Marco Mendonça
Blackface
- 27.11 2022
- Espaço Alkantara
- free entry
- entrada livre
Blackface will premiere one year from now. By then it will have become a musical conference centred on the history and performativity of blackface.
Marco Mendonça opens the studio doors of Espaço Alkantara to share the development process and research behind his work Blackface.
Written and staged by Marco Mendonça, Blackface will be a solo performance between stand-up and fantasy, satire and physical theatre, burlesque and documentary. On stage, Marco Mendonça intends to explore the performativity and history of blackface as a racist theatrical practice — from its roots in the USA to cases in Portugal — as he searches for the limits of what can or cannot be represented on stage.
As we look at the extensive library of events in which this racist practice was used to portray Black people as inferior members of Portuguese society, can we really believe that racism doesn’t exist in Portugal?
Blackface will premiere at Alkantara Festival 2023
Marco Mendonça was born in Mozambique in 1995 and lives in Lisbon since 2007. He graduated in theatre at the Escola Superior de Teatro e Cinema. He works regularly with the company Os Possessos. He was a trainee at Teatro Nacional D. Maria II, where he worked with João Pedro Vaz, Tiago Rodrigues and Faustin Linyekula. He was part of shows by Liesbeth Gritter (Kassys), Tonan Quito and Mala Voadora. He debuted as author and co-creator, alongside João Pedro Leal and Eduardo Molina, in "Parlamento Elefante", a project that won the Amélia Rey Colaço scholarship. In...