“Without a long-term partner like the Maria Matos Theater and with São Luiz celebrating 125 years, this entire edition of FIMFA was a huge challenge for us as programmers”. Luís Vieira and Rute Ribeiro, directors of the Tarumba-Teatro de Marionetas, underline this conjuncture to explain much of what is the programming behind this edition of the most important puppet festival in Lisbon, which, almost celebrating 20 years, relies heavily on street shows, especially in Castelo de São Jorgea place that will be the stage of “an almost mini-festival” that will “have proposals that have never been possible to present at the festival”.

Another great offer of this edition is a complete “radical programming”, in the words of the couple, especially reserved for families. Lisbon now has a theater for children and a youth audience, the LU.CA – Luís de Camões Theater, and this opportunity could not be lost.

On the fringes of these axes, we challenged Luis Vieira and Rute Ribeiro to make the difficult choice of six spectacles considered as absolutely not to be missed in this 19th edition.

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Hans Christian, you must be an angel

Teatret Gruppe 38 (Denmark)

Teatro do Bairro, 10th to 12th May

A memory of Hans Christian Andersen. The audience will be greeted by two butlers and experience all the magic that 20 characters created by the Danish author offer around a table. It’s an absolutely stunning show… Certainly, Hans Christian himself would be fascinated if he could watch it.

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Vu

Cie Sacékripa (France)

Teatro Taborda, 10th to 12th May

It is almost a spectacle of a new miniature circus. Wordless, with lumps of sugar, a coffee machine or a cup of tea, Etienne Manceau will make us think about our lives, about our daily lives. A true gem in the programming of FIMFA.

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Portraits in Motion

Volker Gerling (Germany)

Teatro do Bairro, 14th and 15th June

Gerling is a German director and photographer who fell in love with flipbooks. The genesis of this show is in his itinerant journey through Germany, which the artist traveled furnished with flipbooks with his own photographs, which he showed as if it was an itinerant exhibition. From here, he has been photographing people and listening to stories, reproducing many of them in this award winning show that will make us laugh but also stir emotions.

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Chambre Noir

Plexus Polaire (France/Norway)

Teatro do Bairro, 17th to 19th May

The work of the Plexus Polaire and its creator Yngvild Aspeli has been closely followed by us in recent years. On this return to FIMFA, Aspeli uses human-size puppets, video and live music to tell the story of Valerie Jean Solanas, the woman who tried to kill Andy Warhol. It’s an amazing show, one of those which we can’t miss because of the way it speaks to us, capable of transporting viewers to the golden years of Factory, Warhol’s studio in Manhattan.

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A Filha do Tambor-Mor

Operetta by Jacques Offenbach (Portugal)

São Luiz Teatro Municipal, 22nd to 25th May

This great production of São Luiz gives us a particular pride, since A Tarumba takes in the set design and the puppets. It is the comic operetta that inaugurated the Theater 125 years ago, and on the account of it we formed a team of collaborators, specialists in the most diverse areas. On stage there will be an almost full size donkey, Martin; an order box animated by dancers; Italian period paintings that come to life; and even a madonna coming down from the pulpit, and… it’s better if we don’t reveal anything else! In short, an entertaining operetta with well-defined “marionette” outlines.

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Vies de Papier

La Bande Passante (France)

São Luiz Teatro Municipal, 25th and 26th May

It is a kind of documentary object theater. The authors bought a photo album at a flea market and decided to look for the stories of the people portrayed there. The interest about the family’s journey back to the days of Nazism leads them to a work of theater archeology where research will confront the “investigators” themselves with their personal and family lives. It is an exciting journey, a fantastic trip to a world of others that is, inevitably, ours too.

Sophia de Mello Breyner Andresen was one of the greatest names of 20th-century Portuguese language poetry, cultivating, according to António José Saraiva and Óscar Lopes, “through classic Mediterranean images, the identification of the eternal with human reality and its aspirations to justice.” The remains of the writer rest in Panteão Nacional (Portugal’s ‘National Pantheon’), not far from the house where she lived, on Travessa das Monicas no. 57, just a few steps from Graça Lookout, which is now named after her and features her bronze bust, carved by sculptor António Duarte. Reality confirms Sophia’s verses: “Even if I die the poem will find / A beach where to break its waves.”

