O Começo Perdido: Mixtape #1

Lusobourger is a word. In the 1960s, the Portuguese migratory exodus created an “exclave” in Luxembourg that currently amounts to roughly one-sixth of the Grand Duchy’s population. Now, Lusodescendant playwright and stage director Pedro Martins Beja takes us back home and to the past, by means of a mixtape. In this recording of memories, Portugal is not so much a real, historical place as it is childhood’s distant country, imagined through words and sounds. A sound spectre made up of memories of fado heard through a fuzzy radio and TV commercials, pig-slaughter feasts and tales of werewolves and witchery – such is the incoherent line-up of a tape that is shared by old and young, by the ones who left and the ones who stayed. In *O Começo Perdido: Mixtape #1 [The Lost Beginning: Mixtape #1]*bold text, we hear the fulfilled dreams and shattered illusions of a country that lives outside its borders. Here, Pedro Martins Beja will dive not only into his old mixtapes, but also into the ones belonging to the members of a cast that combines Portuguese and Lusobourger actors.

After Castro’s 2021 tour of Luxembourg, the present show continues the Teatro Nacional São João - Théâtre National du Luxembourg cooperation programme.