to the temporal or
spatial parameters of a festival. In many cases, they unfold in festival
aftermath, the dialogic spaces that arise parallel to or even outside the
defined performance settings of a festival.
This claim, however, implies that the cultural dialogues generated at
festivals are inherently fragmented. They may begin on a stage but are
continued bit by bit on talkback panels, in roundtable debates spon-
sored by the festival, over shared meals at the official dining venue of
a festival, or in the blogosphere after the festival ends. How effective,
exactly, are such piecemeal cultural conversations? Are they potent
enough to transform relationships among artists whose lives have been
shaped by different facets of a shared postcolonial history, as is the case
with the Angolan, Brazilian, Cape Verdean, Guinean, Mozambican,
and Portuguese theatre artists I have featured in this book? Have I put
too much stock in festival aftermath as a location for recasting trans-
national communities, their diverse constituencies, and the host of
pressing cultural matters that connect them?
In this conclusion, I wish to briefly examine an alternative platform

that may offer valuable opportunities for more immediate cultural
dialogues in international festival settings: Augusto Boal’s forum
theatre. A Brazilian director, Boal developed his famed forum technique
in the 1970s and continued to evolve it in collaboration with others
until his death in 2009. Briefly, forum theatre is a way to provoke
spectators to respond actively to a play that depicts a form of social
oppression endemic to the particular community for which the play
is performed. The troupe first performs the skit straight through to
an undesirable ending in which the oppression continues. After that,
the ‘joker,’ or leader of the forum session, invites individual audience
members to become ‘spect-actors’ who mount the stage and attempt
to create a more satisfactory ending to the piece by effectively putting
an end to the oppressive situation. In conventional forum theatre,
spect-actors can only play the people in the skit who are designated as
‘oppressed.’ Meanwhile, the other performers onstage must forcefully
resist the solutions spect-actors propose, thus demonstrating that
resolving oppression in everyday life is no easy task. The joker’s role is
to facilitate dialogue about the social issue among performers, spect-
actors, and other audience members, who are invited to give their
critiques of each dramatized solution to the problem. In most cases,
lively discussion and debate ensues.
Boal’s forum methods caught the imagination of theatre practitioners
worldwide, especially those dedicated to socially conscious theatre.
Essentially, the value of forum theatre is that it gets people talking
about issues crucial to their everyday survival while also stimulating
their critical thinking and problem-solving skills. It can thus act as an
antidote to the sort of mainstream theatre that expects spectators to
sit back passively and watch a play in silence and complacency. Forum
theatre has become so popular that it is now occasionally performed
at international festivals. This creates a paradox since such festivals are
often regarded as exactly the kind of bourgeois theatre settings that
Boal’s interventionist theatre was originally meant to counteract. By
studying the often surprising outcomes of forum theatre performed at
festivals, we can better understand how Boal’s system functions in our
contemporary era of intense cultural globalization.
Forum theatre puts people on the spot. As Alvim Cossa, one of
the leaders of the GTO of Mozambique (Grupo Teatro do Oprimido /
Theatre of the Oppressed Group), points out, when spectators are called
onstage to intervene in the social problem depicted in the play, they
must react quickly to the confrontation, sometimes even expressing
things they would not normally say out loud.3 This is especially likely
at international festivals, since the spectators are often from different
cultural and socioeconomic contexts than the locality depicted in
the piece. In other words, the particular form of oppression explored
onstage may be alien to those called upon to ‘solve’ it. Cossa noticed
this when his GTO troupe performed a play about HIV/AIDS and sex
education for the 2002 Festival d’Agosto in Maputo. He recalls that
a Croatian actress at the festival proposed that the young Mozambican
daughter in the play simply explain to her father why she had condoms
in her schoolbag and the importance of using them with her boyfriend.
Cossa, who acted as the ‘joker,’ or interlocutor, of the piece, seized the
opportunity to explain to spectators why that was not a viable solution
in Mozambique, where it is culturally unacceptable for adolescents,
especially females, to speak openly about sex to their parents at home.4
While the Croatian actress did not solve the oppression in the forum
piece, she did open up a valuable opportunity for foreign spectators to
learn more about the cultural context of Mozambique.
My major argument here is that forum theatre has a strikingly
different purpose in festival settings. By eliciting the often misinformed
ideas international spectators have about the cultural context of the
Theatre of the Oppressed (TO) play being staged, TO practitioners gain
precious opportunities to correct what may be stereotypical, exoticized,
or culturally biased notions of their nations and local communities.
On the Lusophone festival circuit, this could perform an important
postcolonial function, since Lusophone African artists may directly
counter the myths Portuguese and Brazilian spectators believe and mis-
conceptions they have about Africa because of the lingering traces of
lusotropicalist discourses in their societies or even the more generalized
ideas about Africa that Westerners have the world over.
I have come to view forum practitioners in festival settings as ‘invis-
ible ethnographers.’ Here I am drawing on anthropologist Quetzil
Castañeda’s (2006) argument that ethnography itself operates like Boal’s
other celebrated form of TO, ‘invisible theatre,’ which I discussed in my
introductory chapter. In invisible theatre, actors engage in outrageous
public behavior in order to provoke onlookers to engage in dialogue
about pressing social issues, all the while concealing the fact that they
are actually performing a role. For example, actors might board a public
bus and behave disrespectfully toward an elderly person (also an actor),
or start an altercation about homelessness while standing at a busy
street corner. The idea is that the people gathering around the scene
should not – and may not ever – know that what they are watching is
actually a performance. Rather, the actors try to elicit the public’s candid
responses to what they are witnessing, thus raising social consciousness
about critical issues in specific localities.
In Castañeda’s (2006) view, this theatre technique is similar to what
anthropologists do. Ethnography is always a performance but the
community under examination is not always aware they are being
studied. For example, when researchers and community members tell
anecdotes and personal stories in casual conversations, those informal
moments of fieldwork may become part of the ‘invisible theatre of
ethnography.’ I am simply reversing Castañeda’s terms. When Boal’s
forum theatre is staged at international theatre festivals, it allows TO
practitioners to conduct ‘invisible ethnography,’ or anthropological
inquiries disguised as theatre. By presenting spectators with problems
alien to their cultural context, forum actors and jokers extract more
information about the latent prejudices and gaps in knowledge of
audiences than actual solutions to the oppression being depicted in the
forum theatre piece. The unsuspecting spect-actors, in other words, are
the ones being ‘studied’ by the forum actors.
Forum theatre in circulation
The forum theatre dynamic I described above departs from Augusto

Boal’s original conception of the practice. As Boal tells it, the birth of
forum theatre occurred in the early 1970s when the Brazilian director
was in exile during his country’s increasingly dictatorial government.
While he was in Peru, he staged a play about a domestic dispute that
was common in one of the peasant communities where he was working.
When a Peruvian woman repeatedly became angered because his actors
had not correctly implemented the solution she had suggested verbally,
Boal, in frustration, invited her onstage to act it out herself (1995).
Inspired by the woman’s personal investment in her own dramatized
solution, Boal codified the forum theatre method. It became the
centerpiece of his broader TO system,5 a self-empowerment approach
to combating oppression that was profoundly influenced by Brazilian
educator Paulo Freire’s book, Pedagogy of the Oppressed (1970 [1968]).
As forum theatre has gained popularity around the world, it has
generated new controversies as a result of its detachment from its origins
in poor Latin American communities whose members shared common
oppressions. In the narrative above, for example, the Peruvian peas-
ant woman was prompted to intervene because she strongly identified
with the particular gender and class oppression depicted in Boal’s play.
However, when TO enters diverse communities such as North American

universities, social service programs, and workplaces, participants often
have varying notions of what constitutes oppression and how to com-
bat it (Green 2001; Schutzman 1994b). In these circumstances, the
politics of difference may actually serve to reinforce oppression. For
example, Ann Armstrong details a forum play she witnessed in which
an African American woman experienced racial slurs from customers
in her work environment. When White spect-actors, both male and
female, replaced the Black woman in the skit, actors in the antagonist
roles treated them differently, whether or not that was a conscious
decision. Such interventions may carry a dangerous subtext. In this
case the subtext was ‘If only you could behave like a white person in
this situation then your problem could be solved’ (Armstrong 2006:
179). Similarly, Berenice Fischer writes that in TO workshops in Europe
and North America, she has seen male spect-actors exercise gender
privilege when they replace women in forum skits, often in ways that
subtly mock or ‘one-up’ the female characters (1994). Clearly, then,
cross-racial and cross-gender casting in forum theatre in heterogeneous
communities may pose significant obstacles to TO’s aims.6
Similar issues have come to the fore during international TO festi-
vals. In 1993, for example, the Center for the Theatre of the Oppressed
(Centro de Teatro do Oprimido; CTO), Boal’s center in Rio de Janeiro,
organized a TO festival that included workshops, lectures, and daily
forum theatre exhibitions mounted by TO practitioners from more
than 20 countries. Attendees recall the cultural collisions that resulted
when Swedish women intervened in an African play and proposed
notions of liberation that came from their European cultural context
(Heritage 1994) or when spect-actors who intervened in a Calcutta
group’s play were oblivious to the gender and class stratification at the
heart of the Indian society depicted. While many value such moments
of disconnection because they teach actors, spect-actors, and audience
members about cultural diversity, some of them were alarming events
‘where neither the actors nor the spectators showed any respect for
cultural difference’ (Heritage 1994: 30). When blatant disregard for
culture surfaces in forum theatre, the line between a teachable moment
and offensive behavior may become dangerously thin.
Another critique is directed at TO activists themselves. In North
America, TO specialists are trained to go into underprivileged
communities to facilitate discussions about class, gender, and racial
oppressions that do not play central roles in their own daily reali-
ties. TO scholars have raised important questions about the power
dynamics of such social programs (Schutzman 1994a; Schutzman

and Cohen-Cruz 1994; Spry 1994) because they flirt with colonialist
structures.7 Canadian TO practitioner Julie Salverson issues a warning
to cultural workers who are not forthright about the fact that they
inhabit different racial and socioeconomic backgrounds than others
in a given community. When activists do not acknowledge their place
in the hierarchies of a community, they may don a ‘mask of solidarity’
that rings false to people on the lower rungs of that hierarchy (Salverson
1994). They thus work against the cultural understanding forum theatre
is meant to bring about.
When I attended FESTLIP in Rio de Janeiro in 2009 and 2010, I saw
these concerns about TO take shape in surprising ways within this other
context. If any international theatre festival is in danger of promoting
a ‘mask of solidarity,’ it is surely FESTLIP, with its unwavering
commitment to lusofonia. Such a mask has the potential to conceal real
power discrepancies among, for example, middle-class White Brazilian
and Portuguese participants and Black actors from less-privileged eco-
nomic backgrounds in African countries. In 2009 and 2010, FESTLIP
featured forum theatre staged by Guinea-Bissau’s main TO troupe,
GTO-Bissau. At first glance, it seemed that GTO-Bissau’s presence at
FESTLIP might actually reverse the colonialist dynamic that is critiqued
in many forum theatre scenarios. Instead of privileged Whites traveling
to Africa to practice TO, an African theatre troupe came to Brazil to
enact forum theatre for an audience that contained a large number of
White, middle-class Brazilians. Yet when White Brazilian spect-actors go
onstage to resolve family disputes in African villages, how is that any
less colonial? Is the underlying message ‘if only Africans could behave
like White Brazilians, all could be resolved?’ In other words, does forum
theatre at Lusophone theatre festivals carry the risk of replicating the
same colonialist past that lusofonia seeks to redress?
It is here that ‘invisible ethnography’ may play a key role. While
I certainly observed instances of cultural insensitivity at the three GTO-
Bissau performances I attended at FESTLIP, I also saw GTO’s forum
actors and jokers carefully correcting spectators’ misperceptions about
Guinea-Bissau and Africa at large. More important, I saw conscientious
audience members correct each other when they articulated false notions
about Africa, or at least converse with each other with candor (and
sometimes confusion) about the complex cultural issues the plays
elicited. This was most compelling when the dialogue involved Africans
from various Lusophone countries who were there because they lived in
Rio or because they were participating in the festival.
When TO groups from Lusophone African nations generate con-

tentious debate among international festival audiences, they unmask
Lusophone solidarity by revealing the cultural divisions under the
facade. This is significant because forum theatre was conceived by
a world-renowned Brazilian director and thus is rooted in the Lusophone
world.8 And since the staff at CTO consists mainly of Portuguese
speakers, it is only natural that its outreach in Africa has primarily
occurred in Lusophone countries such as Angola, Guinea-Bissau, and
Mozambique, where members of CTO have traveled to train theatre
artists in Boalian techniques and form official GTO troupes.9 The
Mozambican and Guinean groups have maintained strong connections
to CTO since their founding in 2001 and 2004, respectively. In fact, it
was CTO’s staff in Rio that put Tânia Pires in touch with GTO-Bissau
when she was looking for a Guinean theatre troupe to fill out the
Lusophone roster at FESTLIP 2009. Forum theatre is intimately con-
nected to lusofonia, and thus it is an appropriate tool for dismantling
the subtle hierarchies of that ideology at festival venues.
This is an important contribution that African theatre artists can
make to Boal’s globally acclaimed system. In festival settings, African
TO practitioners are not rehearsing for a revolution, as was Boal’s
(1985 [1979]) original intention for forum theatre; they are dispelling
popular myths about Africa. As Jane Plastow (2009) observes, although
Boal carefully adapted his forum theatre methods to the upper-
class communities he encountered while working in Europe and
North America, he did not suggest substantial adaptations for the
socioeconomic contexts of rural African communities.10 GTO-Bissau’s
method of staging rural African plays for urban audiences in Brazil
could be one such adaptation. As the Guinean troupe demonstrates,
when a forum theatre piece leaves the locality it was designed to address
and enters an international festival circuit, its object, or the particular
‘oppression’ it seeks to target, also has to shift. At FESTLIP, the new
target became the preconceptions theatre audiences abroad may have
about Africa. In many cases, the resulting dialogues addressed several of
the points I have touched on throughout this book, including colonial
histories, gender inequality, and cultural hierarchies.
Forum theatre and invisible ethnography at

Lusophone festivals
FESTLIP 2009 featured a forum play by GTO-Bissau that provoked a debate

among festival spectators about the meaning of ‘tradition’ in Africa.
The play provided fertile ground for scrutinizing the preconception

that Africa is more ‘traditional’ than the Western world. It was staged
in a black box theatre in Copacabana called SESC-Mezanino, a space
that lent itself well to the intimacy of forum theatre. It was performed
for roughly 80 spectators at each of its two showings. The audience
consisted mainly of local Brazilians, many of whom appeared to be
White and middle class,11 but it also included a dozen or more visiting
artists from Angola, Mozambique, and Portugal who were in Rio to
perform in other FESTLIP productions.
The play, entitled Nó mama: Frutos da mesma árvore (Let’s Unite! Fruits
of the Same Tree),12 depicted two close-knit Guinean families who
came together to celebrate an annual ritual commemorating the strong
supportive ties between them (Fig. 11). The Pereira family featured
a mother draped in yellow cloth and a teenage daughter, while the Sila
family consisted of a younger mother dressed in blue cloth and her
adolescent son. Presiding over the ceremony was a bearded old man
wearing a cone-shaped hat. Clearly meant to depict a village elder, he
was identified simply as velho (old one). After an onstage drummer
tapped out a slow beat to start the ceremony, the Sila woman abruptly
Figure 11 Actors from GTO-Guinea-Bissau play feuding families in Nó mama:

Frutos da mesma árvore. FESTLIP 2009, Rio de Janeiro, Brazil. Photo: Rogério
Resende, courtesy of Talu Produções.
dipped her hands in the ceremonial water basin first, thus ignoring
the age privilege of the Pereira woman. A feud ensued, resulting in the
two women vowing to sever the families’ bonds, despite the plaintive
appeals of the velho and the children to keep the families united. At
the end of the skit, the two women and their children staged a literal
tug-of-war: the Pereira family grasped the yellow end of a chain of
multicolored cloths and the Sila family gripped the blue end, both sides
heaving until the rope chain snapped apart. GTO-Bissau created this
play when they were working in a small village in the north of Guinea-
Bissau called Suzana Varela. As José Carlos Lopes Correia, one of GTO’s
leaders, explained to me, the country’s northern zone is infamous for
territory disputes, such as who has the rights to the area’s straw for
building their houses. In its local setting, then, Nó Mama used the
metaphor of families splitting up to address the real-life conundrum of
villages feuding with each other.13
Yet at the performance I saw at FESTLIP, international spectators
perceived the play’s main question to be whether or not the younger
woman had the right to change a timeworn village custom. This became
evident when the second spect-actor, a White Brazilian woman named
Liliana, mounted the stage and chose to take on the role of the old man,
donning a pasted-on beard and the pointed hat. After the Sila woman
stooped to wash her hands first, the Pereira woman protested to the
velho that this was not how things were done. Liliana replied: ‘Não é
assim, mas tudo pode mudar!’ (It’s not done like this, but everything can
change!) She then suggested that the two women dip their hands in
the basin together, each washing the hands of the other. After some
grumbling, the two women did as Liliana suggested and the families
embraced each other in reconciliation.
Following each intervention, Correia, who played the joker, asked the
audience if the spect-actor had been able to change anything. When
audience members started framing their opinions in terms of what they
already understood about Africa, the ‘invisible ethnography’ began. After
Liliana’s turn, for example, a Brazilian man said that an African family
would not readily accept such a drastic change to the hand-washing
custom, since everyone knows that Africa is ‘um país muito tradicional’
(a very traditional country). By erroneously calling Africa a single coun-
try, the spectator brought out into the open an issue that Cape Verdean
and Angolan actors at FESTLIP often complained to me about in
private: the Brazilians they met in Rio seemed to think of Africa as one
homogenous space. He also classified that space as very ‘traditional,’
an observation that seems to negate notions of change or modernity
in Africa. In that instance, Correia and another audience member

moved swiftly to correct the man. Correia pointed out that there were
both ‘good’ and ‘bad’ traditions and that it was every community’s
responsibility to fight against the negative ones, thus bringing the
dialogue back to the topic of undesirable family disputes. The Brazilian
audience member asserted that Correia’s statement was true not only
of the African continent but everywhere else in the world, including
Brazil. By designating Africa a continent, this audience member subtly
redressed the knowledge gap of the first one; by pointing out that the
play was equally applicable to Brazil, he rejected the tendency of many
Westerners to exoticize Africa as a ‘traditional’ space that is removed
and distinct from the ‘modern’ West. Liliana’s intervention thus created
an opportunity for the Guinean joker and audience members to bring
up and then quickly dispel misguided ideas about Africa in general.
Yet the next spect-actor’s intervention demonstrated how resistant
some audience members were to surrendering their idea of Africa as
unrelentingly ‘traditional.’ Raising her hand, a Brazilian woman who
appeared to be White, middle class, and middle aged identified herself
as a geography professor and a reader of novels from Lusophone African
countries.14 After establishing her particular knowledge base, she
asserted that elders in African cultures are utterly revered by younger
generations and are steadfast guardians of ancient customs that must
be defended at any cost. When Correia invited her onstage to act out
her idea, she, not surprisingly, also chose to play the velho. She began
the ceremony with a grandiose speech: ‘Our older sister is going to wash
her hands first according to the centuries-long traditions that God has
passed down to us in the name of our continuation.’ As a good forum
actress who has been trained to resist the solutions of spect-actors, Elsa
Maria Ramos, who played the Sila mother, dipped her hands in the basin
first anyway. Yet her character also began to reveal pieces of the back
story: after the velho reprimanded her, she questioned why the older
Pereira woman should be allowed to go first when she had not behaved
responsibly. The velho simply ignored her remonstrations, however, and
repeated the phrases, ‘You can’t break the tradition’ and ‘I’m the oldest
so you must do what I say.’ In the end, she physically propelled Ramos
over to the other actress, Edilta da Silva, for a visibly forced embrace
and reconciliation.
This time, when Correia asked the audience if she had changed
anything, I heard a resounding chorus of ‘não’ (no). Several people
complained that the velho had not listened to a word the women said
to her. By recognizing the need for women’s voices to be heard, these
spectators implied that patriarchy in Africa could and should be subject

to change rather than simply accepted as part of a long-standing
cultural ‘tradition.’ At this point in the forum, many audience members
began calling for more profound dialogue with the other characters
in the scene. The FESTLIP audience thus began moving away from an
idea of Africa as unchanging and unflinchingly ‘traditional’ and toward
a prioritization of ongoing cultural dialogue.
The final spect-actor, a young blonde Brazilian woman, seemed to ful-
fill the collective call for dialogue. Dressed in a shirt emblazoned with the
distinct design of the Angolan flag (half of a cogged wheel, a machete,
and gold star against a black and red backdrop), she wore her professed
passion for Lusophone African nations right on her performing body.
In her enactment of the velho, she zealously pled with the women to
tell her what had happened between them to cause such a rift. While
the Pereira woman remained tight-lipped, the Sila woman said that at
the time of the children’s ceremony, the older woman had not shown
responsibility. The Brazilian velho pressed on: ‘Mas o que aconteceu? Que
dia? Quero um fato!’ (But what happened? On what day? I want a fact!)
Through her persistent appeals for specific events and dates, she enun-
ciated a belief in ‘official histories,’ the kind that rest on questionable
notions of timelines and unassailable facts. Yet the ‘official,’ ‘stable’
histories that dominated the textbooks and legal doctrines of various
regimes in Africa in the colonial era are incompatible with the folk
histories generated in Africa’s rural communities, where past events are
often articulated as cyclical rather than linear (see Chapter 3). Actress
Elsa Ramos performed just that. When the velho asked her for a date,
she consistently responded, ‘muitas vezes’ (many times). When asked
for a ‘fact,’ she replied, ‘eu já disse’ (I’ve already said it). In this case,
a Guinean forum actor powerfully maintained that oral histories should
trump ‘official’ versions of events. In that moment of spontaneous
dialogue between the spect-actor and Ramos, a Brazilian perspective
on history came head-to-head with a Guinean one and Ramos held her
own, giving the final word on the matter to the Guinean actors.
What the FESTLIP audience admired about the last spect-actor’s
intervention, however, was her genuine effort to hear all sides of the
story. Many audience members noted this appreciatively, particularly
an Afro-Brazilian man with long dreadlocks who sat in the back row
and gave an enthusiastic impromptu speech about the necessity for cul-
tural dialogue. This is an illustration of how Nó mama is able to take on
another metaphorical layer in the setting of a Lusophone festival, which
is that of a ‘family’ of Portuguese speakers coming together to resolve
their differences. Correia suggested as much to me when I interviewed

him. When I asked him how he felt about lusofonia, he said it was
important for Lusophone countries to come together: ‘Nó mama!’15
He thus spontaneously applied the play’s theme of familial unity to
Lusophone transnationalism. He also admitted that the audience
members’ contributions to the forum revealed that although they knew
little about Africa, they were eager to learn more and that this learning
could happen with forum theatre.16 Indeed, GTO-Bissau’s performance
at FESTLIP 2009 demonstrated that if a Lusophone ‘family’ does exist,
it is only through constant debate and disagreement about individual
cultures and differing national identities.
One issue I noted about Nó mama, however, is that the ‘rules’ of
forum theatre prevented the audience from truly grappling with
the gender oppression that lurked behind the scene. Correia had
announced to the audience that they could only substitute for the
characters that were ‘oppressed.’ In this case, the velho and the children
were the ones who were suffering because of the women’s actions. Since
the women were identified as ‘oppressors,’ no one could elect to play
their roles and articulate what they might be suffering at the hands of
village partriarchs. To be sure, a common critique of forum theatre is
that the lines between ‘oppressor’ and ‘oppressed’ are too firmly drawn,
obscuring the multifaceted nature of oppression. This has led many TO
practitioners to make shrewd adaptations to Boal’s system (Green 2001;
Spry 1994). Yet Plastow notes that in Africa, TO artists may be less will-
ing to bend the rules of forum theatre. Since they often learn it from
Boal’s books or others who have read Boal, they may perceive his system
as something to be rigidly followed (Plastow 2009).
At FESTLIP 2010, however, the topic of gender could not be avoided.
That year, GTO-Bissau staged a forum theatre piece explicitly focused
on women’s oppression. Called Maria – Ritual das parideiras (Maria –
Childbearers’ Ritual), the play was the fruit of a broader project called
Madalena in which women from CTO traveled to various places in Brazil
and abroad to generate discussions about women’s issues, especially con-
cerns about women’s bodies. In Guinea-Bissau, the conversation quickly
turned to childbearing, as female members of GTO-Bissau shared stories
from the time of their ancestors and about the present realities of child-
less women who are stigmatized (Baldé 2010). GTO-Bissau’s play was
split into two parts. In the first, a group of Guinean women performed
a song and dance ritual practiced in certain rural areas in Guinea-
Bissau designed to celebrate women who have borne children. Wives
who are not yet mothers are excluded, signaling their social ostracism.
In the second part, a newlywed couple debated when they should start
a family. Maria, played by actress Claudina Silva Gomes, wanted to
delay it by three to five years so she could finish her education. Her
husband, played by actress Serando Camara Baldé cross-dressed in a
man’s trousers, jacket, and cap, initially agreed but soon announced he
was tired of waiting. The situation worsened when Maria’s sister-in-law
reprimanded Maria for not giving her brother children. Under intense
pressure from her new family, Maria turned to the audience and asked,
‘Será que o lugar das mulheres na sociedade é só ter filhos?’ (Is bearing chil-
dren women’s only place in society?)
When I viewed the two showings of the play at FESTLIP’s theatre-
in-the-round space, SESC-Arena in Copacabana, I witnessed forum
discussions that far surpassed those of the previous year in intensity
and emotion. The forum, which elicited opinions from the 125 or so
spectators who attended each night, featured a more pronounced and
vocal presence of African and African-descended attendees than the
year before. In both sessions, there was a fluctuation between a machista
agenda espoused by some African men in the audience and various
versions of feminism other spectators offered when they discussed
Maria’s best options in the situation. In both sessions, Brazilian
spectators hotly debated the dangers of imposing their own viewpoints
on a Guinean cultural context. The play thus became an outlet for
diverse Lusophone audiences to reach new understandings together or,
at the very least, to become aware of each other’s diametrically opposed
viewpoints.
The 15 July forum began with a polemical machista intervention by
Gilberto Mendes, the Mozambican leader of Maputo’s famous comic
theatre troupe Gungu, which was also there to perform at FESTLIP.
When Mendes ‘spect-acted’ the part of Maria, it became clear that he
had no interest in pursuing her agenda of delaying childbearing: he
simply laid down on a cushion on the floor, legs spread wide open, and
asked Baldé, as the husband, what he was waiting for. Baldé responded
in character by crawling on top of Mendes missionary-style. Mendes’s
intervention as spect-actor illustrated his belief that if a couple is not
getting pregnant, it is the husband’s fault for not taking the initiative in
the bedroom. Far from resolving the female oppression at the heart of
the play, Mendes’s ‘solution’ affirmed a patriarchal agenda that would
override women’s agency in matters of family, education, and labor
roles. However, it generated passionate discussion among women in the
audience who clearly did not want Mendes to have the final word. A Black
woman seated next to him agreed to become the next spect-actor. Playing
a soft-spoken Maria, she tried to coax her husband to move with her to
a society that would accept their decision to postpone children. At his
firm refusal, she announced, ‘Então, vou-me embora’ (Okay then, I am
leaving).
This ending proved almost as controversial as Mendes’s. Many
audience members defended her choice to leave, saying that prioritizing
education would make Maria a better wife and mother someday. Others
agreed in principle but doubted that it would work in a Guinean
community that placed great emphasis on marriage and family.
When Brazilian spectators began to use their imagination to try to
understand the predicament of Guinean women in this situation,
opportunities for cultural corrections arose. For example, a White
Brazilian man posited that if a woman in Guinea-Bissau tried to leave
her husband, she might be killed. Swiftly, the Black woman who had
played the second spect-actor declared that to be false; she knew
because even though she was born in Portugal, she had family in
Angola and Guinea-Bissau. Summoning the knowledge she had from
her Lusophone African relatives, the spect-actor was able to dispel the
Western myth of rampant barbarism in Africa that lurked behind the
Brazilian man’s observation.
Even though FESTLIP audiences became keenly aware of the cultural
differences the play underscored, they still had difficulty suggesting more
culturally appropriate situations. At both performances, Brazilian spect-
actors proposed a shared child-rearing agreement between husband
and wife that would allow Maria to finish her schooling. On the first
night, Mendes quickly dismissed the idea as ‘magic,’ something that
would work only in theatre, not in an African village. On the second
night, a White Brazilian man invoked Amílcar Cabral’s idea that many
African traditions, including those that work against gender equality,
should be changed. By citing the cultural authority of Cabral, who the
man identified as the ‘father of the Guinean nation,’ the Brazilian man
drew from a broader pool of knowledge about Lusophone postcolonial
cultures in order to shed new light on a scenario that had reached
an impasse; the largely Brazilian audience seemed unable to think of
solutions that were suitable for the Guinean dilemma. His reminder
about the malleability of gender roles was strikingly similar to Raiz
di Polon’s rearrangement of Cape Verdean gender norms in Duas Sem
Três. The advantage of forum theatre is that the performers and audi-
ence members present can express such sentiments outright instead of
relying on the subtleties of a theatre or dance performance that may not
be discernible to everyone who sees it.
The most heated discussion arose at the 23 July performance, when

two different Guinean men in the audience vehemently objected to the
message of the play. The first man volunteered to spect-act but insisted
on playing the husband in the piece rather than Maria. When the
performances’ co-jokers, GTO-Bissau actress Edilta Silva and CTO staffer
Cláudia Simone, consented, they bent Boal’s rule that spect-actors can
only take on the roles of oppressed characters. Yet the young man’s
intervention revealed that he actually viewed the husband to be the one
who was oppressed: he accused Maria of dishonoring their marriage
agreement, which he had negotiated at his own expense, since he had
paid her family a bride-price.17 Later in the forum, he expressed the
opinion that a husband should not be obligated to pay for his wife’s
education because that was her parents’ responsibility. He also implied
that GTO-Bissau’s play was naïve since it overlooked the fact that in
Africa, the decision to have children is not individual but one that is
agreed upon by the entire extended family. The second Guinean man
in the audience concurred, saying that in Africa, people have always
put the collective needs of the community above their own needs. He
aroused controversy in the forum when he lamented that today, many
Guinean women study abroad (presumably in places like Brazil) and
learn feminist viewpoints like the one depicted in the piece. This led
the Guinean women, he opined, to return home with individualistic
mentalities that are anathema in many African societies. Notably, he
made no equivalent statement about the impact of foreign universities
on Guinean men, even though he told me after the performance that
he was himself a college student in Rio de Janeiro.
Once again, women in the audience reacted strongly to these machista
sentiments. A White Brazilian woman said that the Guinean men had
raised a question with universal significance: can anyone else really
‘own’ a woman, even if a bride-price has been paid? An Afro-Brazilian
woman then said that a wife’s decision to finish her education did not
signify leaving her husband and children behind; she was simply trying
to better herself. By this point, the tide of the conversation had turned:
the Guinean men were no longer getting the floor, while various women
present were passionately expressing their views on female autonomy.
It is here that a ‘joker’ can exercise the powerful weapon of closure.
Cláudia Simone ended the forum after a White Brazilian woman in
the audience declared emphatically that a woman’s body was her own
and only she could decide what to do with it, not a husband or any pai
de santo (priest) and that this point applied not only to Africa but also
to Latin America. Voicing a feminist position that embraced women’s
reproductive rights, the woman earned thunderous applause from most