Throughout the year the Sophia de Mello Breyner Andresen Centennial Committee, headquartered at Centro Nacional de Cultura, offers a rich program to celebrate the centenary of the birth of this “great poetess and exemplary moral, civic and cultural figure who inspires, awakens, challenges and renews us,” as the Manifesto endorsed by the Committee reads.

The program before summer includes: an evocation of Sophia at the Palácio de São Bento Gardens on the occasion of the April 25 Revolution commemorations; an afternoon of debates followed by the reading of Sophia’s poems on Fernando Pessoa (April 30 at 3 pm in Museu de Lisboa – Palácio Pimenta); an exhibition of Vieira da Silva and Arpad Szenes’ works in Sophia’s private collection, to be held at the artists’ Museum/Foundation in Largo das Amoreiras; a two-day conference at Fundação Calouste Gulbenkian, featuring the greatest Portuguese and foreign experts on Sophia’s work (May 16-17); and a concert by Orquestra Sinfónica Juvenil which will include the premiere of a Christopher Bochmann piece for choir and orchestra based on a poem by Sophia.

For more details about the commemoration program, visit the Sophia de Mello Breyner Andresen Centennial website .

If you’re a fan of “heavy music,” Restelo Stadium will host, in early July, VOA – Heavy Rock Festival, headlined by Slipknot on July 4 and by Slayer on the following night.

One of the year’s major music festivals – NOS Alive– will also be held in July, at Passeio Marítimo de Algés. There are lots of big names and it’s hard not to get excited about the line-up. British band The Cure will set the bar high on the first night (July 11). Portuguese outfits Ornatos Violeta and Linda Martini will also perform on that day. Vampire Weekend are the headliners on July 12, and The Smashing Pumpkins, The Chemical Brothers and Thom Yorke will close the festival with a bang on the last day.

This year, from July 18 to 20, Super Bock Super Rock will return to Meco. The first day features Lana del Rey but also the controversial Conan Osiris. On July 19 you can see Phoenix or Charlotte Gainsbourg, while Janelle Monae and Rubel are the headliners for the last day.

Still in July, Cascais hosts EDP Cool Jazz, to be held from July 9 to 31. The lineup consists of mostly jazz-related names – such as Jamie Cullum, Diana Krall or Jacob Collier – but also includes shows by The Roots, Tom Jones, Jessie J and Kraftwerk, as well as Portuguese outfits HMB and Best Youth. Another edition of Sol da Caparicahas also been confirmed, but the dates and artists are yet to be announced.

For a more urban experience, Lisbon will host, as usual, another edition of Jazz em Agosto at Gulbenkian, Jazz im Goethe Garten at the Goethe-Institut, or Somersby Out Jazz, which brings good music to various parks across the city.

With a world premiere scheduled for the Espace Cardin in Paris on May 22 of Mary Said What She Said It’s a monologue written by the African-American writer Darryl Pinckney, a recognized author in the theater world for his collaborations with Robert Wilson. In fact, this is an even broader reunion, since the acclaimed French actress Isabelle Huppert will join them more than 20 years after this “glorious” trio brought another monologue to the stage: Orlando, from the Virginia Woolf novel.

As Pinckney himself points out, “the ever inventive Robert Wilson offers to the great Isabelle Huppert the throne of Queen Mary of Scotland, the monarch who, because of her passions, lost her crown.” A three-act play, Mary Said What She Said It’s a story of love, power, and betrayal of a woman who exemplified the irrepressible desire for freedom. Huppert’s talent, therefore, is to be measured to the full extent of her talents.

In a production at the Theater de la Ville (directed by Luso-French Emmanuel Demarcy-Mota), not only does Wilson shine on stage, but the show’s stage set and lighting does as well. It also features original music by the famous composer Ludovico Einaudi and costumes by Jacques Reynaud.

The show is part of the 36th edition of the Almada Festival that runs from July 4 to 18 in Almada and Lisbon. The tickets, as well as the signatures that give access to all the shows at the festival, will go on sale later this month.

“It was not intended as a retrospective, nor did we try to showcase João Onofre’s entire work,” says Delfim Sardo, the curator of Once in a Lifetime [repeat]– an exhibition that brings to Culturgest some of the most significant works of the Lisbon-born artist (1976). One could say that, throughout the exhibition, “the focus is on this limbo of sorts between Romanticism and art history’s major themes, especially love, failure or death, which seems to permeate Onofre’s entire work… All this with undeniable irony.”

