Dialogues












In Memory of Memory

2024


EP. 12 "Inherit the Empire" with Zia Soares

26.01.2024       


Zia Soares is a director and actress and was one of the founders of the Teatro Griot , a company she directed for more than ten years. The work of Zia and the company, a pioneer in the context of performing arts in Portugal, became, among others, a space of transgression and criticism, where it reflects on the exclusion of racialized people, black bodies and the selectivity of History, which makes certain discourses and narratives invisible. Faz escuro nos olhos, Os negros, O riso dos necrófagos, e Uma dança das florestas are some of the shows that have been produced and premiered throughout the company's history.

In today's In Memory of Memory, family history and biographical elements intertwine with aspects of public memory and collective responsibility.

Directed by Inês Nascimento Rodrigues, sound editing by José Gomes and graphic image by Márcio de Carvalho. The songs in this episode are original by Xullaji for the shows FANUN RUIN and O Riso dos Necrófágos (courtesy of the artists). Indicator: voice by Rui Cruzeiro and original music by XEXA.

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Teatra

2023


D. Maria II National Theater Podcast

Interview with Zia Soares

by Mariana Oliveira
20.06.2023


"I can't create anything if there are no conflicts, if there are no contradictions."

Mariana Oliveira welcomes at #TEATRA Zia Soares, actress and director, who recently created the show 'Pérola sem rapariga / Pearl Without a Girl', together with the writer Djaimilia Pereira de Almeida, as part of D. Maria II Theater 's National Odyssey.

The conversation with Mariana Oliveira starts with the construction of this show and travels to the beginning of Zia Soares' career, going through her relationship with dance, the founding of Teatro Griot and some of the shows that marked her journey.


RTCP Conference

2023


Mediation and Participation

Portalegre Performing Arts Center

7.11.2023
11.40am 


Speakers: Manuela Ralha (Municipality of Vila Franca de Xira), Raquel Ribeiro dos Santos (Culturgest), Teresa Garcia (OS Filhos de Lumière), Zia Soares (Teatro Griot)

Moderator: Clara Antunes (Artemrede)


What do we think about when we associate participation and cultural programming?

Involve the community in the cultural proposal of a theater and a territory. Discuss the starting point, the path we propose and the necessary commitment to get there.



Myths, mythologies, fiction and identity

2023


Sines Arts Center

17.11.2023

With Zia Soares and Luís Trindade

Moderation: Tiago Bartolomeu Costa
During the presentation period of the exhibition ""Quem és tu? – Um Teatro Nacional a olhar para o país", reflections are made on historical and political dimensions based on the themes that constructed the exhibition: identity, collectives, memory, territory, belonging, resistance are keywords and starting points for dialogues where theater is the possibility of highlighting what we take for granted and what we have inherited from the recent past.

Partnership Commemorative Commission for the 50th anniversary of the 25th of April, National Theater and Dance Museum



Era o que faltava

2021


SEASON 2
Rádio Comercial
19.04.2021

Conversation between Rui Maria Pêgo, Ana Martins and Zia Soares
Born in Bié, Angola, she is one of the founding actresses of Teatro Praga, and she is also artistic director and actress of Teatro GRIOT, a company of black actors dedicated to exploring the identity between African and European.

Memory and Oblivion, Transgression, Language, Intersectional Spaces and the Other are structuring concepts of the company, which premieres on the 20th at Culturgest a show with a great title to say on the radio: O Riso dos Necrófagos / The Laughter of the Scavengers.

“The world I live in is still out of adjustment because I am a woman, because I am a black woman and then because I am an artist. All these accumulations within me make the world in which I live even more maladjusted, because being black in a white country is a very particular condition, and being a black woman is an even more particular condition, and being a black woman, artist, director of a theater company is a really particular situation”, says Zia Soares.

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To Be Abyss

2022


Listening to Zia Soares

by Djaimilia Pereira de Almeida

São Luiz Theater Magazine nº4

January - March 2022

“It’s very contradictory, because while I regret the absence of a register”, of a systematic history of our presence in the performing arts in Portugal, “I also like the idea of this dispersed archive.” Who organizes the archive? Who decides what goes in and out of it? “Maybe your body — woman, black, actress, director, reader — is an archive”, I say to Zia.

And if so? If Zia's black body contains what she saw and experienced on stage and as a spectator, in the position of reader and performer, if her body, her skin, flesh, movement and spirit are a living and restless vault of what she saw and celebrated and learned on stage, in the audience, in life? And if that's the case of each of the black performers whose history doesn't tell, if each of their bodies is a walking archive of this unwritten history?




Para ser abismo


"It is in the gaping space of history that I am interested in creating"

2022


Jornal Angolano de Artes e Letras

Interview with Zia Soares

by Matadi Makola
30.03.2022


World Theater Day, celebrated on March 27th, was the reason for this interview with director and actress Zia Sores, first black woman artistic director of a theater company in Portugal. Zia Soares is Angolan, born in Bié, 49 years ago. “I have 3 memories: the smell of guavas, my grandmother Mangui’s voice and the clothes I was wearing on the day we left to Portugal”, where she arrived at the age of 2. In this interview, Zia Soares goes through various moments in her career.


Jornal Angolano de Artes e Letras, 2022 - Diálogo Intercultural



Jornadas 40 anos de Teatro
Painel 4 - As Minorias e o Teatro

2022


Quinta da Caverneira | 12.05.2022
2.30pm

Com Flávio Hamilton, Zia Soares, Marta Lança, Francesca Negro, Vanesa Sotelo e Maria João Vaz
 A propósito das celebrações dos 40 anos do Teatro Art’Imagem, a companhia abre as suas portas, durante três dias, a uma reflexão sobre o teatro em Portugal nas últimas quatro décadas. Propomos, deste modo, um espaço de pensamento entre fazedores de teatro (investigadores, profissionais de teatro de relevância e de áreas que se cruzam com as artes de palco), de atualização e visão para o futuro das artes cénicas, contando, para isso, com o contributo de quatro painéis que refletem temáticas fundamentais na evolução do teatro no nosso país. Este espaço, também aberto à comunidade, será um convite para um diálogo crítico e mais alargado sobre a arte teatral, porque o teatro é o mundo e somos todos nós.