of the FESTLIP audience that night. Simone’s decision to allow that par-
ticular woman to have the last word rather than the Guinean men was
consonant with the larger goals of the Madalena project to champion
women and explore issues related to their bodies.
Tânia Pires asserted that GTO-Bissau’s play was an important way to
raise awareness about the varying ways maternity plays out in different
Lusophone countries. In Portugal and Brazil, she said, women can opt
out of motherhood and focus on their careers without suffering societal
judgment, whereas in Africa, this is not yet the case. She said that ulti-
mately women need to be able to choose, and the play underscored this
possibility for Guinean women as well.18 In Pires’s view, then, the forum
piece and its accompanying spectator interventions created new social
imaginaries about increased female autonomy for Guinean women. As
I emphasized in Chapter 2, Lusophone African actors are particularly
adept at presenting novel social imaginaries on festival stages. Yet
I also want to suggest that Pires and some of the other Brazilian women
spectators may have misinterpreted the social imaginary behind Maria –
Ritual das parideiras. When I interviewed the GTO-Bissau actresses,
I noted they were more ambivalent about the issue of childbearing in
their country. Edilta Silva, one of the jokers of the play, said it would
be difficult for a woman in Guinea-Bissau to simply decide not to have
children. She herself had just one, and she experienced social pressure
because of this.19 It became clear to me that the decision not to have
children at all would hold little appeal for the Guinean actresses. Any
discerning spectator could glean this from the play: Maria’s dilemma
was not whether she should have children, but when she should have
them. Throughout the play, she repeatedly sang a chorus in Guinean
Crioulo, ‘Misti teni fidjus ma é ka gosi, no’ (I need to have children but
not now), which she translated into Portuguese after the first time she
sang it (the rest of the dialogue in the play was in Portuguese). For
the GTO-Bissau actresses, then, the feminist message underlying their
play was not so cut and dried. While they suggested that Guinean
woman could negotiate their own timeline for childbearing, they also
upheld their social responsibility to procreate. This contrasted with the
opinions of some female Brazilian spectators who voiced unequivocal
support for women’s reproduction rights, which may reflect a more
Western-oriented feminist agenda. Overall, the forum ensured that
diverse forms of feminism shared the spotlight at GTO-Bissau’s show.
Forum theatre is invaluable for opening up intercultural dialogues
at international festivals. Because such venues typically privilege
performances on proscenium stages, they often preclude the kind

of radically interactive or experimental theatre that is seen as more
politically powerful (Knowles 2004). Forum theatre can be like a waft of
fresh air at festivals, provoking in-depth conversations among spectators
precisely because it presents scenarios that are culturally so different
from the cultures of the international audience. When Lusophone
African artists use their positions as jokers or forum actors to expose
the preconceptions of Western audience members about Africa, they
ultimately raise more awareness about the distance Portuguese-speaking
nations and citizens still have to travel to achieve the egalitarian prom-
ise of lusofonia. By revealing fissures in the Lusophone transnational
community, Lusophone African performers can fill in those gaps with
shrewd interventions that privilege their own cultural and subjective
positions.
From this perspective, the primary value of lusofonia may be the pro-
ductive tensions it generates – not the (perhaps implausible) carrot of
democratic relationships it holds out to Portuguese-speaking nations.
Yet as FESTLIP’s recent funding shortage indicates, the very future
of lusofonia is uncertain. What is certain is the ability of lusofonia to
provoke animated cultural exchanges among members of its various
constituencies. In this book, I have argued that Lusophone African
theatre artists have the power to use festival productions to alter the
terms of the debate by shedding light on pressing issues in their own
nations and localities. I have also advocated for a comparative approach
to international theatre festivals, especially festivals that privilege
a particular transnational community, since those festivals seem to
lend themselves to cultural interventions. Whether my observation
about the agency of artists holds true for other varieties of international
festivals is a valuable question for future researchers to pursue. This
book invites scholars to take a second look at international festivals,
to peer past their veneer of capitalist zeal and ideological excess and
glimpse the kernels of artistic and cultural dialogues that may emerge
during festivals or in festival aftermath. The always-unfolding stories
that constitute international theatre festivals demand this kind of close
reading.
Notes
1 Introduction – Global Casting Calls

1. David Harvey (2005) defines the neoliberal state as one that creates the
conditions for widespread accumulation of capital from both foreign and
domestic sources. Therefore, the government’s role is to work with industries
to strengthen the overall market, usually by allowing businesses and mul-
tinational corporations to operate with minimal government interference.
Yet, as Harvey points out, seemingly sanguine discourses of ‘freedom’ (as
in ‘free enterprise’) merely serve to consolidate class power, since elites in
advanced capitalist countries such as the United States are primarily the ones
who benefit from the surpluses generated from free market trade.
2. See Chapter 6 for a discussion of the now-uncertain future of the FESTLIP
festival. In a curious turn of events, FESTLIP 2012 was canceled for lack of
funding. It did come back in 2013, taking place in August of that year.
3. For example, Lim (2005) analyzes an urban gay theatre production to show
how Singapore’s queer community unsettles both a growing market for
imported Western gay culture and state policing of sexual minorities. In
another example, Graham-Jones (2005) cites Underiner’s (2004) work on
Mayan theatre troupes to show how the local and global are inextricably
intertwined, since these troupes rely on international media to circulate
their indigenous theatre.
4. This is an example of the recent claim by some globalization theorists that
mechanisms of circulation are constitutive of cultural practices, not merely
incidental to them (Gaonkar and Povinelli 2003; Lee and LiPuma 2002;
Werry 2005).
5. Ernest Gellner’s Nations and Nationalism (1983) in particular has been the
subject of much scholarly critique. To be fair, Gellner’s theory of nationalism,
which draws from case studies in industrial Europe, does not explicitly say
that nationalism requires actual homogeneity among a country’s political,
demographic, and cultural units. Instead, he writes that nationalists feel that
such congruency exists, no matter how illusory or misguided that may be.
Nationhood is, for Gellner, a willed collectivity based on a perception of
a culture that is shared. Nevertheless, scholars have taken Gellner to task
for his assumption that ‘congruency,’ or at least the desire for it, is the basic
political principle underlying nationalism. For example, Askew (2002) notes
that postcolonial nations such as Kenya and Tanzania house numerous
ethnic groups brought together forcibly by European colonialists. These eth-
nic groups experience a sense of ‘shared culture’ primarily with each other
rather than their countries as a whole (9). Homi Bhabha (1994) takes issue
with Benedict Anderson’s notion of nations as ‘imagined communities,’
since critical exclusions will always result when people imagine their
country to be populated by others just like themselves. Bhabha suggests that
183
184 Notes
new narratives of nationhood will be developed from a country’s margins

by those threatened with exclusion from hegemonic and official discourses,
such as migrants, diasporans, and postcolonial subjects. For further critiques
of homogeneity and nationhood, see Edensor (2002); for a diasporic perspec-
tive, see Axel (2001) and Tololyan (1991).
6. See Dulce Almada Duarte’s (2003) comprehensive discussion of the genesis
of Cape Verdean Crioulo.
7. Semedo and Turano (1997) cite several colonial documents prohibiting
Tabanca, dating primarily from the years 1895 through 1923.
8. For more on how certain islands in Cape Verde have been associated with
Africa and others with Europe, see Fikes (2006) and Anjos (2002).
9. The journal African Theatre’s recent special issue on festivals (vol. 11, 2012)
also attests to this claim.
10. While Adorno’s first major theoretical formulation of the ‘culture industry’
appeared in Dialectic of Enlightenment, co-authored with Max Horkheimer
in 1947, he continued to hone this thesis throughout his life. See Huyssen
(1975).
11. The long-awaited third edition of a Black Arts festival (Arts Nègres) took
place in Dakar, Senegal, in December 2010.
12. See also the special issue on Africa of the journal The Global South (vol. 2,
no. 2 [2008]), especially the introductory essay (Alabi 2008).
13. The festival in Cameroon is called Rencontres Théâtrales Internationales
du Cameroun (RETIC); the two festivals in Burkina Faso are called Festival
International de Théâtre pour le Développement (FITD) and Festival
International de Théâtre et de Marionnettes de Ouagadougou (FITMO).
14. Earlier scholarship on globalization focused primarily on its economic
impact. Saskia Sassen’s (1998, 2002) work has been prominent in this
regard. In many ways, Appadurai’s ground-breaking book, Modernity at Large:
Cultural Dimensions of Globalization (1996), was pioneering in its holistic
attempt to theorize cultural globalization. Lee and LiPuma’s work, however,
is evidence of a newer strand of globalization theory that seeks to analyze
finance and cultural practices jointly. Many of these new dialogues have
appeared in the journal Public Culture.
15. Other Portuguese scholars defend the notion of lusofonia and its advantages
for Portuguese-speaking countries. For example, Fernando Santos Neves
(2000) offers an incisive retort to Margarido’s (2000) critique of lusofonia.
16. For an excellent overview of scholars who perceive lusofonia as a reawaken-
ing of lusotropicalism, see Sieber (2002).
17. From page three of a sponsored section called ‘Small Island Nation Attracts
Big Global Partners’ in the July–August 2011 edition of Foreign Affairs.
Thanks to Jennifer Granger for pointing this out to me.
18. See, for example, Lusografias (Cezerilo 2002), proceedings from an inter-
national conference on Lusophone writing held in Maputo, Mozambique,
18–22 February 2002. Some authors, such as Mozambique’s Mia Couto, are
more ambivalent toward the lusofonia project. See Couto (2008).
19. The closing ceremony took place on 12 July 2009, at FESTLIP’s hub in
Copacabana, Rio de Janeiro. Festival artistic director Tânia Pires generously
allowed me to attend this private affair and audio record its events.
Notes 185
20. While Appadurai (1996) invokes Benedict Anderson’s generative notion

of nations as imagined communities conjured through processes of print
capitalism, he specifies that today’s communities of sentiment do not rely
on the printed word.
21. Some examples are António Augusto Barros, artistic director of Cena
Lusófona in 2005, and Ana Cordeiro, director of the Instituto Camões in
Mindelo in 2005. Mozambican actors Evaristo Abreu and Isabel Jorge told
me of the frustration they experienced while attending international confer-
ences where simultaneous translation is provided for a multitude of romance
languages but not Portuguese. They expressed a hope that Lusophone
festivals will advocate for the importance of Portuguese as a global language.
22. Francisco Fragoso, founder of the post-independence theatre group Korda
Kaoberdi of Cape Verde, emphasized to me the reality of Africans’ unequal
access to visas and international travel within the supposedly egalitarian
community of the CPLP. Interview with the author, Lisbon, Portugal, 19 July
2005.
23. In the immediate post-independence era, increasingly autocratic govern-
ments exhibited such hostility toward the arts that performers were put on
the defensive, as is cogently expressed in Ngũgı̃ wa Thiongo’s (1998) account
of making grassroots theatre in Kenya in the 1970s.
24. See Magliocco’s (1993) discussion of the heated local politics surrounding
two cultural festivals centered on the Madonna in Sardinia. Departing from
the Durkheimian assumption that community festivals convey group iden-
tity, Magliocco examines how festivals can instead be points from which
conflict emerges.
25. OTACA is an acronym for Oficina de Teatro e Comunicação de Assomada
(The Assomada Theatre and Communication Collective).
26. Castañeda (2006) distinguishes this from ‘doing fieldwork,’ or the kind of
data gathering with samples, surveys, and questionnaires that does not
require long-term immersion (76).
27. I owe a great debt to João Branco (2004), who painstakingly collected the
newspaper articles and ephemera housed in CEDIT when he was working on
his book Nação teatro: História do teatro em Cabo Verde.
2 Mapping Festivals
1. ‘Fladu fla’ is a common expression in badiu, the Santiago Island variant of
Cape Verdean Crioulo. The phrase refers loosely to gossip or hearsay; it liter-
ally means ‘they’re all saying’ or ‘word has it.’
2. There are various ways to spell ‘Crioulo.’ Fladu Fla’s title reflects how it
would be written using the Santiago variant, badiu.
3. For a thorough review of Africanist critiques of lusotropicalism, see Arenas
(2011: 8–11).
4. However, in Managing African Portugal (2009), Kesha Fikes makes the
convincing argument that Freyrian notions about the absence of racism
in Portugal were fundamentally challenged when an influx of African
immigrants arrived in Lisbon in the 1970s after countries such as Cape
186 Notes
Verde and Angola achieved independence. The abrupt shift in Lisbon’s

demographic provoked violent incidents of racial hatred.
5. Even Portuguese scholars occasionally reproduce these views, as evidenced
by political scientist Paulo Gorjão’s recent assertion that Portugal’s campaign
for a non-permanent seat on the UN Security Council for 2011/12 was
successful because of ‘[t]he country’s roughly one thousand years of history,
its global presence, [and] behavior and consideration towards all countries’
(2010: 30).
6. Ana Malfada Leite, interview with the author, Lisbon, Portugal, 25 July 2005.
Jean-Michel Massa calls lusofonia a ‘recent replica’ of francophonie, a term
invented by French geographer Onésime Reclus in 1880 and recuperated
in the postcolonial era to define a political network of nations in which
French is utilized (2006: 175). Interestingly, both Cape Verde and Guinea-
Bissau have officially joined La Francophonie even though, as countries with
Portuguese as their official language, they are also members of the CPLP.
7. While I am aware that the term ‘fraternity’ has a masculinist connota-
tion, I use it here only because it is a direct translation of the Portuguese
word fraternidade, which does appear in Freyre’s writing. In contemporary
discourses of lusofonia (and I am thinking mainly of what is printed in
the festival programs at FESTLIP and the speeches given at the opening
ceremonies there), I more often hear the gender-neutral term solidarity
(solidariedade) than fraternity, although both words are used.
8. The official site of UCCLA was Lisbon for the organization’s first 25 years. In
2010, the UCCLA site was transferred to Salvador da Bahía in Brazil.
9. The Portuguese expression cidades gêmeas (twin cities) is equivalent to ‘sister
cities,’ or cities in different countries that develop agreements about cultural
or economic exchanges. UCCLA’s constitution declares the Lusophone capitals
to be united by geminação múltipla (multiple twinning). The history of UCCLA
can be found at http://www.uccla.net/index.php?option=com_content&view=
article&id=115&Itemid=114 (UCCLA, accessed 22 April 2011).
10. See the history of the CPLP at ‘Histórico—Como surgiu?’ http://www.cplp.
org/Default.aspx?ID=241 (CPLP, accessed 22 April 2011).
11. See Cahen (2003) for a discussion of Lusophone African governments’ initial
resistance to the leadership role that Portugal took in the CPLP, given its past
role as colonizer.
12. I noticed frequent advertisements for such contests when I lived in Cape
Verde. On a trip to Mozambique in summer 2010, the director of the
Instituto Camões in Maputo offered me a copy of a play that had won the
2002 Prémio Revelação de Teatro (debut playwriting prize) co-sponsored
by Maputo’s IC and AMOLP, the Associação Moçambicana da Língua
Portuguesa (Mozambican Portuguese-Language Association).
13. See http://aulp.org (AULP, accessed 26 April 2011). The prize is co-sponsored
by the Association of Portuguese-Language Universities (AULP), the CPLP,
and the Instituto Camões.
14. In Portuguese: ‘África Lusófona’ não existe, ou pelo menos não existe enquanto
entidade geográfica, política ou histórica.’ Unless otherwise noted, all transla-
tions from Portuguese and Crioulo are mine.
15. See Arenas’s (2011) account of a 1998 dialogue between the presidents
of Brazil (Fernando Henrique Cardoso) and Portugal (Mário Soares), who
Notes 187
consciously drew on lusotropicalist narratives to argue that their two nations