The exhibition begins on the outside, at the entrance to Culturgest, with Box, a 1.83m steel cube that hints ata grave’sstandard depth of 6 feet. The piece is a quote of a seminal minimalist sculpture – Tony Smith’s Die (1962) – which Onofre revisits as a soundproof box in which a death metal band (Holocausto Canibal) delivers “an extreme performance”: imprisoned inside, the band plays until the oxygen runs out (the performance will take place again on May 17 at 10.30 pm).

The trilogy O Estúdio [The Studio]also echoes modern and contemporary art history. The three videos are a direct quote of Bruce Nauman, an influential US conceptual artist who used his own studio as the focus of some of his most remarkable works. Nauman believed that “art is what the artist does in his studio,” and Onofre seems to take inspiration from this motto to film – “with a trenchant irony regarding the transfiguring ambition of artistic images” – a female singer performing Sol LeWitt’s ‘conceptual art’ prepositions to the melody of Madonna’s Like A Virgin ; to have an illusionist performing the traditional levitation trick with his partner (again, a Nauman quote); and to release, in the studio itself, a vulture which ends up destroying everything – an ironic take, as the curator points out, on the “necrophagy of the artist’s work.”

Another reference to Nauman, more specifically to his famous Self-Portrait as a Fountain, emerges in Untitled (Luminous Fountain), a self-portrait against the backdrop of Praça do Império’s Luminous Fountain in Belém.

Movies are another source of quotes in Onofre’s career. If, on the one hand, the oldest work in this exhibition is a short excerpt from Antonioni’s masterpiece The Eclipse– a looped sequence in which the main characters (Alain Delon and Monica Vitti) play out the seduction game with their hands -,the most recent (and until now unseen) piece consists of a complex two-and-a-half-hour single shot, recalling Godard’s One Plus Oneor Aleksandr Sokurov’s The Russian Ark.

Untitled (zoetrope) is an extremely long take starring a gospel choir,a music quartet and a mixed rugby team, who “stage an endless ritual, to the point of complete exhaustion.” To the sound of I want to know what love is– a pop tune that topped the charts in the 1980s – the rugby players try, one by one, to sing the song’s chorus to a microphone in the middle of the set, surrounded by the musicians and the choir. But they can never finish it, because they are repeatedly tackled by their teammates.

This filmed performance is particularly illustrative of the spirit behind the entire exhibition, which was conceived, as Delfim Sardo points out, “around the importance of circularity and repetition as a creative process” And there is also “the ubiquitousness of the idea of finitude, of lack, failure and error, which are intrinsic to life and, therefore, to artistic creation.” Yet in João Onofre’s work, these experiences are seen through the lens of “an exquisite irony,” making each piece “oscillate between tragedy, comedy and concept.”

Addressing the audience, André Amálio begins by promising a different show from all those he has directed before. “This one is not political. This one is about love,” he says. Then, each of the actors explains how they will express love on stage and announce “their love” – a father, in Júlio Mesquita’s case, or a partner, in Amálio’s case. All this because, to paraphrase Slovenian philosopher Srecko Horvat, “love is revolution.” Always, and in all circumstances, “our revolution.”

But “revolution” is a political concept, isn’t it? “This is a false premise we have decided to adopt, because what we really want is to suggest that all love is political,” Amálio says. Political because, he believes, “all love stories” are political.

It is precisely in this sense that Amores Pós-Coloniais (free translation: Postcolonial Sweethearts) draws from interviews with Colonial War soldiers who had children with black African women during the conflict, followed by memories of white Portuguese women who experienced love stories with African activists (such as Agostinho Neto and Amílcar Cabral) and testimonies of children born from interracial relationships.

However, the patchwork Amálio and his creative/love partner Tereza Havlíčková build goes even further. The overseas empire has fallen and we have been living, since the end of the fascist regime, in a postcolonial society, although thought and behavior are still colonized. It is particularly interesting to listen to the play’s contemporary testimonies, especially those of the black actors (Júlio Mesquita, Laurinda Chiungue and Romi Anauel), all born after the 1974 revolution but still marked by a nefarious 500-year heritage we stubbornly try to hide. After all, Amálio asks us, “what is the most decisive event in the history of this country: the discovery of the maritime route to India or the beginning of colonialism and transatlantic slave trade?”

If, on the one hand, Amores Pós-Coloniais is an openly militant and political indictment, it is also, on the other hand, a show about love. In spite of all the seriousness that hangs in the air when these topics are addressed, it is also a festive experience complemented by music, dance and food. So let us celebrate love – “our revolution,” as the show says at some point. For, as the play implicitly suggests, only love can finish the incomplete decolonization process. Here in Portugal, right now, in 2019.

