Teatro e Marionetas de Mandrágora
24 years of Teatro e Marionetas de Mandrágora!
2 Apr 2026 . ThursdayWe all deserve congratulations!
Clara Ribeiro, Filipa Mesquita, and Rúben Gomes have been the core of Teatro e Marionetas de Mandrágora for 24 years.
Let’s celebrate, because celebrating is essential for our well-being, because celebrating is also a form of expression, because celebrating means being resilient in the face of happiness.
But what are we celebrating? These 24 years? More than that, we’re celebrating the people, the gathering places, the moments, and the experiences.
We could count them in the tens and hundreds or more. We have had 277 collaborators working with us, we have taken on dozens of interns, we have worked with 127 organizations, we have been involved in over 300 projects, we have created more than 75 productions, 14 co-productions, 28 theater projects in institutions, more than 30 community theater projects, more than 20 shows resulting from training programs, more than 30 visual art creations for other companies, more than 50 workshops, 11 exhibitions, …
We have toured 975 venues, 172 cities, 9 countries, and 518 festivals and events. We have performed in Bulgaria, Canada, Greece, Macau, Norway, Portugal, Slovakia, Spain, and the United States of America. We have given over 5,700 performances, with an audience exceeding 1 million.
Today we are a core group of 5 people, and Joaquim de Sousa and Eurico Santos are our partners. We organize the programming for 2 puppet theater festivals; we were founded in Vila do Conde, established our headquarters in Gondomar, and the Company is based in Espinho.
Above all, our goal is to promote the art of puppetry. We are driven by a force that defies explanation but spreads contagiously between the stage and the audience. We remain committed, focused on our mission: art, culture, theater, puppetry, a social perspective on the world around us, as well as a reflection on who we are, what unites us, and what drives us.
Mandrágora Anniversary : https://marionetasmandragora.pt/aniversario
Let’s always celebrate World Theatre Day.
27 Mar 2026 . FridayAnd may this passion that drives us inspire all those who consider culture a fundamental value, as well as others who have not yet discovered just how incredible this art form is.
To the companies, the artists, the playwrights, the technicians, producers, programmers, set designers, costume designers, ushers, theater educators and researchers, outreach teams, box office staff, and so many others who live for the moment when the curtain rises over the auditorium, filled with our audience, and the show begins. Long live the theater!
March 21 is celebrated as...
21 Mar 2026 . SaturdayMarch 21 marks World Puppetry Day, World Poetry Day, and the arrival of spring. Over the course of several months, the Teatro e Marionetas de Mandrágora visited various schools in the municipality of Gondomar, where it held a series of workshops with children and young people. The project, “Vestir a Primavera” (Dressing Spring), is an art installation taking place in the gardens of the Gondomar Municipal Library, as well as inside the building. For several years now, it has celebrated a community project aimed at enhancing the local area, the space itself, and collective creation in the spirit of shared celebration. Proudly, the children held their homes, nests, and objects they had built within their school environment, which opened its doors to allow the company’s team to develop a multidisciplinary project.
Thirty stories were created and later recorded as audio, and the children inhabited these nests, giving them life, shapes, figures, and characters with a unique identity.
These small dwellings—metaphors for the nests we all inhabit, where we feel safe, protected, and eager to grow so that one day we may fly higher—will remain suspended until the end of Ei! Marionetas—Gondomar International Puppet Festival.
The young representatives from various schools came to the Library, proudly carrying their homes and leaving them on display.
The stories are also available online via the Teatro e Marionetas de Mandrágora website and can be read as well as listened to in the voices of the company’s actors.
Maria and Petrúcio.
10 Mar 2026 . TuesdayMaria and Petrúcio built their home in front of a tree with deep roots and had three daughters: Violeta, Helga, and Mariana, who never left home, not even for Lucília's birth. Someone begins to see double and says they have found the souls of the world, someone gets up at dawn to see better, insanity after insomnia. Petrúcio fell silent and watched the threatening advances of the excavators gutting the earth, prowling around the land. The night of the great fire will come.
The Ancient Olive Tree : https://marionetasmandragora.pt/oliveiramilenar
The Creation.