should ‘work together in Africa,’ which Arenas interprets as reinforcing ‘an
ideological platform for Portugal and Brazil to expand economically and
culturally into Africa’ (13).
16. The CPLP’s 105-page document on circulation can be found on the website:
http://www.cplp.org/id-185.aspx (accessed 29 April 2011).
17. Francisco Fragoso, interview with the author, Lisbon, Portugal, 19 July 2005.
18. The Portuguese word estações can either mean seasons of the year or station,
as in a train depot. Cena Lusófona uses it in the sense of a train station.
19. Jorge Biague, interview with the author, Mindelo, Cape Verde, 17 September
2005.
20. Ibid.
21. See ‘MITO invade Fundição de Oeiras,’ http://www.cm- oeiras.pt/
noticias%5CPaginas/MITOinvadeFundicaodeOeiras.aspx, and I Festival
Lusófono de Teatro Intimista de Matosinhos, http://teatroreactor.bloguepessoal.
com/ (both accessed 3 May 2011).
22. See A Semana (2010).
23. After the close of Mindelact 2005, I sat down with festival director João
Branco to discuss budget and sponsorship. He could give me precise
figures for some sponsors, such as 5,000 euros each from the Gulbenkian
Foundation and Cooperação Portuguesa. Cape Verdean government sources
were more complicated. The Ministry of Culture had given a lump sum of
1,000,000 escudos (around US$11,000) for all of the Mindelact Association’s
activities that year, including the festival and March, Theatre Month.
The municipal government of São Vicente had given a total of 400,000
escudos but had also arranged hotel rooms for the national theatre groups
and loaned vans for local transportation. Branco also counted on TACV,
Cape Verde’s major airline, to give international theatre companies travel
discounts and forgiveness of excess baggage costs—a major expense, given
that some brought large pieces of scenery with them.
24. See also A Semana (1995) and Novo Jornal (1995).
25. Cena Lusófona’s first two theatre stations were held in Maputo, Mozambique
(in 1995), and Rio de Janeiro, Brazil (in 1996).
26. João Branco, ‘Mindelact: Associação Artística e Cultural,’ document #0888,
Mindelact Documentation Center (CEDIT).
27. See Brito (2001). In Portuguese: ‘Promover a apresentação de espectáculos teat-
rais de grupos estrangeiros no Festival, privilegiando o contacto com os grupos ori-
undos dos países lusófonos,’ and ‘servir de elo de ligação entre os agentes teatrais
cabo-verdianos e os promotores de intercâmbio teatral entre os países lusófonos.’
28. Proposal and budget for Capital Lusófona da Cultura 2002/2003, document
#665, Mindelact Documentation Center (CEDIT).
29. This removal of the explicit focus on Lusophone theatre at the festival was
already evident in a 2005 television interview in which João Branco said that
Mindelact would continue to showcase theatre from Lusophone countries
but would not limit itself to that linguistic background (Moreira 2005). That
same year, Manuel Estevão, who was then president of Mindelact’s general
assembly, told me that he did not support the concept of lusofonia because
it implied a community that was ‘closed off’ from the rest of the world.
He wanted Mindelact to include a solid infusion of French-, English-, and
188 Notes
Spanish-language theatre as well. Manuel Estevão, interview with the author,

Mindelo, Cape Verde, 10 September 2005.
30. Mindelact’s new set of objectives, which were approved at the March 2007
meeting of the General Assembly, are available at http://www.mindelact.
com/estatutos.html (Mindelact, accessed 6 August 2011).
31. Mindelact still supports the lusofonia project. For example, it signed a
protocol of geminação with the aforementioned Brazilian festival, FestLuso,
which is strictly Lusophone. The protocol declared the two to be ‘twin’ or
‘sister’ festivals that support and promote each other’s activities. See http://
festluso.blogspot.com/2010/11/mindelact- lamenta- corte- na- programacao.
html (FestLuso, accessed 15 June 2012).
32. João Branco, interview with the author, Mindelo, Cape Verde, 19 September
2005.
33. Seventeenth-century documents even evidence a distinction between
two language variants spoken on the islands, ‘high Portuguese’ and ‘low
Portuguese,’ of which the latter was the Portuguese Creole now known as
Crioulo (Duarte 2003: 44).
34. Even today, the bulk of Crioulo’s vocabulary consists of Portuguese words
and loan words from various West African tongues such as Wolof and Fula.
35. Sabino Baessa, interview with the author, Mindelo, Cape Verde, 10 Sep-
tember 2006; Narciso Freire, interview with the author, Assomada, Cape
Verde, 13 August 2005.
36. This is a sentiment I heard time and again from a wide cross-section of
Mindelo theatre artists during my fieldwork periods in 2004–7.
37. Zaina Rajás, interview with the author, Maputo, Mozambique, 13 August
2009.
38. FRELIMO is Frente de Libertação de Moçambique (Mozambican Liberation
Front) and RENAMO is Resistência Nacional Moçambicana (Mozambican
Resistance Movement).
39. See http://www.commonwealth-of-nations.org/Mozambique/Organisations/
Mozambique_in_the_Commonwealth (Commonwealth of Nations, accessed
1 June 2011).
40. Voting and eligibility for political office were common themes in these
opinion pieces. The proposed protocol implied that any CPLP citizen
would be eligible for election in municipal governments in any Lusophone
country and that all CPLP citizens could vote in elections regardless of
their country of residence. Fearing a neocolonial takeover at the municipal
level, editorialists asked readers to imagine a worst-case scenario in which
a Portuguese citizen was elected mayor of Maputo (Macaringue 2002b;
Simbine 2002). Writers also sensed the specter of economic exploitation
since the protocol would guarantee CPLP citizens equal access to the invest-
ment and professional opportunities available to nationals in CPLP states.
Such a move, they opined, would make Mozambique’s industries more vul-
nerable to Brazilian and Portuguese control since those two countries are the
most economically developed nations in the CPLP, while few Mozambicans
would be wealthy enough to invest reciprocally in Brazil and Portugal
(Arnaça 2002). In sum, the editorialists feared the egalitarian promise of uni-
versal CPLP citizenship was a mere front for Brazil and Portugal’s imperialist
designs, and they applauded their president for opposing it.
Notes 189
41. Unión de Naciones Suramericanas (Spanish) or UNASUL; União de Nações

Sul-Americanas (Portuguese).
42. I am working from the description provided on the program for the ‘1a
estação da cena lusófona: Festival de Maputo, Moçambique,’ which the staff
at Cena Lusófona’s headquarters in Coimbra generously shared with me
during my visit in summer 2005.
43. Gilberto Mendes, interview with the author, Maputo, Mozambique, 28
August 2009.
44. Manuela Soeiro, interview with the author, Maputo, Mozambique, 18
August 2009.
45. Companhia Nacional de Canto e Danca (CNCD).
46. David Abílio, interview with the author, Maputo, Mozambique, 23 August
2009.
47. Evaristo Abreu and Isabel Jorge, interview with the author, Rio de Janeiro,
Brazil, 8 July 2009.
48. Ibid.
49. IATM resulted in at least two subsequent theatre festivals, one in Zambia in
2000 and the next in Tanzania in 2001 (Kasozi 2001). I have not been able
to locate evidence of its continuation beyond this.
50. ACERT is Associação Cultural e Recreativa de Tondela (Cultural and
Recreational Association of Tondela), which arose in 1979 as a broader initia-
tive that emerged from the formation of the theatre group Trigo Limpo in
1976. See ‘ACERT: Associação Cultural e Recreativa de Tondela,’ http://www.
acert.pt/novociclo/ (ACERT, accessed 14 June 2001).
51. Abreu and Jorge interview.
52. José Rui Martins, interview with the author, Tondela, Portugal, 23 July 2005.
53. Maria Simões, interview with the author, Tondela, Portugal, 23 July 2005.
54. In Portuguese: ‘Acreditamos que este festival é um passo gigante para que, em
nome da cultura europeia, não se continue a ter uma atitude paternalista em
relação à cultura africana. Queremos aprender e trocar saberes.’
55. Paulo Neto, interview with the author, Rio de Janeiro, Brazil, 20 July 2010.
56. Soeiro interview.
57. Neto interview; Matchume Zango, interview with the author, Maputo,
Mozambique, 21 August 2009.
58. Having lived in Maputo for a couple of months myself, I wondered if
transportation was also a complicating factor for these late evening theatre
productions. Public transportation in Maputo is scarce, and people working
in the city often must travel to their homes in outlying residential areas in
battered, privately owned white vans called chapas. Since chapas stop run-
ning in the early evening, late-night performances could simply have been
untenable for many would-be spectators.
59. In Portuguese: ‘Eu já não sei o que as pessoas querem.’
60. World Bank statistics for Gross National Income (GNI) per capita, PPP, http://
ddp-ext.worldbank.org/ext/ddpreports/ViewSharedReport?&CF=&REPORT_
ID=9147&REQUEST_TYPE=VIEWADVANCED (World Bank, accessed 21 June
2011).
61. Alvim Cossa, interview with the author, Maputo, Mozambique, 13 August 2009.
62. Rogério Manjate, interview with the author, Maputo, Mozambique, 12
September 2010.
190 Notes
63. Soeiro interview.

64. Martins interview.
65. According to Barbosa and his co-authors (2009), in Angola, BNDES invests
mainly in projects that the Angolan government considers a priority,
such as roads. Another example the authors give is the way Brazil has
been supporting ethanol production in many African countries (primarily
Ghana), mainly for exports to European markets.
66. Tânia Pires, interview with the author, Rio de Janeiro, Brazil, 26 July 2010.
67. Pires interview.
68. However, I heard informally from some of my contacts from Cape Verde
and Guinea-Bissau that in some cases, FESTLIP offers theatre companies a
set number of airfares, perhaps four or five, and the companies must raise
money on their own to purchase flights for any additional artists they wish
to bring along.
69. Pires interview.
70. Ibid.
71. Ibid.
72. For example, a newspaper article I saw in a Rio de Janeiro newspaper
announced an upcoming training course for prospective African diplomats
and mentioned there would be translators of Swahili, the ‘common language
in all of Africa’ (Jornal do Brasil 2010). As Swahili is spoken in only roughly
thirteen African countries, this glaring error in a major Brazilian newspaper
indicates a large deficit of knowledge about Africa in Brazilian society. Other
anecdotes I heard from FESTLIP contacts suggested that many Brazilians
they encountered in Rio had very little conception of the size of Africa or
distances among countries. For example, an Angolan actor recounted to me
that a Brazilian once told him, ‘You’re from Angola? What a coincidence!
I have a friend in Guinea-Bissau.’
3 Recasting the Colonial Past

1. OTACA’s performance was a co-production with another nearby amateur
theatre troupe, Raiz di Engenhos, which supplied just one actor, Edimilson
Sousa, who played the lead character of Bita. Since Sousa was actually from
the area of Engenhos, while OTACA is from nearby Assomada, the troupe felt
he could bring the most authentic experience to his representation of Bita.
2. Estação Teatral da Beira Interior (Theatre Station of Interior Beira).
3. For example, Rebecca Schneider (2011) writes about Civil War re-enactors
who have a clandestine desire to revise history, sometimes in troubling ways.
For example, some would prefer a reenactment in which the South could
win.
4. In Portuguese: ‘baseando-se em factos recolhidos junto das pessoas idosas oriundas
do interior de Santiago, com maior incidência nas Ribeiras de Engenhos deste con-
celho de Santa Catarina, pessoas, essas com profundas conhecimentos das relações
desastrosas entre trabalhadores das terras e os donos destas terras, os senhores
“MORGADOS” e . . . as Autoridades Coloniais’ (Mindelact 2004 festival pro-
gram, 41).
Notes 191
5. In Portuguese: ‘As raízes e as tradições da maior ilha do país, do grupo que melhor
as sabe interpretar’ (ibid., 40).
6. In Crioulo: ‘Homi faca, Mudjer matchado, Mininus tudo ta djunta pedra.’
7. Freire later told me an anecdote that confirmed this. When he arrived
in Mindelo for Mindelact 2004, festival director João Branco asked him,
‘Narciso, why are you calling this a debut? I’ve researched Cape Verdean
theatre. You performed Tchom di Morgado in Santa Catarina around 1980.’
Freire responded, ‘That was another play, a different story. Morgados were
on Santiago for a long time. There isn’t only one Tchom di Morgado!’ Narciso
Freire, interview with the author, Assomada, Cape Verde, 2 October 2006.
8. Nilda Vaz, interview with the author, Assomada, Cape Verde, 3 October
2006.
9. Freire interview, 2 October 2006.
10. Ibid.
11. Alverino Monteiro, interview with the author, Engenhos, Cape Verde,
2 October 2006.
12. Amélia Sousa, interview with the author, Engenhos, Cape Verde, 2 October
2006.
13. António Carreira (2000) points out that this system actually predated the
end of slavery, since Cape Verdean society had long included freed and
escaped slaves who lacked the socioeconomic power to own land.
14. Alverino Monteiro interview; Amélia Sousa interview; Crisálida Correia,
interview with the author, Praia, Cape Verde, 4 October 2006.
15. Freire’s distrust of the colonial narrative is evident in the description he
gave me of the abuse of agrarian workers that inspired Tchom di Morgado.
The document abounds with imagery of ‘savage beasts,’ which is how Freire
thinks colonial authorities and landlords viewed their Black workers.
16. Monteiro interview. Manuel Semedo Tavares, who was a guard for Serra at
the time, recalls that a group of farmers were exiled in the 1950s for protest-
ing the steep increase in the cost of renting the morgado’s machinery for
refining sugar cane. Manuel Semedo Tavares, interview with the author,
Engenhos, Cape Verde, 2 October 2006.
17. In Crioulo: ‘Ma genti, pamodi? Pamod es é branko? Pamod es ta papia Potugues?’
Thanks to Narciso Freire for lending me a copy of his script.
18. Two of my interviewees who had been employed by morgados downplayed
this violence. For example, when I interviewed Henrique Mendes Correia,
who was raised in a morgado’s house, his daughter Crisálida Correia was
there. When she prompted him to talk about worker beatings, he said, ‘O que
passa, djá passa!’ (What has passed, has passed). Henrique Mendes Correia,
interview with the author, Praia, Cape Verde, 4 October 2006.
19. Monteiro interview.
20. Henrique Mendes Correia interview; Amélia Sousa interview; Manuel
Semedo Tavares interview.
21. Monteiro interview.
22. Manuel Semedo Tavares affirmed that before Carlos Serra arrived in 1947,
all of the Portuguese morgados in Engenhos were absent landlords; Manuel
Semedo Tavares interview.
23. Freire interview, 2 October 2006.
192 Notes
24. For example, all of my Engenhos interviewees mentioned Pepé’s arbitrary

