Diego Bragà in residency at Espaço Alkantara

We at the Nightclub Suffer Together

ALKANARA - Diego Bragà is in the center of the photograph, looking directly into the lens, with arms hanging by their side. They are dressed in a long, shiny black coat, reaching down to their bare feet buried in the sand. In the background, the horizon line and the evening sky, fading from orange to purple. - ©Rui Palma — @ Rui Palma

24.03 — 30.03 2025

Broken hearts, Latin Americans, African Americans, and immigrants pulsed in a loop during the disco era of the 1970s. They all died. This is war. Miss Universe takes refuge in a bunker that was once a disco —in the height of fascism— in Copacabana, where she encounters gay ghosts. From a real archive —her uncle Richard Wagner’s— merging into fiction, WE AT THE NIGHTCLUB SUFFER TOGETHER is a hyper-pOPERA where the bunker becomes a ghostly, utopian disco, reinterpreting homoerotic themes through an androgynous transfeminist lens.

WE AT THE NIGHTCLUB SUFFER TOGETHER is a utopian and ghostly opera for the dance of our ghost-archives and an empowerment of queer ancestral survival tools. It’s a theatrical, operatic gesture, born from a love note received in a nightclub in the ‘70s, to embrace suffering and to usher in a beautiful future ahead.

— Diego Bragà

With this project, Diego Bragà was one of the artists selected for CommonLAB 2024, and later took part in an artistic residency at Moussem Nomadic Arts Centre in Brussels as part of our annual exchange program. Diego is also participating in TalentLAB 2025 in Luxembourg. We at the Nightclub Suffer Together is now one of three projects in development produced by Alkantara in 2025.

Credits

Staging, Libretto & Composition Diego Bragà Performers Diego Bragà, TBA Musical Direction, Soundscape Nico Spinoza Musical Production Pedro Joaquim Borges Hypeer-Pop Electronics & Beats Diana XL Choreographic support/ Movement dramaturg Tânia Carvalho Light design Rui Monteiro Produced by Alkantara Residency support TalentLAB 2025 Support for creation OPART, E.P.E./Estúdios Victor Córdon Co-production Alkantara, Théâtre National Wallonie-Bruxelles, MC93 With support from Common Stories/Creative Europe, Bolsa de Criação O Espaço do Tempo with the support of BPI and the "la Caixa" Foundation | 2024

Diego Bragà

Diego Bragà (she/they) is a technical and intuitive trans non-binary Luso-Brazilian artist-theatre-maker, filmmaker, composer and dramaturg – born in Belo Horizonte (BR) and based in Lisbon (PT). Diego is currently one of the emerging artists selected for Common Stories - Common LAB - to explore the shifting notions of diversity in a changing European society. In 2021, through an autobiographical film, she received the fellowship for young filmmakers from the Sundance Institute and her film “Think About The Beautiful Future Ahead” and can be seen in the Op-Docs...