Some of the Children of It All: Reflections on Children of the Return [Filhos do Retorno], a Performance by Teatro do Vestido: Constructions, Representations, Memories, and Postmemories

This chapter⏤originally a performance-lecture⏤addresses Teatro do Vestido’s production “Children of the Return” [Filhos do Retorno] written and directed by Joana Craveiro. The performance was built around the postmemorial experiences of five actors chosen for the project because of their families’ relationship with the Portuguese colonial past. Detailing the research and creative process that led to the performance⏤from the audition to interviews conducted with each of the actors after the première of the show (2017) and its subsequent run at the National Theatre, in June 2018⏤Craveiro discusses the interplay between collective and personal memory and examines how five singular stories, when told together, influence and transform one another. This chapter takes the stage and the text as conflicting sites too, in that the five actors in “Children of the Return” were staging their own stories, experiences, ideologies, and personal views mediated by words written for them⏤and therefore, somehow out of their control. In the realm of such a sensitive and problematic theme as the colonial legacies transmitted within families, this project unearthed the performers’⏤and their families’⏤conflicted and multilayered narratives, and exposed the potential of performance as a means of questioning, transformation, and reconciliation.