rule that renters had to dress in a suit jacket before they could enter the
morgado’s house to pay their rent. Since the renters were too poor to own
a jacket, Pepé had one that he would rent to them at the door so they could
enter and pay their land rent.
25. Crisálida Correia interview. Henrique Mendes Correia (2006) recalls that
most of the proprietors he knew in Santa Catarina were Cape Verdean.
António Carreira (2000) writes that as early as the late seventeenth century,
there were Black and mulatto proprietors on Santiago. Anjos (2002) links
the dilution of the morgados’ authority in the late nineteenth and early
twentieth centuries to the social ascendance of non-White owners of small
parcels of land.
26. Written accounts of the history of Maio Island are scarce, but see Almeida
(2003) and Meintel (1984).
27. Arsenio Bettencourt, interview with the author, Maio Island, Cape Verde,
6 October 2006.
28. As an editorial in a major Cape Verdean newspaper stated: ‘When we
couldn’t produce anything because of drought and multitudes of people
died, the highest authority of command in these lands, instead of ordering
foodstuffs for the people, ordered them to expand the cemeteries’ (Pinto
2006: 19).
29. I have pieced together the following summary of the interactions between
the two men from an interview with Custódio (Porto, Portugal, 11 June
2006) and conversations with Tavares during my four-day stay on Maio
Island, 6–9 October 2006.
30. Herlandson Duarte, interview with the author, Mindelo, Cape Verde,
24 September 2006; Freire interview, 2 October 2006.
31. All quotes from Mãe Preta are my own English translations from the text
posted online at http://esteteatro.home.sapo.pt, accessed 9 November 2007.
32. João Branco, interview with the author, Mindelo, Cape Verde, 1 August
2007.
33. Ney Tavares, interview with the author, Maio Island, Cape Verde, 8 October
2006.
34. Ney Tavares, interview with the author, Mindelo, Cape Verde, 16 September
2005. In 2004, Tavares performed in a sketch with a Maio Island theatre
group for Festival Off. Branco usually invites the strongest theatre group
from Festival Off to perform on the main stage the following year.
35. This exact line also appeared in the Mindelact 2005 program. A voiceover
on Hulda Moreira’s (2005) documentary on Mindelact 2005 introduced the
segment on Mãe Preta with a similar phrase.
36. Tambla Almeida, a Cape Verdean filmmaker and promoter of culture, told
me that ‘Suffering Mother’ or ‘Mother of All of Us’ would have been bet-
ter choices; Almeida, interview with the author, Mindelo, Cape Verde,
24 September 2006.
37. Ney Tavares, interview with the author, Maio Island, Cape Verde, 8 October
2006.
38. Nuno Pino Custódio, interview with the author, Porto, Portugal, 11 June
2006.
Notes 193
39. Nuno Pino Custódio, interview with the author, Mindelo, Cape Verde,
18 September 2005. A year later, Custódio explained that Horta originally
chose the title ‘on the level of instinct’ and he agreed to it because it cap-
tured the spirit of the piece. He admitted that in Cape Verde, the title ‘black
mother’ makes as little sense as a Portuguese play entitled ‘white mother’
would if it was performed in Portugal. Nuno Pino Custódio, interview with
the author, Porto, Portugal, 11 June 2006.
40. Ney Tavares interview, 8 October 2006.
41. Albertina Tavares, interview with the author, Maio Island, Cape Verde,
7 October 2006.
42. Custódio interview, 11 June 2006.
43. Ibid.
44. Dany Santos, interview with the author, Mindelo, Cape Verde, 17 September
2005.
45. Duarte interview.
46. Albertina Tavares interview.
47. In her documentary about Mindelact 2005, Hulda Morreira (2005) observes
that Mãe Preta ‘touched Cape Verdean mothers.’ In 2006, I asked a woman
who regularly attended Mindelact to talk about the show from 2005 that she
remembered most. The woman, who was a mother, said that it was Mãe Preta
because it dealt with the anguish of losing a child.
48. In Portuguese: ‘A história verdadeira de uma mulher angolana que acreditava ser
Santo António e que foi condenada a morrer queimada (como Joana D’Arc) pela
Inquisição.’
49. José Mena Abrantes and Anacleita Pereira, interview with the author, Rio de
Janeiro, Brazil, 9 July 2009.
50. For example, Thornton (2011) notes that in oral accounts, the Kongo king-
dom is presented as a loose confederation of migratory clans over which the
Kongo king had limited powers, while written documents describe a highly
centralized kingdom with a powerful ruler and firm administration.
51. Abrantes and Pereira interview.
52. In our interview, Abrantes told me that he did not know about Thornton’s
book until the Elinga actors were already rehearsing his first draft of
Kimpa Vita, which he had cobbled together from what he knew about the
protagonist’s life from living in Angola, what he learned about her from the
Internet, and his own imagination. After he discovered Thornton’s book,
he decided to leave Kimpa Vita largely intact. He later wrote another play
about her life, Tari-Yari: Miséricórdia e poder no reino do Congo no tempo de
Kimpa Vita (1701–1709) (Tari-Yari: Mercy and Power in the Kongo Kingdom
in the Time of Kimpa Vita), which hews closely to Thornton’s narrative.
However, the fact that Elinga chose to stage Kimpa Vita for FESTLIP 2009 sug-
gests that the theatre company puts more stock in fantasy than in ‘official’
histories, even though it reserves the right to mix the two together freely.
53. I have pieced together this narrative of Kimpa Vita’s life from the follow-
ing sources: Covington-Ward (2008), Slenes (2008), Thornton (1998), and
Elinga’s lengthy pamphlet on the prophetess, which the company produced
as part of the debut of Kimpa-Vita in Luanda. José Mena Abrantes generously
gave me a copy.
194 Notes
54. In 1996, for example, the Angolan government organized a four-day

conference about her legacy, which was sponsored by the EU and UNESCO—
a clear signal that this once counter-culture prophetess has been appropriated
by contemporary agents of government and economic power in Africa and
abroad. See CICIBA (1996).
55. Bernard Dadié’s play about Kimpa Vita, Béatrice du Congo, also targets the
early Portuguese settlers in Africa by using the thinly veiled pseudonym
of ‘Bitandese’ for the Kongo kingdom’s adversaries. This allows the Ivorian
playwright to explore the development of colonialism in the Kongo region
over time, particularly because he collapses 200 years that begin with the
fifteenth-century arrival of the Portuguese and end with Kimpa Vita’s life-
time. See Conteh-Morgan (1994).
56. In Portuguese: ‘Comerciantes, militares, religiosos também são três em um. Esse
‘um’ é que precisa de sair daqui para fora.’
57. The Portuguese were, however, the ones who introduced Christianity to the
Kongo. In 1491, the Kongo king asked to be baptized after a few years of
cautious contact with emissaries from the Portuguese king (Covington-Ward
2008). A period of intense Europeanization of the Kongolese elite followed,
during which Kongo kings and queens typically adopted Portuguese names
(sometimes the same ones as their counterparts in Portugal) and nobles
wore Portuguese dress and, in some cases, studied in Lisbon. By the seven-
teenth century, Italian Capuchins were vying with Portugal for the control
of Christian churches in Central Africa (Newitt 2010). By Kimpa Vita’s time,
Kongo kings, including Dom Pedro IV, favored the Capuchins, even going so
far as to banish Portuguese priests from their realms because of their distrust
of Portugal and its expansionist tendencies (Thornton 1998).
58. Indeed, in Abrantes’s other play, Tari-Yari, the stage directions for Kimpa Vita
exactly replicate the description of her movements as recorded in Thornton.
During her first encounter with the Capuchin priest Padre Bernardo, for
instance, Kimpa Vita circles him on tiptoes (Abrantes 2009: 66).
59. When I saw Kimpa Vita at FESTLIP 2009, I immediately thought of Bernard
Shaw’s play Saint Joan because of its extensive scenes featuring the inquisitor
and Church authorities debating Joan’s actions and teachings. When
I mentioned this to Abrantes, however, he responded that he had never read
Shaw’s play, despite the similarities between Joan and Kimpa Vita. Abrantes
and Pereira interview.
61. This is another alteration of the historical record, which states that the
Capuchin priests spared the life of Kimpa Vita’s child because of their
mercy for its innocent soul (Thornton 1998). In Elinga’s production, Mafuta
recounts that she cast a spell that caused both her and the child to vanish
suddenly before they could be burned. The implications are that Mafuta’s
powers as an indigenous healer were stronger than the Christian dogma that
condemned her as a heretic. Abrantes and Pereira interview.
62. In Portuguese: ‘Vai chamar-se Jemmy . . . ou então Zumbi. Não consigo perceber
muito bem.’
63. The Stono Rebellion was in fact driven by enslaved Kongolese people.
Their leader, Jemmy, attempted to lead them to Florida in warrior fashion
(Thornton 1991; Wood 1974). Thornton’s book on the prophetess speculates
Notes 195
that the Stono Rebellion ‘may have involved the working out of some of
the issues raised by Dona Beatriz [Kimpa Vita]’ (1998: 2). Yet he stops short
of positing a direct connection to the Antoniano religious movement that
arose in the Kongo after Kimpa Vita’s death.
65. Ibid.
66. Abrantes told me a story about how the president of Angola learned about
early Kongolese history through Elinga’s theatre. A few years back, a new
oil well was discovered in the ocean off the coast of Angola. A government
minister proposed that the new well be named ‘Kimpa Vita, after the great
Kongolese queen.’ No one in the government cabinet noticed the inaccuracy
in the proposal except the president, who had read about Kimpa Vita in the
lengthy program Elinga had generated to accompany its theatre production.
The president told the minister that Kimpa Vita was a priestess, not a queen.
While Abrantes told me this story to illustrate the depths of many Angolans’
unawareness of early history in the region, it also illuminates the broad
reach historical fantasy can have: Elinga’s fantastical version of Kimpa Vita’s
life informed an actual government decision in Angola. Typically, this would
only occur if the playwright or the theatre company is well connected. This
is the case with Elinga; Abrantes has been the presidential press secretary
since 1993. Abrantes and Pereira interview.
67. Abrantes and Pereira interview. In Portuguese: ‘isto também ajuda a quebrar
mitos, relativamente às vezes conceitos cristalisados sobre identidade africana,
Àfrica, e tradição.’
4 African Women on Festival Circuits

1. Raiz di Polon was awarded the FESTLIP prize because its active interna-
tional touring schedule ‘projects’ Cape Verdean art throughout the world
(A Semana 2011).
2. In many cases, such scholars are following the logic outlined in Chandra
Mohanty’s now-classic essay, ‘Under Western Eyes: Feminist Scholarship and
Colonial Discourses’ (1994 [1988]).
3. See also Amadiume (1987) for an analysis of the various gender signifiers in
Igbo kinship structures. In a review of how African feminism has changed
gender studies, Eileen Boris cites both Amadiume’s and Oyewùmí’s work as
important paradigm shifters: ‘But if a gender studies with multiple genders
sometimes risks its own version of essentialism, research on Africa serves as
a corrective by grounding gender systems, identities, practices, and ideolo-
gies in time and place’ (2007: 200).
4. For a counterargument, see Steady (2004), who advocates development-
based research rather than theory-based scholarship, which, she argues, has
little practical application.
5. Knowles (2004) provides a detailed explanation of how one of those plays,
Sue Glover’s Bondagers, received vastly different critical responses depending
on the venue in which it was performed. The play is about the struggles
of female agricultural laborers in specific border areas of Scotland dur-
ing the late nineteenth century. The Traverse Theatre company generated
196 Notes
pedagogical materials for schools that clearly suggested how the play was
meant to be a feminist re-reading of Scotland’s labor history during that
time period. That is indeed how theatre critics discussed it in newspaper
reviews published in Glasgow shortly after the play debuted there in 1991.
Yet when the production was transferred to the DuMaurier World Stage
Festival, Knowles noted that ‘the work came to represent Scotland in ways
that would have been unrecognizable in Glasgow or Edinburgh’ (2004:
182). One contributing factor was that the Canadian branch of the Scottish
Studies Foundation sent members to the festival to work booths in the lobby
that provided more information about Scottish culture in general.
6. The African tour was Raiz di Polon’s prize for winning a competition at the
5th African and Indian Ocean Choreographic Encounters in Madagascar in
2003.
7. At this writing, Sousa is also minister of culture for Cape Verde.
8. This connotation comes from the archaic Portuguese expression perder os três
vinténs (losing the three coins). Alternatively, spectators might associate the
title with the proverb não há duas sem três (there’s no two without three),
which relates to the superstition that all bad things come in threes (Jeff
Hessney, e-mail message to author, 1 March 2008).
9. Bety Fernandes, interview with the author, Mindelo, Cape Verde, 18 Sep-
tember 2004.
10. Alkantara now organizes performing arts festivals. See ‘Alkantara,’ a ponte/
the bridge website, http://www.alkantara.pt/2010/alkantara.php (accessed
28 June 2012).
11. In Portuguese: ‘A mulher tem um lugar especial na cultura cabo-verdiana. Num
país de emigrantes, são as mulheres que mantêm as tradições e asseguram a sobre-
vivência e a continuação. O Batuque é um exemplo impressionante da força da
contribuição da mulher africana à cultura do seu continente.’
12. McClintock is working from Nairn (1977) and from the work of other critics,
such as Homi Bhabha, who follow Nairn’s analysis of the nation as Janus-
faced.
13. I am grateful to Jeff Hessney, the manager of and spokesperson for Raiz di
Polon, who pointed this out to me after I had asked about Depputer’s text;
Jeff Hessney, e-mail message to author, 1 March 2008.
14. The term ‘voluntary’ is questionable, however, since many of these waves of
emigration are propelled by the need to find work abroad.
15. However, following Jørgen Carlson’s extensive research on Cape Verdean
migration, Carter and Aulette (2009) maintain that men in Cape Verde still
emigrate at a higher rate than women, as perhaps evidenced by the larger
proportion of women on the islands.
16. For example, when musicologist Susan Hurley-Glowa (1997) began her
ethnographic study of batuko music among women performers in Santiago
Island’s interior, many told her, ‘So you want to learn about African music!’
(175).
17. The word badiu probably derives from the Portuguese word vadio (vagrant or
vagabond). Colonial Portuguese officials used the term vadio to refer to any
subjects who resisted forced labor in the archipelago or in mainland African
colonies. Kesha Fikes notes that in the late eighteenth century, travelers
and historians began applying a derivation of that word, badiu, specifically
Notes 197
to Santiago islanders (2000; see also Pereira 1984). There were many slave
revolts on Santiago, many of which were followed by mass exoduses to inte-
rior mountain regions, where whole communities of Santiaguenses lived in
isolation from the White and mestiço populace. In the colonizers’ eyes, this
made them ‘vagrants.’ The decision of these populations to sequester them-
selves from White settlers led to the popular perception that badius main-
tained folklore traditions, religious practices, and a Crioulo language variant
that were closer to their African roots than those of other Cape Verdeans that
did not live in such isolation (Meintel 1984: 141–42).
18. Badia is the female form of badiu.
19. Bety Fernandes’s narrative comes from our two interviews in Mindelo, on
17 September 2004, and 30 July 2007. I have translated the quoted passages
from Crioulo to English.
20. All quotes from Sousa’s text are from Jeff Hessney’s English translation,
which he sent to me in an e-mail message on 18 June 2005. Hessney’s
explanations of the changes in music and dance genres in Duas Sem Três
greatly helped me understand the piece.
21. Fernandes interview, 18 September 2004.
22. I found from my own experience living on the islands that few Catholic-
identified Cape Verdeans attended church regularly. However, many still
claimed to follow the tenets of the Catholic Church. The Catholicism
practiced on Cape Verde is occasionally mixed with West African and
Brazilian spiritual practices, in line with the deeply creolized nature of
Cape Verdean culture. See ‘religion,’ the Cape Verde.com website, www.
CapeVerde.com/religion.html (accessed 22 March 2013).
23. See Lucas Paoli Itaborahy, ‘State-sponsored homophobia: a world survey of
laws criminalising same-sex sexual acts between consenting adults,’ ILGA
(The International Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, Trans and Intersex Association), old.
ilga.org/Statehomophobia/ILGA_State_Sponsored_Homophobia_2012.pdf
(accessed 22 March 2013).
24. This information came to me through someone living on Santiago Island
who wishes to remain anonymous.
25. See page 11 of ‘Cape Verde,’ a recent human rights report generated by the
US Department of State, www.state.gov/documents/organization/160113.
pdf (accessed 22 March 2013). An interesting recent development in Cape
Verde was the 2012 founding of the Associação Gay Cabo-verdiana contra
a Discriminação (Cape Verdean Gay Association against Discrimination), an
NGO based in Mindelo and run mainly by gay, bisexual, and transgender-
identified people in their 20s and 30s. The new group works closely
with a more established NGO in Cape Verde called VerdeFam, which
promotes sexual and reproductive rights on the islands. A representative
from VerdeFam noted that some gays in Cape Verde have reported being
the victims of street violence, even stone-throwing. See Susana Rendall
Rocha, ‘Mindelo: Gays, lésbicas e simpatizantes em oficina de saúde
sexual 12 Outubro 2012,’ A Semana Online, http://asemana.publ.cv/spip.
php?article81023&ak=1 (accessed 22 March 2013).
26. The song, ‘Tina Blues,’ was Sousa’s original composition for the piece. In
Portuguese, tina means ‘wash basin.’
27. Bety Fernandes, interview with the author, Praia, Cape Verde, 30 July 2007.
198 Notes
28. When Jeff Hessney told me this story, he also mentioned that the dangling
banana could represent a half moon (which has ties to female sexuality),
a phallus, or any other number of things; e-mail message to the author,
17 June 2005.
30. Ibid.
31. Bety Fernandes now supplements her work as a dancer with a job in the Praia
municipal government’s department of youth; Jeff Hessney, e-mail message
to the author, 2 December 2011.
33. The anecdote about the London talkback and the information about the
making of the wedding veil for the piece were provided by Jeff Hessney in
e-mail messages to me on 1 March 2008, and 2 December 2011.
34. Evaristo Abreu, e-mail message to the author, 18 October 2011.
35. In Portuguese: ‘detalhe para os nomes dos homens, alusão à exploração externa
sofrida por Moçambique.’
36. Joana Fartaria, a Portuguese actress who lives in Mozambique and had
seen the play in Maputo, told me that she did not think the allegory had
translated well to audiences there either. The only FESTLIP participant who
gave a different response to my informal inquiry about O Homem Ideal was
Portuguese actor António Simão, who said the play was about ‘relações entre
os continentes em paralelo com mulheres e homens’ (relations among continents
in parallel with women and men). Simão thought the allegory was relatively
easy to grasp and speculated that other FESTLIP participants might not have
understood it because of lack of training in play analysis.
37. Evaristo Abreu, e-mail message to the author, 8 October 2011.
38. The political allegory in O Homem Ideal is doubly significant since
historically, a Mozambican woman named Deolinda Guezimane was an
early leader in the FRELIMO party and was later president of its women’s
association, OMM (Organização da Mulher Moçambicana; Organization of
Mozambican Women) (Sheldon 2002).
39. In Portuguese: ‘Estás a dizer-me que eu devo aceitar partilhar o mesmo homem,
estás maluca, isso nunca vai acontecer.’ I am quoting from the unpublished
play text, which author Evaristo Abreu generously shared with me.
40. For Lee and LiPuma (2004), this is an example of the ‘abstract violence’
perpetrated on African and Latin American economies that accompanied
the shift from productive capital to speculative trade in recent decades (25),
since international lending institutions demand that economically weak
countries begin to privatize and open up their markets, even when they
might not be ready for these steps.
41. In Portuguese: ‘endividada até ao pescoço.’
42. In Portuguese: ‘Ouvi-la! Quem não está comigo, está contra mim!’
43. In Portuguese: ‘É estranho! Aquela família nunca manifestou grande interesse por
esses, agora assim de repente, custa acreditar.’
44. In Portuguese, the full line of dialogue reads: ‘Nada disso, isto não cheira bem,
vocês querem me endividar para depois me cobrarem com juros.’
45. The full history of Mozambique’s civil war (1977–92) is too complex
to go into here. For an analysis of how FRELIMO ultimately embraced
neoliberalism in the 1980s, see Dinerman (2006).
Notes 199
46. In Portuguese: ‘Vocês querem que eu venda o meu corpo?’ ‘Você mesmo é quem
disse.’
47. In Portuguese: ‘já reparaste que se ficares com um deles e tentares compreendê-lo,
podes buscar o melhor e até conseguir que tenha as características que gostas em
cada um deles?’
48. In Portuguese: ‘a peça questiona se o atual mundo neoliberal com sua ganância
desmedida e que submete milhões de pessoas a viver em condições sub-humanas
seria o ideal.’
49. Evaristo Abreu, e-mail message to the author, 8 October 2011. In Portuguese:
‘muita gente prefere não olhar para o aspecto metaforico da peça no sentido
político, ou porque estão distraídas em relação ao que se passa no mundo, ou
porque apenas preferem olhar para o que mais transparece.’
5 Adaptation and the (Trans)Nation

