ABSTRACT
In this chapter, the artist, actor, and director André Amálio talks about the work he has been developing with the theatre company Hotel Europa, specifically a documentary theatre cycle on the end of Portuguese colonialism. The aim is to contribute to rewriting the history of Portuguese colonialism, looking critically at the country’s past beyond the memorialist and commemorative discourses that have silenced it for decades. Using oral history as a research methodology, the documentary theatre performances are created from a collection of testimonies, using interview material as theatrical text, a method called “verbatim theatre” which means “word for word” theatre. This chapter draws in particular on the performance Portugal is Not a Small Country, which was focused on the stories of the retornados who went to Africa in the 1950s and 1960s and arrived back in Portugal with decolonisation.