How did Fado come into your life?

It runs in the family, I have Fado blood running in my veins. I usually say that I don’t even know when it started, because I’ve been going to Fado houses since I was three. I remember listening to Fado records at my aunt’s house, the Fado singer Joana Correia, when I was six or seven. At the age of eight or nine, I started writing the lyrics in a notebook to memorize what my aunt was singing. When I was 13, I participated in the Great Night of Fado contest. I won, and that’s when I was sure that this was what I wanted for my life.

Was your participation in the Great Night of Fado contest a turning point?

People around me have always encouraged me to go on, but yes, that’s when the penny dropped.I knew that was what I really wanted.

You often compare Fado houses with the ritual of going to Mass…

A self-respecting Fado singer must go to Fado houses because that’s where Fado really happens. That’s where we engage with more experienced Fado singers, where we get the inspiration we need when we take to the stage. Moreover, they have a more intimate ambiance, we are closer to the audience. I love being on stage, that’s where I feel like myself. I’m a very anxious person, but when I get on stage my anxiety disappears.

Your debut album has earned a lot of praise from critics. Were you expecting such a warm reaction?

I was sort of expecting good reviews, because I know the work I did. I spent three years working on that album. My goal was to make this album exactly the way it came out, and to send a message to people from my generation who do not listen to Fado. I feel that young people who are now starting their Fado careers have also learned a lot from me, and that’s awesome. That’s what I always wanted, to be considered an influence. I’m only 25 years old, although many people think I’m older…

Do you think this has something to do with the motion that Fado is for older people?

People don’t know what the essence of Fado is, they don’t know it… It’s important that people in this circle, like myself, show some of the history. There is a great deal of ignorance regarding the history of Fado. I often say it wasn’t me who chose to sing Fado, it was Fado that chose me – this is evident in my path. I love singing, but my main goal was to send a message, to trigger people’s curiosity: learn more about Fado because there’s a lot to learn!

Does the fact that Fado is basically a genre with a tradition and an associated ritual drive younger generations away?

I think that distance is due to the image Fado has always had. The black, somber clothes, the long dresses, the sad lyrics… I remember being a girl and some people telling me this kind of music was not suitable for my age. Nowadays, Fado has a much lighter image. The lyrics are more modern, and Fado singers sport a different look… This was a necessary change, but there are lots of traditional elements that should be maintained. I don’t think clothing defines a Fado singer or any other singer. I don’t really care if someone sings in a skirt or in a pair of pants, but there’s a certain degree of thoughtfulness one must have. Each person must have their own identity and their own taste. Fado is in the voice, not in the clothes.

This album features Diogo Clemente and Ângelo Freire, two Fado heavyweights. How did this collaboration come about?

We’ve known each other for a long time, and they kept telling me that when the time came, they would want to make a record with me. I grew up with them by my side. At some point I felt the need to leave something of my own, a record. I think it takes a certain maturity and some experience, not only in Fado but in music in general. You need to have a story to tell other people. I’m 25 years old, I have my whole life ahead of me, but I felt I was ready to make a record. I already have 15 years’ experience in Fado, it was the right time. I mentioned this to Diogo and he also thought the time had come.

You decided to name your first album after yourself. Why?

First of all, because I wanted to present myself as Sara Correia. Then, because these traditional fados are almost like my autobiographies, my life stories. I thought it didn’t make sense to try to find a motto for this album. I am the motto, Sara Correia, just the way I am.

Being compared to Amália is the biggest compliment you can get?

Yes, but it’s also a great responsibility. I don’t like comparisons. I have my idols, just like anyone else. For me, Amália Rodrigues is the essence of Fado, its greatest exponent, I’ve been singing her songs since always. I even recorded a version of Fado Português, which I was hesitant about.

Were you afraid?

I was, because some songs you just can’t improve. What Amália did is perfect, which puts the bar really high. But I thought, ‘Why not?’. I’ve also recorded songs from other Fado singers I admire a lot.

You will showcase this album at Capitólio on February 21. Tell us more about this show.

I’ll be doing new things, I’m preparing a few surprises, but it’s all about singing Fado, of course, because that’s what I know how to do.

What will the future bring?