1. See Knowles (1995: esp. 35–36); and Worthen (2003: esp. 165–68). In an
African context, perhaps no Shakespeare adaptation has invited this critique
more than Welcome Msomi’s Zulu reworking of MacBeth, Macbeth/Umabatha,
which features dancing, drumming, and various signifiers of rural witchcraft.
See Distiller (2004) and McLuskie (1999). The production, which traveled to
the Shakespeare’s Globe theatre in London in 1997 as part of the Globe-to-
Globe Festival, also informs W. B. Worthen’s discussion of ‘Shakespearean
Geographies’ in Shakespeare and the Force of Modern Performance (2003: see
esp. 153–55).
2. See Paulo de Medeiros’s (2006) critique of Santos.
3. For more about the concept of secondhand discourse, see Soares (2006).
4. António Augusto Barros, interview with the author, Coimbra, Portugal,
22 July 2005.
5. In his 1955 essay ‘Bases para uma cultura de Cabo Verde’ (‘Bases for a
Cape Verdean Culture’), renowned Cape Verdean author António Aurélio
Gonçalves (1998) writes that he delighted in reading Garrett and Queirós
in school. He uses the affinity of Cape Verdean students with this genre
of literature as evidence that whatever other influences Cape Verdean
culture may evidence, it is ‘structurally Portuguese’ (124). In the 1960s, in
addition to reading Portuguese drama in school, Cape Verdeans could attend
performances of plays by the late-medieval playwright Gil Vicente (who is
considered the father of Portuguese theatre and the Lusophone equivalent
of Shakespeare) when touring Portuguese troupes staged his ‘discovery’
plays as part of the 500th anniversary of the arrival of the first Portuguese
in Cape Verde. See the transcript of ‘Mário Matos no I Encontro de Agentes
Teatrais,’ a speech Matos delivered at a roundtable discussion held during
the Mindelact festival in September 1996 (document #170, Mindelact
Documentation Center [CEDIT]).
6. From exam questions on one of the tests Branco administered to his class
during the 2006–7 session, document #1521, Mindelact Documentation
Center (CEDIT). I observed Branco’s class several times while I was living in
Mindelo and saw how often the class received handouts and instruction on
various eras of Western theatre. To temper this European emphasis, I led a
200 Notes
class on African theatre one night and handed out a bibliography of plays
from various African countries.
7. João Branco, interview with the author, Mindelo, Cape Verde, 21 March
2007. For Mindelact 2004, the theatre group Estrelas de Sul of Sal Island
dramatized an inheritance dispute among Cape Verdean brothers in their
main-stage show, Ka’ de Morte (House of Death/Mourning).
8. Branco interview, 21 March 2007.
9. See the chapter entitled ‘O texto teatral: Dramaturgia e temáticas do teatro
cabo-verdiano’ in Branco’s Nação Teatro (2004: 303–90). Branco has also
been a dynamic force in publishing new Cape Verdean plays. The Mindelact
Association has published anthologies of plays by notable Cape Verdean
playwrights such as Mário Lúcio Sousa and Espírito Santos.
10. For a discussion of the function of a festival’s artistic director, see Cremona
(2007) and Schoenmakers (2007).
11. Branco interview, 21 March 2007.
12. In Portuguese: ‘o crioulo que se ouve tem uma estrutura nas suas frases diferente
daquela que ouvimos na nossa vida quotidiana, uma sonoridade diferente, uma
poética mais acentuada.’
13. The article cited here is also available as document #807 in the Mindelact
Documentation Center (CEDIT).
14. Linguist Angela Bartens (2000) notes that the frequent mixture of Portuguese
and Crioulo on the northern islands often stems from the ‘inability [of
speakers] to distinguish between the two codes’ or their lack of motivation
to do so (40).
15. Most of the Crioulo words that Cape Verdean linguist Dulce Almada Duarte
(2003) identifies as having discernible African origins are badiu. She also
maintains that as the basilectal creole form, badiu is more resistant to ‘con-
tamination’ by Portuguese structures (133; see also 57–60).
16. Many thanks to João Branco for telling me of Cunhal’s text. Interestingly,
Álvaro Cunhal was also the former secretary general of the Portuguese
Communist Party.
17. Quoted from the unpublished script for GTCCPM’s Rei Lear. Thanks to João
Branco for sharing this script with me.
18. Herlandson Duarte told me this right after Sonho de uma noite de verão
debuted.
19. Herlandson Duarte, interview with the author, Mindelo, Cape Verde,
29 August 2007.
20. Yet comparatively, gays and lesbians living in Mindelo generally experience
less social ostracism than they do in Cape Verde’s capital city, Praia. See
Chapter 4.
21. Herlandson Duarte, interview with the author, Mindelo, Cape Verde, 7 Sep-
tember 2005.
22. Duarte interview, 29 August 2007.
23. All citations from the adaptation are from Solaris’s unpublished script,
which the company shared with me.
24. These quotes are from an informal conversation I had with the Solaris actors
in Mindelo in March 2007. After this exchange, Milanka Vera-Cruz, who
played Titânia, added, ‘No, Christina, the court is the court.’ My impression
Notes 201
was that she was worried that the other actors were oversimplifying the
adaptation by suggesting one-to-one correspondences.
25. See Solaris, Sonho de uma noite de verão flyer, document #1120 at the
Mindelact Documentation Center (CEDIT).
26. Herlandson Duarte told me an anecdote about Solaris’s summer 2007 pro-
duction that seemed to illustrate the fact that some Mindelo spectators did
finally stop attending Solaris’s shows. Their production, Putrefacto, featured
the odor of putrid meat, horrific plastic fetuses dangling over spectators’
heads, and actors biting each other and violating dolls. Duarte recalls, ‘No
one liked it. Everyone left in shocked silence. The president of Teatrakácia
[another Mindelo theatre group] vowed never to see a Solaris show again.’
Duarte interview, 29 August 2007.
27. Ibid.
28. For example, as a Peace Corps volunteer on Sal Island, I co-led a student
theatre group that wanted to perform at Mindelact. João Branco asked
me to stage a performance during a weekend when he would be passing
through Sal so that he could judge whether we were ready to perform at
the festival.
tember 2005.
tember 2006.
31. This was the opinion of Josina Fortes (2007), the director of the Mindelo
Cultural Center.
32. Solaris later traveled to Rio de Janeiro to perform Psycho for FESTLIP 2010.
33. For example, one of Portugal’s major international theatre festivals, FITEI
(Festival Internacional de Teatro de Expressão Ibérica; International Theatre
Festival for Iberian Expression), features Portuguese- and Spanish-language
performances from the Iberian Peninsula, Latin America, Central America,
and Africa.
34. Felix Bruno L. Carlos, interview with the author, Maputo, Mozambique,
15 August 2009.
35. Maite Agirre, e-mail interview with the author, 27 March 2012.
36. Agirre explained that she wanted to fuse the spirituality of Dulcinéia with
the carnality of Teresa Panza (whose surname means ‘belly’ in Spanish) and
that ‘Doltza’ is a Basque name that evokes various images of women for her.
Ibid.
37. Carlos interview.
38. Agirre has said that she obsesses over themes when she discovers new ones;
she prefers to go into great depth with one theme (such as Cervantes’s novel)
instead of merely skimming over many themes like a butterfly in flight.
See Agirre’s interview with Kutsemba Cartão (11 June 2010), ‘Nunca Deixei
Moçambique . . . Entrevista com Maitre Agirre,’ http://kutsembacartao.wix.
com/kutsemba#!entrevistas/vstc8=maite-agirre (accessed 20 July 2012).
39. Agirre interview.
40. Agirre generously provided me with a copy of her working script for Dulcinéia
e o cavaleiro dos leões, which had handwritten notes on it that indicated some
of the elements that were added during the rehearsal process.
202 Notes
41. My thanks to Leo Cabranes-Grant for suggesting this angle of analysis.

