Agenda

The holding of municipal fairs always had a strong tradition in Minho. On the defined calendar day, especially the people who lived in the villages, they soon became accustomed to moving to the fairs, either to market their products or to stock up on products for themselves, the family, the home or their work . Farmers, seamstresses, housewives and marketers have become accustomed to living in this secular space.

This space is organized by sectors, with more than 100 places for non-sedentary retail trade.

The fair is held on Monday, every two weeks and has a free public car park. There is a food and beverage establishment inside the Bus Station and public toilets in the immediate vicinity of the premises, which serve as support for merchants and consumers.

Maria da Luz drinks Coca-Cola with solemnity and listens to Grândola as though it were a prayer. Flores de Pão is a journey back to a time when fear was commonplace, trust was dangerous, and making a bread flower was an act of resistance. As memories unfold, stories emerge of resistance and submission, of those who fought underground and those who staunchly defended the regime. Moving between past and present, the stories take shape on stage, becoming a living experience in which memory ceases to be merely a recollection and becomes action. A play about the anonymous women who never made it into the history books. About the price of freedom and what is lost when we forget what that freedom cost.

Because freedom is not something we inherit ready-made. It must be nurtured. Every day.

TECHNICAL CREDITS

• Written and directed by: Alexandra Costa and Sofia Sampaio
• Cast: Bia Teixeira, Helena Roxo, Mafalda Miguéis, Marcelo Silva
• Production: GATERC

The holding of municipal fairs always had a strong tradition in Minho. On the defined calendar day, especially the people who lived in the villages, they soon became accustomed to moving to the fairs, either to market their products or to stock up on products for themselves, the family, the home or their work . Farmers, seamstresses, housewives and marketers have become accustomed to living in this secular space.

This space is organized by sectors, with more than 100 places for non-sedentary retail trade.

The fair is held on Monday, every two weeks and has a free public car park. There is a food and beverage establishment inside the Bus Station and public toilets in the immediate vicinity of the premises, which serve as support for merchants and consumers.

On a historic bench in the southern city of Ponta Delgada, made famous by the fact that the great poet Antero sat there before taking his own life with two shots from a pistol, two men revealed to be brothers — two lost souls with nowhere to go, born of our collective imagination and typical of any age that passes through these parts — await a future that never comes.

The two brothers carry in their pockets fundamental themes of humanity, such as family, fear and shame. More directly and realistically, they also represent the “human zombies” seen on the streets of Ponta Delgada today: addicts of synthetic drugs, figures who carry with them wherever they go an image of human degradation, the edge of the abyss, and death. They are, therefore, tragedies in motion.

What is more, they are sitting, significantly, in the very place where a poet who dreamed of a better world and a more justly organised society, one that paid particular attention to the marginalised, took his own life. Antero’s suicide appears to be an act of surrender. Yet it is always important to remember that the word hope survives behind him, engraved on a plaque.

This is where the island comes in, with its abandonment: an archipelagic history shaped by poverty and emigration, and a widespread inability to deal with those human fruits that fall from rotten trees, deemed to be of no use. What are we to do with them? What can we do to ensure that those who come after them do not rot all over again from the very beginning?

• Original text: Nuno Costa Santos and João Pedro Porto
• Artistic direction/staging: Miguel Damião
• Cast: Emanuel Arada and Rui M. Silva
• Lighting design: Rui Viveiros
• Set design: Natália Melo
• Costume design: Isabel Roque
• Executive production: Beatriz Silva Lavouras
• Photography: Paulo Goulart
• Supported by: Portuguese Republic – Culture, Youth and Sport / Directorate-General for the Arts
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