Right now I’m focused on this album, but I already have some ideas for the next one, because the show must go on… Now I’m focused on promoting this album and giving concerts. I have some concerts scheduled, I’ll perform at Alfama Box again and I’ll be in Norway and Vienna soon… It’s funny how much audiences abroad love Fado. Even though they don’t understand the words, they always ask for the most traditional songs, the most ‘hardcore’ fado.

What is the dream concert hall for a Fado singer?

I have many dreams, but none about a concert hall. My dream is to sing on stage, wherever it is, and whoever the audience is. That’s my dream, being able to sing for other people. Meeting other artists, other musical cultures.

You graduated in sculpture but devoted your life to singing. Looking for an analogy, could we say that opera is like carving out a character on stage through singing and acting?

Yes, we could. It’s also a creative act. Within acting we have an enormous amount of creativity to explore. If there’s something I’ve learned from my past in sculpture and my years in Fine Arts was to create enough tools to feed the imagination which is necessary for opera and concerts. Especially in concerts, because in opera we have a context that helps us, whereas in concerts we’re on our own. We need images and experiences to feed that imagination, and Fine Arts have given me that repertoire of images which is so important for providing context, for putting myself in the shoes of the ‘other’. Basically, for understanding the ‘other’ and myself as well.

Do people still tend to value opera singers for their vocal qualities rather than their dramatic talent?

Since quite a few years ago, opera stage directors have been playing a greater role in choosing the cast, and singers are now required to have, in addition to the voice, a strong stage presence and know how to embody the characters. Directors have a great deal of power in finding someone who is cut out for the role, and sometimes they are even willing to make some musical concessions in favor of their character idea.

You have specialized in the Baroque repertoire. Why?

Aesthetically, it is the repertoire with which I identify the most. When I started listening to classical music, I listened to Bach, Haendel. But there was also a chance element, because I started my career with Baroque orchestras and I became more enthusiastic about the repertoire. And there are so many things that have never been done before, so much to be discovered in Baroque music. And starting from an almost virgin repertoire allows for greater creativity, less burdened with references. The Baroque repertoire offers a freedom that cannot be found in other styles, and I like the task of completing an unfinished score, one that gives us room to choose an approach and even select the instruments we play.

In the preface to Alceste, Gluck wanted to reform opera by turning it into a true musical drama. What did this renewal consist of?

It was about composing music in accordance with poetry, with the text. Without resorting to artifice, breaking away from some of the Baroque repertoire’s predictable structures and from some indulgence and virtuosity on the part of singers. Gluck wanted to abolish excesses in favor of a pure approach that would cut straight to emotions. Singing Gluck requires a purity of the vocal line and a lyricism which the Baroque repertoire doesn’t have.

Tell us about Alceste, the character you will play. How would you define her?

Alceste is a woman who sacrifices herself for her husband. Because of the weight of Alceste interpretations in the 1950s and 1960s, I had imagined a determined and strong heroine who exalts her courage and takes her fate in her own hands. But when I started reading the libretto, I realized that the character is more than a rigid statue. I perceive her as an anti-heroine. Someone who is not a heroine by nature, but who does what she must and believes she is right. She chooses to sacrifice herself as the last resort. After all – and this is very clear in the score -, she is a character who is always wavering between fear and courage. This is what humanizes her and pushes her forward. Deep down, she is a character with a certain fragility, despite all her strength and determination.

What challenges does this role present?

It’s a very tense role. This is an emotionally strong character, and the challenge is to find the perfect balance between acting and singing.

You have played Despina and said you would like to play Mozart’s Suzana. These are light roles that require great liveliness. Do they reflect to another facet of your personality?

Yes. Although I feel very close to Alceste and my personality allows me to approach this kind of drama, I have always played agile, lively, spicy, young roles. These are the roles I usually get. Alceste is not the kind of role I have the opportunity to play every day.

What would you highlight in this new staging by Graham Vick?

The way he biulds the character. I was persuaded to play the role because he believed I could do it, which is not evident for my kind of voice. His idea of Alceste as someone who is not necessarily strong, with a fragile and vulnerable side, is what interests me the most, and it coincides with my own vision.

How would you convince someone who has never been to the opera to come see Alceste?

To watch an opera you must be willing to accept this type of language. And in the case of Alceste, to accept the experience of coexisting with a theatrically powerful character. Then you need curiosity, because sacrifice is not a very common subject from this perspective. But Gluck’s music cuts straight to emotions, which makes this a very moving opera. At the end of the day, this is what we expect when we go to a show – to feel and experience emotions. This is, in and of itself, a valid reason to come and see this Alceste..