42. Carlos interview.
43. Agirre interview.
44. Ambrósio Joa, interview with the author, Maputo, Mozambique, 13 Sep-
tember 2010.
45. In Mozambique, the aftermath of Dulcinéia e o cavaleiro dos leões continues
in the shape of its informal publication by Kutsemba Cartão, a nonprofit
organization that publishes a limited number of books, mainly new
works of fiction, from recycled cardboard. Kutsemba Cartão is modeled
after similar organizations in Latin America and counts on support from
the Spanish Embassy in Maputo. See http://kutsembacartao.wix.com/
kutsemba#! (accessed 23 July 2012).
46. Earlier models for intercultural theatre provide evidence of this stance.
For instance, Patrice Pavis’s (1992) ‘hourglass’ model for intercultural
performance features a ‘source culture’ that sifts its grains of sand through
various filters, eventually arriving at a new product, the intercultural
performance staged for a ‘target culture.’ Yet even attempts to modify Pavis
continue this focus on the intercultural product, including Gilbert and
Lo’s (2002) toy-on-a-string model, which depicts intercultural interaction
as a ‘centrifugal’ force but still denotes its manifestation as product, albeit
in two distinct source cultures. Diane Daugherty (2005) proposes a model
based on Rustom Bharucha’s description of intercultural performance as
a swing of the pendulum between two cultural contexts. In this model, the
weight suspended from a pendulum is akin to the product of an intercultural
encounter, even as it swings between its two source cultures.
6 Toward a Conclusion
1. The letter applauded the Lula administration’s cultural policies, especially
the fact that they evolved in a climate of open dialogue and debate. The
letter-writers argued that this process had ceased with Buarque’s appoint-
ment. One of the major issues was the fact that Buarque was blocking
a reform of Brazil’s stringent copyright law, a process that was started under
former minister of culture Gilberto Gil (2003–8) and continued under
Juca Ferreira, Buarque’s immediate predecessor. An English translation of
the letter is available at ‘Letter to the Honorable President of Brazil Dilma
Rousseff,’ http://www.vgrass.de/?p=791#more-791 (accessed 5 July 2012).
More recently, Ana Buarque declared that Internet piracy was killing
Brazilian culture, a position many artists see as kowtowing to big industry
and ignoring the ways that Internet accessibility helps fledgling artists gain
a popular following (Dias 2012).
2. The theatre company Elinga has been a regular participant in Lusophone
festivals (see Chapter 3) and other activities organized by Cena Lusófona.
3. Alvim Cossa, interview with the author, Maputo, Mozambique, 13 August
2009.
4. Ibid.
5. I have found that the clearest explanation of the three main components of
TO (forum theatre, invisible theatre, and image theatre) is in the translator’s
Notes 203
introduction to Boal’s book Games for Actors and Non-Actors (1992). For
explanations of how Boal applied his methods to therapeutic and legal
contexts, see his later works The Rainbow of Desire: The Boal Method of Theatre
and Therapy (1995) and Legislative Theatre: Using Performance to Make Politics
(1998), respectively.
6. Yet feminist TO practitioners concede that restricting ‘spect-acting’
opportunities to audience members whose racial and gender identity
matches those of the skit’s protagonist is an equally conservative move.
Fischer (1994) suggests instead that the ‘joker’ should make it a point to
start a discussion afterward about how spect-actors performed roles, such
as asking the audience: ‘Is this how an African-American woman might
respond to this action? Is this how the women you know might act?’ (195).
7. Spry (1994) recommends that cultural animators temper these power
imbalances with heightened transparency about their positionalities and
their reasons for practicing TO in the communities where they work.
8. This is not to say that the ideas behind forum theatre came solely from
Boal. As David George (1995) has noted, critical contributions to Boal’s
thinking came from his early collaborators at the Teatro de Arena in São
Paulo, José Renato and Gianfrancisco Guarnieri. Boal (2001) admits that
his coringa (joker) system is simply a more extreme form of Bertolt Brecht’s
Verfremdungseffekt.
9. The GTO theatre troupes formed in Lusophone African countries fall under
the umbrella of CTO’s larger outreach project called Ponto a Ponto (Point to
Point). See the featured articles about GTO-Bissau, GTO-Maputo, and GTO-
Angola in Metaxis 6 (2010), a recent edition of CTO’s official journal.
10. Boal (1995) noted that the middle-class participants he encountered
in workshops in Europe and North America suffered less from external
oppression and more from psychological suffering (what he called ‘cops
in the head’). As a result, their version of forum theatre became more like
therapy. In recent years, TO’s presence in Africa has become more pro-
nounced. Perhaps the most famous example is Burkina Faso’s Atelier-Théâtre
Burkinabé (ATB), a theatre company that melds forum theatre with the West
African genre of burlesque musical performance called koteba. ATB also hosts
an international festival for Theatre for Development every two years in
Ougadougou, the country’s capital (Morrison 1991; Plastow 2009). In addi-
tion, Senegal’s Kàddu Yaraax theatre company has hosted a Forum Theatre
Festival in Dakar each year since 2005.
11. Because I lack access to concrete demographic data about FESTLIP audi-
ences, I am speculating here about the racial identities of the Brazilian
audience members based on admittedly problematic external signifiers
such as phenotype and hair shape. This is especially problematic in Brazil,
where categories of racial identification are blurred because of the country’s
intensely mixed heritage. I speculate here merely to indicate the degree of
misunderstanding that can arise when cross-racial and cross-cultural casting
occurs in forum theatre.
12. While GTO-Bissau normally performs the play in Guinean Crioulo at home,
the actors used Portuguese for the FESTLIP crowd. The Crioulo spoken in
Guinea-Bissau is similar to that spoken in Cape Verde, a mix of archaic
Portuguese and various West African languages. The play’s main title,
204 Notes
Nó Mama, is a Crioulo expression loosely meaning ‘we all suckle from the
same breast.’ The play’s subtitle is in Portuguese.
13. José Carlos Lopes Correia, interview with the author, Rio de Janeiro, Brazil,
6 July 2009.
14. In the FESTLIP performances I saw, not all of the spect-actors were asked to
give their names.
15. José Carlos Lopes Correia interview.
16. Ibid.
17. See Sharon Green’s (2001) discussion of forum theatre events at which
participants were allowed to play the role of the ‘oppressor’ in a scene. This
included an event at a Washington state high school, where a skinhead
insisted on playing the role of a White racist. In that case, the student
claimed that the racist was oppressed because he was criticized for exercising
freedom of speech.
18. Tânia Pires, interview with the author, Rio de Janeiro, Brazil, 26 July 2010.
19. Edilta Silva, interview with the author, Rio de Janeiro, Brazil, 18 July 2010.
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Index
Note: references to illustrations appear in bold.
Abrantes, José Mena 88–90, audience 2–3, 7, 9–11, 23–5, 78,

92–5, 193n52, 194n58–61, 95–7, 99–100, 109, 127, 131–2,
195n66 138–9, 143–52, 167, 172, 177–9
Abreu, Evaristo xiii, 56–9, 117, 122, see also spectator
127, 153, 161–2, 185n21 authenticity 68n1, 69, 72, 82, 86,
ACERT (Associação Cultural e 88, 134, 160
Recreativa de Tondela; Cultural cultural 83, 100
and Recreational Association of national 11, 32, 98, 100
Tondela) 51, 56–9
adaptation 49–50, 130–2, 135–49, badiu 48, 49, 104, 113, 141, 185n1,
153–62, 177 196–7n17, 197n18, 200n15
Adorno, Theodor 12 badiu fundu see under Crioulo
Africa 10, 12–16, 34, 37, 40, Balade 41
51–3, 55, 61, 64, 98–100, Barber, Karin 25
108, 119–24, 126–7, 158–9, Barcellos, Senna 75
171–81 Barros, António Augusto 54, 135
arts festivals see under festivals Basque
history 10, 37, 48–9, 52, 119, 134, country 131, 153, 156–61
158–9, 176 nationalism 156–61
notions of tradition 66, 83–5, 95, batuko see under dance
98–9, 102–3, 168, 171–6, 179 Bhabha, Homi 24, 84–5, 133, 183n5,
Afro-Brazilian 60–1, 66, 94–5 196n12
aftermath 7, 12, 22, 25–6, 127, Black 11, 63, 83–5, 93–4, 113, 170–1
131–2, 152–3, 161–2, 166 Black Mother see Mãe Preta
see also festival aftermath Boal, Augusto 29, 167–70, 172
Agerre Teatroa 152, 155, 157 Branco, João xiii, 1–2, 11, 44–7, 72,
Agirre, Maite 153–61 82, 87, 131, 135–46, 150–2, 185n
Angola 40, 53, 60, 68, 88–91, 94–6, 27, 187n23, 29, 191n7
176, 190n65 Brazil
see also Kongo economy 18–19, 62–3, 95, 122
Anjos, José Carlos Gomes dos 135, global influence 19, 47, 53, 59,
184n8, 192n25 61–2, 64–6, 95, 122
Appadurai, Arjun 9, 21–2, 184n14 Ministry of Culture 19, 61, 59,
Apter, Andrew 13, 15 63, 164
Arenas, Fernando 17, 38, 40, 60–2, race 37, 60–3, 66, 93–4, 128, 171
108–9, 185n3, 186–7n15 relationship to CPLP 19, 38, 42,
articulation 6 60–4, 134
Associação Cultural e Recreativa relationship to Portuguese
de Tondela (Cultural and colonialism 16–17, 36–7, 47,
Recreational Association of 59–62, 65–6, 94
Tondela) see ACERT slavery 37, 60, 61, 90, 94
222
Index 223
Brecht, Bertolt 76, 84, 117, 203n8 colonialism 9–10, 16, 20–1, 36–7,
Burkina Faso 14 40, 62, 78, 102, 108, 133
plays about 50, 77–8, 122, 158–9,
Cabral, Amílcar 34, 54, 119, 158, 179 194n55
Cameroon 14 Commonwealth, the 18, 52, 134
Candomblé 66 Comunidade dos Países de Lingua
Cape Verde 9–11, 18, 23, 44–9, 76, Portuguesa (Community
81–3, 86, 101–4, 108, 113–15, of Portuguese-Speaking
133, 135, 139 Countries) see CPLP
history 10–11, 23, 49, 68–72, 74, Conquergood, Dwight 27–8
77–9, 81, 83, 102–3, 140 contemporary dance see under dance
language 10–11, 35–6, 48–9, 101, Cooperação Portuguesa 45, 135
104, 133, 136–7, 141 Copacabana 65, 116, 173, 178
liberation movement 10, 34, 119 co-performer witnessing see under
Ministry of Culture 14, 43, 136 ethnography
postcolonial era 11–12, 119, Correia, José Carlos Lopes
132–3 174–5, 177
relationship to CPLP 40–1, 46 Cortiços 128
Capuchin priests 70, 89–93 Cossa, Alvim 58, 167–8
Carlos, Felix Bruno L. CPLP (Comunidade dos Países de
(‘Mambuxo’) 153–5, 161 Lingua Portuguesa; Community
Carreira, António 75, 77– 9, 83, of Portuguese-Speaking
191n13, 192 n25 Countries) 16–17, 19, 22, 38–42,
Castañeda, Quetzil 29, 168–9 52–3, 61–3, 134–5
catchupa 81 Creole 11, 48, 141
CEDIT (Centro de Documentação e Creole Prophecy, The see Profisia di
Investigação Teatral do Mindelo; Krioulo
Theatre Documentation and creolization 32, 136–9
Research Center of Mindelo) see also adaptation
30, 44 Crioulo 11, 35, 48–9, 72, 81, 82,
Cena Lusófona 41, 44–6, 54, 134–5, 101, 133, 136–49
165 badiu fundu 48, 49
Centro de Documentação e CTO (Centro de Teatro do Oprimido;
Investigação Teatral do Mindelo Center for Theatre of the
(Theatre Documentation and Oppressed) 170, 172
Research Center of Mindelo) cultural exchange see intercâmbio
see CEDIT cultural sovereignty 23
Centro de Teatro do Oprimido Custódio, Nuno Pino 80–7, 143
(Center for Theatre of the
Oppressed) see CTO Dakar 9, 13
Chembene, Dinis 50, 59 dança contemporânea see under dance
Chissano, Joaquim 53 dance 101–16, 128, 177
circulation 3–4, 15, 40–2, 183n4 batuko 101, 102, 104, 110
civil war 10, 51, 52, 89, 93, 122 colá San Jon 111, 113
see also under Mozambique contemporary dance 101
class 25, 48, 107–8, 169–71, 183n1 dança contemporânea see
Coimbra 41–2, 44 contemporary dance
colá San Jon see under dance funaná 72, 101, 105–6, 108–10
Cole, Catherine 24–5 Diamond, Elin 76, 84
224 Index
Dias, Matilde 145, 147–8, 150 methodology 27–31, 105

Diaspora 9, 13, 28, 69, 94, 103 multi-sited 27, 28
Dom Quixote 154, 159–61 EU (European Union) 47, 53, 194n54
Dona Beatriz see Kimpa Vita eventification 25
Don Quixote 131, 153, 155–6, 157–8
see also Dulcinéia e o cavaleiro feminism 98–9, 116, 178–81
dos leões African 98–9, 112, 115–16, 118,
Drewal, Margaret xiv, 28 126–7
drought 68, 70, 71, 79, 83 Ferguson, James 14
Duarte, Dulce Almada 48, 141–2, Fernandes, Bety 100–15, 112
184n6, 188n33, 200n15 Ferreira, Eunice 48–9, 114
Duarte, Herlandson (‘Kutch’) 31, 86, FESTAC (Festival of Black Arts and
131, 136–7, 144–6, 149–51 Culture) 13, 15
Duas Sem Três (Two without festival aftermath 7, 22, 26, 131–2,
Three) 97, 100–16, 112 161, 166
Dulcinéia e o cavaleiro dos leões see also aftermath
(Dulcinéia and the Knight of the Festival d’Agosto, the 3, 4, 18–19,
Lions) 153–62, 155 30, 50–9, 153, 161–2
funding 14, 56, 58–9; see also
East Timor 1–2 under festivals
Economic Community of West history 50–1, 55–9
African States, the see ECOWAS Festival d’Avignon, the 3, 12
ECOWAS (the Economic Community Festival de Teatro da Língua
of West African States) 13, 47 Portuguesa (Theatre Festival
Edinburgh of the Portuguese Language)
Festival Fringe 3 see FESTLIP
Theatre Festival 3, 12, 130 Festival of Black Arts and Culture
Edmondson, Laura 8, 23, 25, 28 see FESTAC
Edwards, Brian xiv, 15 Festival Off 27, 43, 87, 152, 192n34
Elinga 68, 70–1, 88–95, 91, 165 festivals
emigration 97, 99, 101, 102–3, funding 14–15, 19, 41, 43–6, 54–6,
113–14, 128 58–9, 63, 65, 136, 140, 164–5
see also migration in Africa 3, 10, 12–15, 25, 35,
Engenhos 72–8 42–60
ensemble 8, 154–5 tabanca 2, 10–12, 34
Estação Teatral da Beira Interior theatre festivals 2–5, 7–10, 12–16,
(Theatre Station of Interior 21, 24–6, 35, 41–3, 50–1, 60–67,
Beira) see ESTE 69, 98, 130, 145, 164–5, 182;
estações see stations see also under individual theatre
ESTE (Estação Teatral da Beira Interior; festival names
Theatre Station of Interior travel to 20, 41, 43, 45, 80, 153
Beira) 68, 80, 81, 82, 85 FESTLIP (Festival de Teatro da Língua
Estevão, Manuel 44, 187n29 Portuguesa; Theatre Festival of
ethnography 27–31, 105, 168–9 the Portuguese Language) 4, 6,
co-performer witnessing 27–9, 19–21, 29, 60–7, 68, 88, 119, 171
30, 105 cancellation (2012) 164, 183n2
critical 30–1 funding 19, 59, 61, 63–5, 164;
fieldwork 17, 21, 27–30, 32, 54, see also under festivals
105, 169 history 19, 63–5
Index 225
FestLuso 42, 98, 188n31 GTCCPM (Grupo de Teatro do Centro

Fikes, Kesha 38, 113, 184n8, Cultural Português do Mindelo;
185n4, 196n17 Theatre Group of the Mindelo
Fladu Fla 35 Portuguese Center) 136, 138,
foreign policy 16, 41–2, 62–3, 122–3 139, 142, 145
forum theatre 67, 167–73, 177 GTO (Grupo Teatro do Oprimido;
Foucault, Michel 70, 78, 79 Theatre of the Oppressed Group)
Fragoso, Francisco 40, 185n22 GTO-Guinea-Bissau 171–2, 173,
Francophone 15, 69 174, 177
Freire, Narciso 72–5, 78 Mozambique 167–8, 172
FRELIMO (Frente de Libertação de Guinea-Bissau 67, 134, 171, 177,
Moçambique; Liberation Front 179, 181
of Mozambique) 52, 119–20, Gungu 54, 178
122–3
Frente de Libertação de Moçambique Hall, Stuart 6
(Liberation Front of Hauptfleisch, Temple 5, 25–6
Mozambique) see FRELIMO Hessney, Jeff 196n13, 197n20,
Freyre, Gilberto 16, 36–8, 65, 66 198n28
see also lusotropicalism history
Fumo, Yolanda 117, 123 colonial 5, 69, 76, 78, 79–80, 87
funaná see under dance historical fantasy 69–70, 83,
FUNARTE (Fundação Nacional de 88–90, 93–5
Artes; National Foundation of the historical imagination 68, 70, 85,
Arts) 65, 164 87, 94
Fundação Nacional de Artes official record 69–71, 73, 77, 88–9,
(National Foundation of the Arts) 93, 176, 193n52
see FUNARTE oral tradition 70–1, 73–4, 77–82,
89–90, 176
gender 97–100, 102, 104, 108, 117, homosexuality 8n3, 108, 109,
119–20, 127, 179 115, 146
machismo 107 see also under women
machista 108, 178, 180 hooks, bell 84, 100
see also women Horta, Sandra 80–1, 84–5, 85
Ghana 15, 24, 62
Glissant, Edouard 145, 151 IATM (International Anti-Corruption
global casting calls 20 Theatre Movement) 55–6
globalization 7–8, 13–14, 99, Ideal Man, The see O Homem Ideal
117–18, 123, 125, 184n14 IMF (International Monetary Fund)
Goulart, João 61 10, 13–14, 114, 117, 121, 122–3,
Grahamstown Arts Festival, 125–6
the 14–15, 130 imperialism 16, 36, 54, 133, 159
Grupo de Teatro do Centro Cultural Instituto Camões 39, 45, 80
Português do Mindelo (Theatre intercâmbio 4, 38, 45, 54, 64
Group of the Mindelo Portuguese intercultural 16, 56–7, 80, 119,
Center) see GTCCPM 131–4, 151, 154, 159, 161–2, 181
Grupo Elinga Teatro (Elinga Theatre International Anti-Corruption Theatre
Group) see Elinga Movement see IATM
Grupo Teatro do Oprimido (Theatre of International Monetary Fund
the Oppressed Group) see GTO see IMF
226 Index
international theatre festivals 2, 4, Lusophone 1–2, 9, 16–21, 36,

