Teatro do Vestido is a theater collective founded in 2001, whose first play, Tua, premiered at Galeria Zé dos Bois. Its work is based on writing original dramatic texts, seeking alternative performance spaces, observing reality, ethnographic research, and oral history as its main working methodologies. The company constantly seeks new ways to create autobiographical, political, engaged, and poetic theater through collaborative processes, under the artistic direction of Joana Craveiro. The company’s permanent team consists of Alaíde Costa, Estêvão Antunes, Francisco Madureira, Leocádia Silva, Maria Inês Augusto, and Tânia Guerreiro.
Ethical, social, and pedagogical dimensions have been part of the company since its formation in 2001 and have been expressed in the multiple projects developed over more than 20 years of activity. The company has always worked with the theme of memory and its relationship with society and with each person’s life, making its theater a mixture of autobiography and deep reflection on the surrounding reality. The company has been trying to redefine the practice of political and documentary theater today. The poetics of cities, of vacant spaces, of spaces of passage and transformation; the attentive and engaged observation of everyday life; fieldwork, the collection of memories and life stories; historical memory, and the creation of various communities in the company’s wake—all these aspects are the methodological and artistic hallmark of Teatro do Vestido’s work. Recognizing this, the Portuguese Association of Theater Critics described Teatro do Vestido in 2012 as having “an activity open to all forms of art, attentive to all citizens and curious about everything that happens in the world in which people live.”

Joana Craveiro is a playwright, director, actress, teacher, anthropologist, and documentary filmmaker. She is the artistic director of Teatro Vestido (which she co-founded in 2001) and coordinator of the Theater Degree at the School of Arts and Design, Caldas da Rainha. She holds a PhD from Roehampton University, London. Her creative methods are largely based on ethnographic practices and oral history. The relationship between historical events and their representations in the present, as well as the collection of memories and life stories, and the poetic and affective cartographies of cities are some of the issues she has been working on and researching. She develops a creative and combative pedagogy that helps to imagine a world free of totalitarianism, xenophobia, misogyny, and structural racism. Her theater is political, documentary, and poetic. She is a member of the European playwrights’ network, Fabula Mundi, and an associate researcher at the Institute of Contemporary History at Universidade Nova de Lisboa (IHC/NOVA).