BWW Reviews: CONTOS EM VIAGEM a Mesmerizing Start to the Iberian Festival at the Kennedy Center

We are in for a truly fascinating month, acquainting ourselves with the culture of the Iberian peninsula-consisting mainly of Spain and Portugal of course, but with visits to the cultures these nations have inspired the world over. The colonial legacy, complex though it may be, can still create some fine art; and that's what we were able to witness with Teatro Meridionale's Contos em Viagem-Cabo Verde.

Teatro Meridionale is what we might call grassroots theatre, devoted to locally-produced and locally-focused productions on a Spartan budget. Itinerant by design, they travel to local communities throughout Portugal and its former colonies; but instead of giving the locals a taste of 'real' culture from the capital of Lisbon, they look for ways to perform local stories, in a language the locals can instantly connect with. They are not cultural ambassadors, so much as cultural explorers and curators.

Set in the 10-island archipelago of Cape Verde, Contos em Viagem is a tapestry of stories woven from a broad range of writers native to this former Portugese colony. Selected by the company's dramaturg Natália Luiza and performed in a combination of Portugese and the local creole dialect, this one-woman show celebrates the literary movement known as Claridade which, beginning in the early 20th century, insisted on writers from Cape Verde using their own voices and their own language to tell their stories. Claridade formed the cultural front in Cape Verde's struggle independence-unlike many other European powers, Portugal tried to hold onto their colonies until well into the 1970's.

The stories chosen here, and performed passionately by Carla Galvão, are taken from the lives of women in the islands, among them kids recalling the creepiness of a death in the family and, most memorably for me, a teenage girl begging her mother to go to a dance, with predictable results. The performance style here is part theatre, and part storytelling, live music and a touch of ritual thrown in. Galvão begins in darkness, to the sound of waves and then sifting grain, repeating the Lord's Prayer as a kind of incantation while director Miguel Seabra's lights slowly rise on the stage. The setting, designed by Marta Carreiras, is evocative of a small-town seaport with mooring and bric-a-brac stacked here and there, and sea-like blue cellophane lining the floor.

Galvão is accompanied throughout by composer Fernando Mota, who matches her word for word, gesture for gesture, on a variety of traditional and 'found' instruments, everything from a guitar to a PVC pipe blown through water. Their collaboration alone is worth whatever it takes to see this show, and although this production has been in Teatro Meridionale's repertory for years you get that delicious scent of improvisation, of a truly live collaboration between artists. The audience is not forgotten either, because when Galvão is not regaling us with her tales from the islands she leads us in a sing-along of one of the late Caesaria Evoria's most famous ballads, "Saudade." Fans of Evoria's music would delight especially in this evening of theatre, because it gives such a vivid picture of the many stories behind her songs.

Production Photo: Carla Galvão (foreground) with Fernando Mota. Photo by

Performances for the Iberian Suite: Global Arts Remix take place March3-24 at the Kennedy Center in Washington, D.C. For tickets and more information, visit:

http://www.kennedy-center.org/iberia