8–9, 21–2, 25–6, 35–6, 42, 50–1, 38–42, 45–6, 53–4, 63–6, 94,
67–9, 128, 145 134–5, 177
invisible ethnography 169, 171, 174 colonial histories 9, 16–17, 36–9,
invisible theatre 29, 168–9 71, 83, 89–90, 133, 171
culture 16–17, 19, 45–6, 172
Jemmy 93–4 postcolonialism 40, 49, 91, 133,
Johnson, E. Patrick 83, 85 151, 168, 179
Jorge, Isabel 55, 58, 123, 126, speaking 6–7, 16–17, 38, 42, 60,
185n21 63–5, 140
José, Dadivo 50 lusotropicalism 16–17, 36–8, 52, 60
Kikongo 24 Machel, Samora 119, 158, 160

Kimpa Vita: A profetisa ardente Madalena project 177, 181
(Kimpa Vita: The Burning Madison, D. Soyini 30–1
Prophetess) 88, 90–6, 91 Mãe Preta (Black Mother) 71, 79–88,
Kimpa Vita (Dona Beatriz) 68, 70, 85, 96, 166
88, 90–4 Maio, island of 79–80, 83, 87
King Lear see Rei Lear Mandela, Nelson 52
Knowles, Ric 4, 5, 6, 8, 69, 99, 130, Manjate, Rogério 58
195n5 Maputo 50–1, 54–5, 58, 121, 153–4,
Kongo, the 60, 70, 89–93, 95 158
see also Angola March, Theatre Month 44
Março, Mês do Teatro see March,
labor Theatre Month
exploitation 20, 70, 74 Marcus, George 27, 28
roles 99–100, 111–14, 119–20, Maria—Childbearers’ Ritual see
124, 178 Maria—Ritual das parideiras
work 74, 83, 99, 103, 111–14, 120, Maria—Ritual das parideiras (Maria—
124, 149 Childbearers’ Ritual) 177–81
see also under women Martins, José Rui 56
La Francophonie 134, 186 n6 Massuir, Bernard 3–4, 56
Lampreia, Luis Filipe 61, 62 M’Bêu 55–9, 97, 116–17, 123, 128
Lee, Benjamin 13, 15 memory 25, 68–9, 71, 76, 79, 109
lesbianism see homosexuality under Mendes, Gilberto 54, 178–9
women meta-theatre 5, 89, 150
Let’s Unite! Fruits of the Same Midsummer Night’s Dream, A
Tree see Nó mama! Frutos da see Sonho de uma noite de verão
mesma árvore migration 9, 11, 41, 97, 102–3,
LiPuma, Edward 13, 15 118, 128
Lisbon 38–40, 185n4 see also emigration
Luarte 50, 153–5, 155, 159–61 mimesis 73, 75, 76, 84
Luís Lopes Sequeira, or the Wondrous Mindelact
Mulatto see Sequeira, Luís Lopes Association 11, 30, 44, 46, 138,
ou o Mulato dos Prodígios 140, 147
Lula see Silva, Luis Inácio ‘Lula’ da Festival (1995–6) 43–4
lusofonia 6–7, 16–22, 35–6, 38–40, funding 14, 18, 43–6, 136; see also
42, 44–7, 50–6, 60–1, 63–5, 134, under festivals
153, 171–2, 177, 182 history 43–5, 150–2
Index 227
International Theatre Festival OAU (Organization of African

(1997–) 1–2, 4, 10–12, 16–18, Unity) 13
23, 43–50, 72, 76, 132, 135–6, Oficina de Teatro e Comunicação
147 de Assomada (The Assomada
selection process 43, 132, 136, Theatre and Communication
150–1 Collective) see OTACA
travel to see under festivals O Homem Ideal (The Ideal Man)
Mindelo 2, 46, 49, 76, 78, 90, 97–9, 116–28, 123
104, 109, 113, 136, 138–9, Oliveira, Daniel de 20
146–7, 151 OMCV (Organização das Mulheres
Mindelo Cultural Center (CCM) do Cabo Verde; Organization of
1, 27, 43 Cape Verdean Women) 101
modern dance see dança oral tradition see history
contemporânea Organização das Mulheres do Cabo
Monteiro, Alvarino 74, 78 Verde (Organization of Cape
Moorman, Marissa 23 Verdean Women) see OMCV
morgados 71–2, 74–8, 75, 77–8 Organization of African Unity see
see also under Santiago OAU
morna 71 Os Fidalgos 41–2
Mota, Luci 118 OTACA (Oficina de Teatro e
motherhood see under women Comunicação de Assomada;
Mozambique 18–19, 51–5, 97, The Assomada Theatre and
99, 116–22, 124–5, 153, Communication Collective) 28,
158–9, 168 68, 71–9, 77
civil war 10, 51, 52, 122 ousadia 145, 148
economy 59, 97, 122–5, 188n40 Oyewùmí, Oyèrónké 99, 118
liberation movement 10, 52, 119,
157–8, 160 PAICV (Partido Africano da
postcolonial era 119, 132 Independência de Cabo
relationship to CPLP 19, 52–3, 134 Verde; African Party for
Mudjer Trabadjadera (Working the Independence of Cape
Woman) 80–2, 87 Verde) 11, 23
Mutumbela Gogo 54, 56, 65 Palmares, Zumbi dos 93–4
PANAFEST 14, 15
national Pan-Africanism 13, 51, 158
boundaries 9, 21, 69 Partido Africano da Independência
collaborative nationalism 23 de Cabo Verde (African Party
culture 3, 11, 23, 25, 34, 99, 158 for the Independence of Cape
identity 2, 23, 25, 36, 48–50, Verde) see PAICV
66, 134 past, the see history
nationalism 157–60 Pavis, Patrice 137, 139, 143, 202n46
Negro Arts Festival 13 Pereira, Anacleta 95, 118
Newitt, Malyn 52, 60, 94, 123, performers 5–7, 9, 20–1, 23, 25, 31,
194n57 36, 48, 68–71, 97–8, 152, 165,
Nigeria 13, 61, 62 167, 182
Nó mama! Frutos da mesma árvore Petrobras 61, 95
(Let’s Unite! Fruits of the Same Pires, Tânia xii, 59–66, 94, 164, 181
Tree) 173–7, 173 polygyny 101, 121
Nyerere, Julius 126 popular culture 23, 25, 26, 109
228 Index
Porto 84 Santo Antão, island of 44, 113

Portugal 10, 17, 37–42, 45, 47, 53–4, Santos, Boaventura de Sousa 133–4
61, 63, 74, 79, 84, 92, 109, 133–4 São Tomé 62, 102
Portuguese language see Lusophone São Vicente, island of 10–11, 49,
postcolonial 40, 49, 88, 92, 133–5, 104, 109, 113, 141
144–5, 156, 159–60 Sassen, Saskia 117, 125–6, 184n14
Praia 27, 44, 100–1 Sauter, Willmar 5, 8, 21, 25
Preto, Mano 100 Schoenmakers, Henri 5, 20–1,
Profisia di Krioulo (The Creole 24, 128
Prophecy) 35–6 Sequeira, Luís Lopes 89
Proprietor’s Land, The see Tchom di Sequeira, Luís Lopes ou o Mulato dos
Morgado Prodígios (Luís Lopes Sequeira,
Psycho 118, 152 or the Wondrous Mulatto) 45,
89–90
race 11, 16, 37, 66, 77–8, 83, 85, 128 sexuality see under women
see also under Brazil Shakespeare 49–50, 130–52
racism 16, 37, 42, 60, 63, 170 see also under individual play titles
Raiz di Polon 97–8, 100–11, 112, Silva, Edilta 175, 180–1
113, 115–16 Silva, Luis Inácio ‘Lula’ da 62,
Ramonda 2, 10, 12 94–5, 119
re-Africanization 11, 104 slavery 18, 48–9, 60, 74, 77, 93,
recasting 7–9, 12, 43–45, 162, 165 102, 150
audience perceptions 100, 120 slave trade see slavery
history 68–69, 71, 74, 85, 89 Soares, Fonseca 140–1, 142
Rei Lear: Nhô Rei já bá cabeça (King social imaginaries 35–6, 41–2, 47,
Lear: The King’s Head Has 66, 67, 181
Gone) 131, 134, 136–44, 142 Soeiro, Manuela 54, 57, 59
RENAMO (Resistência Nacional Solaris 118, 144, 145–52, 148
Moçambicana; Mozambican Sonho de uma noite de verão
National Resistance) 52, 122 (A Midsummer Night’s
Resistência Nacional Moçambicana Dream) 131, 137, 144–52, 148
(Mozambican National Sousa, Amélia 74–6
Resistance) see RENAMO Sousa, Edimilson 73–6, 77, 190n1
Revolta d’Rubom Manel 72 Sousa, Mário Lúcio 101, 106
Richards, Sandra xiv, 71 South Africa 15, 51–2, 125
Rio de Janeiro 19, 29, 60, 128, Southern African Development
190n72 Community see SADC
Rokem, Freddie 73 spectator 2, 10–11, 20–1, 23–5,
Rubom Manel 72, 76 76, 78, 100, 109, 127–8, 132,
138–9, 143–4, 149, 151, 167–9,
SADC (Southern African Development 172–82
Community) 19, 51–3, 55, 124 see also audience
Salazar, António de Oliveira 16–17, 37 stations 41, 44–5, 46, 54
Santa Catarina 72, 74, 78 subjugated knowledge 70, 79, 80
Santiago, island of 11, 48–9, 78,
103–4, 109 Tabanca see under festivals
history 49, 70, 72–3, 78–9 Tabanca Tradiçon 2, 10–11, 23, 24
land rights 71–2, 74, 76, 78 TALU Produções 60, 164
morgado system 71–2, 74, 77–8 Tavares, Albertina 83, 86
Index 229
Tavares, António 108 UCCLA (União das Cidades Capitais

Tavares, Matilde 71, 82–3, 85 Luso-Afro-Américo-Asiáticas;
Tavares, Ney 80–3, 86, 87–8 Union of Luso-Afro-American-
Tchom di Morgado (The Proprietor’s Asiatic Capital Cities) 38,
Land) 68, 71–9, 77 46, 140
Teatro Livre 47–8 União das Cidades Capitais Luso-
theatre festivals see festivals Afro–Américo-Asiáticas (Union
Theatre for Development 55, of Luso-Afro-American-Asiatic
203n10 Capital Cities) see UCCLA
Theatre of the Oppressed see TO
theatre troupes 4, 12, 20, 41–4, Vaz, Nilda 48, 73
49, 56, 68, 132, 136 Venus Hottentot, the (Sarah
amateur 22, 43, 47, 50, 56, 66, Bartmann) 84
190n1
professional 22, 47, 56, 66 West Africa 10, 11, 48, 60, 108
see also under individual women
troupe names as nation 98, 100, 102, 119
Thornton, John 70, 89, 90, 92, bodies 84, 105–10, 125–6, 177–8,
93, 193n50, 194n63 180–1
Timas, Rosy 103, 105–8, global economy 102, 117–18, 123,
110–13, 112 125–6
timbila 158 homosexuality 108–9, 115–16,
TO (Theatre of the Oppressed) 145–6
168–72, 177 labor 83, 98–100, 107–8, 111–14,
see also Augusto Boal; forum 119–20, 124–5
theatre; GTO motherhood 83–6, 99, 101,
translation 133, 137, 139, 141, 177–81
143, 149 oppression 113, 118, 177–8
see also adaptation prostitution 99, 124–6
transnationalism 9–12, 16–22, sexual exploitation 37, 124–6, 128
45–6, 49–51, 55–56, 165 sexuality 84, 100–1, 108, 116, 117,
minor 21 121, 198n28
Trigo Limpo 51, 56–9 work see labor
see also ACERT Working Woman see Mudjer
Trottino Clowns 3, 56 Trabadjadera
truth see authenticity World Bank 13–14, 117, 119, 121–6
Two without Three see Duas
Sem Três Zeleza, Paul 126

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Studies in International Performance

Published in association with the International Federation of Theatre Research

Studies in International Performance

All rights reserved. No reproduction, copy or transmission of this publication

Typeset by MPS Limited, Chennai, India.

List of Illustrations viii

1 Introduction – Global Casting Calls: Performing

1 Manuel Semedo Tavares stands in front of the morgado

8 Nuno Delgado (the Fool) interacts with the head of Fonseca

CEDIT Centro de Documentação e Investigação Teatral do

SADC Southern African Development Community

The “Studies in International Performance” series was initiated in

Janelle Reinelt and Brian Singleton

International Federation for Theatre Research

Behind this book are a multitude of individual voices and institutions

became a spectacular friend to boot. During my two summers and year-

graduate school, Buffett Center for International and Comparative

In September 1999, as a young, fresh-out-of-college Peace Corps

for the duration of Mindelact, chronicled the impact of the crisis on

Globalized theatre venues: The conundrum of

Mindelact 1999 had become a conduit for impassioned cultural

interconnectedness of cultures that characterizes our age of global

gibberish words sung a cappella. Mindelact 2005 highlighted the French-

actively drawn together theatre artists and spectators united by a

interpretive framework the festival offers to spectators. Moreover, the

its colonial undertones and because the Portuguese state vigorously

For example, mass-produced musicals such as The Lion King threaten

‘Recasting’ thus signifies on two levels in this book: the transnational

of Portugal’s authoritarian regime (the Estado Novo, or Second Republic),

Portuguese, but the language people speak on a day-to-day basis is

evening, Ramonda’s actors attempted to ‘recast’ the Mindelact festival’s

Intertwining discourses: African theatre festivals,

Africa is a promising geographical site for cultural and economic queries

By contrast, the first international arts festivals in Africa carefully

their already vulnerable markets to foreign speculation as a condition

600 performances in formal and improvised theatre spaces sprawled

Lusofonia in transnational perspective

The Lusophone world is a compelling laboratory for studying theatre

propagandist campaign to retain his African colonies in the post-World

privileging the Cape Verde Islands in my discussion of a Lusophone

stages alongside English-language theatre from neighboring South Africa,

July 2009, Angolan guitarist and lyricist Daniel de Oliveira performed

participant’ who attends multiple events on a program and can thus

I am wary, however, of painting an overly rosy picture of this

Nation-building and ‘festival aftermath’

Until recently in scholarship on African theatre, the term ‘contested’

the instability of nation formation, which, as Bhabha (1994) rightly

Yet there is one crucial difference between these two performance

also asserts that festivals naturally generate ‘rancour and wrangling’

Methods and structure

How does one conduct an ethnography of three festival sites in

a way of knowing ‘grounded in active, intimate, hands-on participation

with multiple troupes, she gains in the increased knowledge of cultural

a community of Lusophone artists was forming during the festival’s

meant a constant awareness of my privileged status as a White North

I selected performances that fall under the categories of historical

a Portuguese theatre troupe transformed race representation and Cape

My concluding chapter moves away from Cape Verde entirely to

International theatre festivals are sites where participants and attendees