LOUIE LOUIE (Escadinhas do Santo Espírito da Pedreira 3)

The Lisbon store opened in 2007. But the Louie Louie already existed in Porto. Jorge Dias was a partner in this store and also had a share in Carbono. Louie Louie is considered an alternative to megastores. Vinyl became a salvation for this kind of stores. The substantial increase in tourism in Lisbon as well. Foreigners buy more, even if in amounts that take into account the return journey. Jorge Dias distinguishes three types of customers: the ones who only buy new discs, the ones who only buy used ones, and the ones that look for a particular disc and don’t care if it is new or used. As we talked, Homogenic by Björk and the first album of Caetano Veloso played in the store. From the music released in 2018, the store recommends Thom Yorke’s soundtrack for the remake of Suspiria and the easy going surf-pop of Khruangbin (Com Todo el Mundo).

FLUR (Avenida Infante D. Henrique, Armazém B, loja 4)

Flur exists since 2001 and maintains the same address near the Lux Frágil nightclub. The store values the familiarity it has created with its customers who never traded purchasing records at Flur for online shopping. Flur also has a website that works mainly as a storefront and that, along with the weekly newsletter, is the only promotion they make. Vinyl record sales represent twice the amount of CD sales. New ones also cost roughly twice as much. The music being played in the store at that moment belonged to the album Izlamic Songs, by Muslimgauze. When choosing important albums released in 2018, Zé Moura, manager of Flur, referred the album Belzebu, by Telectu, and Taipei Disco, with exclusives by the DWART project, both from the Holuzam label, a very recent publisher owned by Flur’s three current partners.

VINIL EXPERIENCE (Rua do Loreto 65)

The place matches the description of a mezzanine: “a floor, usually with low-ceiling, located between the store or ground floor and the first floor.” In practice it is as if José João (Jota) received us in a room in his own house. The records are somewhat organized but it is certain that only the manager can locate a specific record. They are closed two days a week (Tuesdays and Wednesdays), as well as on Sundays. During the conversation, we listened to a Jimi Hendrix tribute band, The Purple Fox, and the modern psychedelic band King Gizzard & the Lizard Wizard. Jota also feathered his own nest when choosing a recent record that left a mark on him: it was the EP 909DemocrashDrug by Portuguese band Democrash, which is a shared edition by Raging Planet and Vinil Experience.

GLAM-O-RAMA (Rua do Viriato 12)

Glam-O-Rama was Luís Lamelas’ gateway to Lisbon. 4 years ago that became reality. A short time ago, he was able to negotiate a realistic rent value with the owner and Glam-O-Rama moved to where VGM once was. The store also promotes record presentations, autograph sessions and acoustic concerts. We talked to him as he was starting to work and the store was silent. Moments later, the instrumental surf-rock of Head Shrinkin ‘Fun by The Bomboras could be heard. Glam-O-Rama’s profits approximately the same from CD and vinyl; used CDs are gaining some ground because they are cheaper. The conversation ends with the re-edition of the album A Wind of Knives by Zygote, an important record among the many that Luís Lamelas has recently heard.

CARBONO (Rua do Telhal 6B)

Carbono was the first used record store to emerge in Portugal, in 1993. What immediately impresses those who enter Rua do Telhal’s place is its size. We can walk around at will although we are surrounded by records at each corner and in the center of the store. And there is more material to see and buy on the ground floor. According to the person in charge of Carbono, vinyl has come into fashion. Individuals who keep good editions do not want to sell them and the market is increasingly full of re-editions that do not have the same value. He also tells us that all stores normally sell more CDs than vinyl. The price is a decisive factor. The music that was heard belonged to the “bootleg” With your host Bob Dylan 2007/2008. The 2018 album that João Moreira chose for us was Knock Knock, by DJ Koze.

TABATÔ (Rua Andrade 8A)

To get in the Crew Hassan Cooperative you have to descend a few steps and then you are at Tabatô. The man responsible is Frenchman Bastien who visited Portugal in 2010, to do some work as a DJ (world music, reggae), and came back to stay. The store opened in 2015. Customers are looking for rare records, African music from the PALOP (African countries with Portuguese as their official language), and receives many people from France, Germany and the Netherlands. Tabatô closes on weekends and this may explain why Mondays and Fridays are the days of greatest affluence. When we spoke with Bastien the store was minutes away from opening and music came from upstairs, where a radio played The War on Drugs. Bastien chose for us, amongst his most recent discoveries, the albums The Rule of Fire, by Luís Cília, and the very rare maxi-single from Cape Verdean Cruz Pinto (funaná).