About love and prejudice 

2022


Joaquim Benite Municipal Theater 19.11.2022
6pm - Conversations with the Public

With Cláudia Lucas Chéu, Zia Soares

Moderation: Manuel Halpern
Starting from the film Fear Eats the Soul, by Fassbinder, which inspired the CTA show, "O medo devora a alma", directed by Rogério de Carvalho, the director and actress Zia Soares and the director Cláudia Lucas Chéu will talk about love and prejudice, moderated by film critic Manuel Halpern.



Which Rite Between Life And Death?

2021


Culturgest | 2021

Raquel Lima, Zia Soares [ONLINE]

Are the tchiloli processions, imbued with chaos and trance, or the African spiritual ceremonies, the point of balance between denouncement and celebration? When considering art from a decolonial outlook, we contemplate memory and counter-memory, but finding the balance may turn out to be the ultimate challenge.

Zia Soares, actress, director and artistic director of Teatro Griot, and Raquel Lima artist and researcher discuss matters arising from O Riso dos Necrófagos. How do bodies express themselves within a cast as diverse as the one in this show? What role does Teatro Griot play in the dawn of a new theatre, one which is co-created but not hostage of a script? How may the company’s journey reshape the artists’ and ‘public’s perceptions so that they might embrace these tensions?



Transoceanic Conversations

2021


Cena Contemporanea – Brasília International Theater Festival

07.07.2021
5pm (Brasília) 9pm (Portugal)


With Edna Jaime (Mozambique), Zia Soares (Angola-Portugal), Chico Diaz (Brazil), Patrícia Portela (Portugal)

Mediation: Gonçalo Amorim (Portugal)

Opening speech: Guilherme Reis (Cena Contemporânea) and Alexandra Pinho (Camões - Portuguese Cultural Center in Brasília)

A dialogue about Brazil's cultural relationship with Portugal and Portuguese-speaking African countries from a poetic and artistic perspective. The meeting proposes a debate between the artists and will develop between history, limits, cures, contemporary and the Portuguese language, stimulating cultural and poetic reflections on the present, past and future of these relationships.




The place of bones: science, art and the legacies of colonial violence

2021


Science Museum - University of Coimbra

18.10.2021
3pm 

Speakers: Bruno Sena Martins, Zia Soares, Reddy Wilson Lima and Patrícia Ferraz de Matos



This roundtable takes place within the project "O riso dos necrófagos / The laughter of scavengers” which develops from the events of the Trindade War / Batepá Massacre that took place in São Tomé and Príncipe in February 1953. Directed by Zia Soares and co-produced by Teatro GRIOT/Culturgest, this project has the partnership of CES through the Popular University Commitment and Art (UPEA-CES).

In this context, the roundtable "The Place of the Bones" aims to think, on the one hand, about the historical role of the University as a support and repository of the structures of colonial violence and racial discrimination. On the other hand, it intends to look at the horizons of possibility for a decolonisation of knowledge that, by combining art and science, confronts today the imperatives of historical justice and dignity of racialised populations.

Organisers: UPEA-CES, Teatro Griot and Doctoral Programme "Human Rights in Contemporary Societies"

LINK




Panaphrotopias: Afro Contemporary Practices Of Emancipatory Imagination; Theater, Music And Martial Arts

2020


Passa Sabi Association, Bairro do Rego 04.04.2020
6.30pm 

With Felwine Sarr, Marcus Veiga aka Scúru Fitchadú, Zia Soares

Mediation: Nina Vigon Manso
Imagination and imagery as spaces/powers of creation allow thinking and sentient bodies-spirits to revolutionize their own corporeal and material existence. Convinced of this and, rescuing the appeal of Amadou-Mahtar M'Bow (1978), this V Konfirensia Panafrikanu di Lisboa, invites artists, writers, singers, dancers and martial arts practitioners, to share their knowledge and to show that people also need to exist in the imaginary.



Ways of Occupying
Fingers in the wound, hands in the culture

2020


Porto Municipal Theatre, Small Auditorium 
20.09.2020
7pm

Curatorship and moderation by Pedro Santos Guerreiro

With Marta Martins, Paulo Brandão, Pedro Quintela, Rui Moreira, Teresa Coutinho, Zia Soares
The pandemic has exposed everything. What we didn’t have and what we will always have, what we can aim for and what we want to target. The crisis has multiplied the questions but has not multiplied the answers. What follows in Culture and the Arts, in the conditions of its professionals, in the space for creators and for divergent thinking, in the articulation of central, local and private power, in institutions and independent companies, in access to culture by viewers? Come and put your finger on the wound.
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Memoirs
Post-memory constellations in post-colonial europe

2021


Representing memory

Culturgest | 04.11.2021 3.30pm
With Katia Kameli (visual artist), Aimé Mpane (visual artist), Paulo Faria (writer), Zia Soares (actress and theater director), António Pinto Ribeiro (CES-UC and cultural programmer)

Moderation: Vitor Belanciano

Memoirs – Children of Empires and European Postmemories, a pioneering project in the development of research into the impact of colonial legacies on the following generations in Portugal, France and Belgium, is now presenting its results. The questioning of these legacies is diversifying the European debate, renewing European literature and art, museography and curatorship and strengthening and diversifying the forms of individual and collective intervention.


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