Reopen, Listen Again

We will reopen the Mosteiro de São Bento da Vitória next 1 October. We will reopen it after the completion of the refurbishment works, in which €4.85 million were invested under the PRR Cultura programme. This intervention enhances the built heritage—reinforcing safety, sustainability and energy efficiency, and improving working and audience reception conditions—and expands its artistic vocation. We will reopen the former Sala do Tribunal, refurbished as a contemporary performance space, equipped with technical resources and prepared to host artistic programming. We will begin a programmatic recharacterisation that will redefine the place of the Mosteiro within the programme economy of Teatro Nacional São João.

SET DEZ 8  TEATRO NACIONAL SÃO JOÃOPROGRAMAÇÃO SET—DEZ 2026  9 Voltar a escutar 12 O tempo do começo 16 De regresso ao Mosteiro 20 Calendário da programação dentro e fora de portas 22 Maiúscula 36 Kung-Fu 38 Cantar de Galo 40 Relicário Perpétuo 42 Caravana 44 MUSICAL-MENTE 48 My Center Is Not in the Solar System 50 Solistas da Orquestra XXI: Morton Feldman 52 O Pai 54 O FIMP no TNSJ 58 Festa 68 TPC: Frei Luís de Sousaaa 70 Auto da Barca do Inferno + Conferência Marco Neves 72 O Conceito Inútil + residência 78 Roda-Viva (A Menina e o Círculo) 82 Schubertíada 84 Centro Educativo 86 Memórias do Cárcere 100 Auto da Casa 102 Conferência Maguy Marin 104 Centro de Documentação 106 Leituras no Mosteiro 108 Coleção Textos Dramáticos 110 Coleção Empilhadora 112 Conversas com o Dori 114 Acessibilidade 115 Bilhetes Sociais/Estreia Solidária 116 Visitas Guiadas 117 Bar Ubu 118 Assinaturas 120 Cartão Próspero + Cartão Amigo TNSJ + Cartão Escolas de Teatro e Dança 122 Atendimento e Bilheteira 123 Ficha técnica TNSJ 125 Mecenas BPI/ Fundação “la Caixa” 130

Listen… and incline the ear of your heart. Rule of Saint Benedict, Prologue 1. Listen. It is with this appeal that Saint Benedict opens his Rule. Before ordering time, distributing tasks or establishing the principles of a life in common, he asks for something very simple, and very difficult: listen. To listen attentively is perhaps still more than to hear. The word has acquired a particular resonance: one listens to a body, bringing one’s ear close to it, in search of its most discreet signs. Attentive listening is a close form of listening, a way of grasping what pulses inside things. It is examination, inquiry, probing. Perhaps the Mosteiro de São Bento da Vitória—a monument of uncertain destiny, sometimes forgotten—should today be listened to attentively.

2. In the first days of October, Teatro Nacional São João will reopen the Mosteiro de São Bento da Vitória to the public, following refurbishment works that constitute the most significant intervention of PRR Cultura in the city of Porto and the Northern region. It was completed in less than ten months, when the initial estimate indicated a minimum period of eighteen. There were no overruns, either in time or in cost. With an investment close to five million euros, the intervention considerably transforms this National Monument: it restores and enhances the built heritage, radically improves conditions of comfort, accessibility and work, modernises infrastructure and equipment, and converts the so-called Sala do Tribunal into a small performance venue, fulfilling a long-standing ambition of TNSJ. A third floor—territory finally conquered in this intervention—now makes it possible to plan new workspaces, with unobstructed views over the Douro and its banks. For years, working in the Mosteiro had something of exile about it (I too experienced its penitential rigours during my years as an editor). Today, the building that was most inhospitable to us has perhaps become the one that welcomes us best.

PEDR O   SOBRADO President of the Board of Directors

PR OGRAMA ÇÃ O SET—DEZ 2026  13

Voltar escutar a

We have reasons to be satisfied. And uneasy, too. A work is only truly consequential when it produces consequences. When, in July, we publicly presented the 2026–27 season, in a Mosteiro still covered in dust and crossed by scaffolding, with the Claustro Nobre turned into a storage area for equipment and materials, we wanted to make it clear that the transformation under way was not merely material; it was also spiritual—or, rather, programmatic. The work opens the way to a new phase in the life of the Mosteiro within the programme economy of TNSJ. It therefore obliges us to listen to it again: to understand what this place is and may become, what practices it can host, what times and forms of encounter it can foster, how it can inscribe itself in the city and what relationships it can build with artists and audiences.

3. The Mosteiro de São Bento da Vitória is a sleeping giant. The intervention now completed reveals its immense, largely unexplored potential. In 2007, the Portuguese State assigned to TNSJ the eastern wing, part of the southern wing and the Claustro Nobre of the Mosteiro. This assignment entailed considerable heritage and operational responsibilities; it also gave us TNSJ’s best rehearsal rooms and work offices for various teams. The building’s public activity, however, remained episodic or sparse. The size of the TNSJ team and the resources available, mobilised by the intense life of our two theatres, did not allow us to give it momentum or ensure a regular rhythm. We began to say that the Mosteiro was before and after the performance: here one works and rehearses; here one archives and documents. For us, it became a place where artistic projects are gestated and also a place of memory, through the Centro de Documentação and an exhibition of stage designs that has now been reinvented. Yet, by listening attentively to these almost twenty years of public activity, we identify vital signs of a possible character. They are present in the opening and sharing of creative processes in the editions of MAP/P (2012–14); in the residencies and collaborative experiences of SKITe/ Sweet & Tender Collaborations, which, in the summer of 2008, brought together four dozen young artists of various nationalities; in performative events that resist categorisation, such as the works by Tania Bruguera, Romeo Castellucci and Josef Nadj that we presented there; in the chamber music concerts curated by Filipe Pinto-Ribeiro in recent years; in the international conferences held within the Odisseia project and others organised in partnership with the União dos Teatros da Europa; and in Leituras no Mosteiro, perhaps the most enduring of the initiatives