DISCOLECÇÃO (Calçada do Duque 53)

After staying in three other spaces of the city, the Discolecção is now at Calçada do Duque. The space was full. We listened at a good volume to The Bracknell Connection, by Stan Tracey Octet, British jazz of the 1970s. Vítor has always had exclusively vinyl, but now we can find in a noble area of Discolecção dozens of CDs that in no way diverge from the general criterion. It is increasingly difficult to find material of this quality from individuals. Vítor continues to attend the Utrecht fair, stating that it’s the biggest and most important one for this market. He relies on the displayed items, the surprise effect and the ability to bring past recollections to those who pass by and purchase. He chooses from the most recent things that surprised him, A Meditation Mass (1974) by the German group Yatha Sidra, and Your Daily Gift (1971) by the Danes Savage Rose. Both in the genre that Vítor Nunes most appreciates, classic rock and its variants.

Seaside scenes on Levante beaches, fishermen in the coastal area of Valencia or children and young people in summer jousting are some of the most striking images of the work of Joaquín Sorolla y Bastida (Valencia, 1863 – Cercedilla, 1923). In part, those are the ones which earned him fame and popularity in life, but also a notorious indifference, and even historical and critical irrelevance, for decades. In Portugal, as António Filipe Pimentel and José Alberto Seabra Carvalho point out in the review included in the catalog of the present exhibition, Sorolla was practically ignored by the historiography of the art, having been the object of “a simplistic and stereotyped interpretation of his work to the point that many understood him as a kind of Spanish Malhoa. ”

The director and the deputy director of Museu Nacional de Arte Antiga (MNAA) consider that the Valencian was “a great painter, modern in his time although not ‘avant-garde,’ innovative but committed to the masters of the past.” For this reason, he is essential for the understanding of “the finissecular painting of the nineteenth century and the first decades of the twentieth century, without obeying the official and academic narratives that, so to speak, move from Impressionism and Post Impressionism to Cubism or Modernism as if between them there had been nothing but a desert.”

The commissioner of Terra Adentro – Spain of Joaquín Sorolla, Carmen Pena, explicitly explains, as a cause for so many misunderstandings and prejudices regarding the work of “luminaries” such as Sorolla, the fact that the art historiography of the last century privileged the Impressionists, “considered avant-garde painters of the nineteenth century.” After all, it was these “contemporaries” that held “a hegemonic role in this narrative, which privileged avant-garde phenomena as an explanatory process of contemporary art.”

Not being therefore avant-gardist, what is so “modern” in Sorolla’s work, and how did the painter recover a prominent place internationally in the historiography of art (a place which the Spaniards never refused him)? Carmen Pena justifies this with the “officialization” of the avant-gardes, who went from “transgressors to canonical models,” and with this helped to highlight in the art history of the last century some of these so-called “modern integrated”, that is, painters “of their time,” trained in the national schools, including Sorolla, who made frisson at the great halls of Paris and at the universal exhibitions.

The “modern” in the work of the Valencian painter is emphasized in what Pena considers the “common denominator of his work”: “to capture the endless and changing effects of light outdoors in the context of modern color physics and as an experimental application” and thereby “to achieve modern light effects” which will not be at all strange to the “new” art of photography to which he was particularly attentive. Indeed, just as his luminist and Impressionist contemporaries, like Degas or Monet, in landscape painting.

It is precisely the other Sorolla, the “introspective” one, the one from Terra Adentro, as if contrasting with the “solar” Sorolla of the Mediterranean beaches, that affirms the genius of a “modern”. According to Román Casares, of the Museo Sorolla Foundation, it was “in the Spanish landscapes of the interior, sometimes naked, severe, imposing” that the painter discovered “other reasons for his paintings and other reasons to perceive his country.”

In this magnificent exhibition of the MNAA, the visitor can witness the two sides of Sorolla: that of the “optimistic and luminous” realist whom so many know; and the one that still remains almost unknown – that of the solitary landscapes of a dreamed Spain, demonstrating, as Carmen Pena points out, the “Spanish regenerative thought of its time” which sought through painting new “identity icons.” The latter was, of course, a great revelation.

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