27 Jan 2026 . Tuesday“A Oliveira Milenar” (The Ancient Olive Tree) intends to be a deeply evocative performance that explores the conflict between childhood nostalgia, the threat of loss, and the undeniable force of progress. In this dramatic tableau, the yellow of the house emerges from the landscape symbolizing light, yet it faces the shadow of change represented by metallic monsters that destroy everything in their path.
The story unfolds in a universe in constant transformation, where nature, tradition, and family intimacy confront the voracity of progress. The performance aims to be a poem in motion, with characters who entwine themselves around the Ancient Olive Tree, which acts as a silent and immobile witness to past times and emotions. The presence of this ancestral figure serves as a link between the life that reproduces and the life that fades away, questioning permanence and transience, the root and the scar. This Olive Tree represents those who have gone—in the case of this family, the mother, Maria.
With every uprooting of the earth, with every piece of nature that disappears, the reflection arises: what is lost, what is gained?
We intend to transport the spectator to the heart of a conflict that, seemingly, has no exit. Throughout the play, the yellow house becomes a stage for dreams and nightmares, for laughter and tears, for kisses and screams, where life unspools.
This creation intends to be a visual and sonic poem that creeps into our consciousness and, through the power of poetry, leaves us with the taste of scorched earth and the scars of the past for future generations. In this performance, we intend to look with respect at the roots that keep us firm.
Life and struggle blend together, showing the fragility of our existence and the need to resist, with courage, the forces that attempt to destroy our dreams.
The Ancient Olive Tree : https://marionetasmandragora.pt/oliveiramilenar
The Art Residence.
26 Jan 2026 . MondayThe process of an artistic residency is a concentration of efforts focused on creation. An isolation and a convergence of distinct places, which bring creatives together, lead to a fundamental impulse for structuring foundations, in this case, “The Ancient Olive Tree”, the new production by Teatro e Marionetas de Mandrágora. Clara Ribeiro, artistic director and performer of this work, and Rúben Gomes, in charge of visual design, thus initiate the project.
Time, something demanded by creation itself, requires a space of its own. Artistic creations are slow-paced; they need space to take root and grow solid.
The Ancient Olive Tree : https://marionetasmandragora.pt/oliveiramilenar
Art Residence.
21 Jan 2026 . WednesdayWe are grateful to the Fossekleiva kultursenter og Berger Museum, and Franzisca Aarflot produksjoner for hosting the creative process of A OLIVEIRA MILENAR.
This moment and time for research, experimentation, and listening are fundamental to the design of this creation, allowing us to elevate the performance to a deeper cultural dimension. It is a privilege to have this time to build this universe and reflect on how the audience will inhabit it.
The creation borns here, at the meeting point of thought, body, and space—a living process built with time, attention, and presence.
The Ancient Olive Tree : https://marionetasmandragora.pt/oliveiramilenar
We have begun.
12 Jan 2026 . MondayWe have begun the artistic creation of "A Oliveira Milenar" (The Millennial Olive Tree) with a meeting that brought together a vast multidisciplinary team. In attendance were creatives from the fields of artistic and visual direction, the author, and those responsible for lighting design, music, and puppet construction, alongside performers, puppeteers, the costume designer, and the video, photography, production, logistics, and communication teams.
Based on the original text "Escavadoras" (Excavators) by Marta Pais Oliveira—winner of the Agustina Bessa-Luís Revelatory Literary Prize—the creation of "A Oliveira Milenar" emerges from a process of emotional connection to the city of Espinho. The premiere is scheduled for May 2025 at the Auditório de Espinho | Academia, as part of the Mar~Marionetas – Espinho International Puppet Festival.
In a land where a house is destroyed—a place that could be in Alentejo or Palestine—the harshness of the word "excavators" gives way to the poetic dimension of the millennial olive tree. The text, born from Marta Pais Oliveira’s complex writing, finds in the dramaturgy the foundation for the artistic creation that occupies the stage. Here, the olive tree is the center: a fundamental scenographic element where the word is transmuted into image and time is mirrored in the roots of the set design.
This dramaturgy also reflects a journey through the Company’s own history. The olive tree thus becomes the soul of a place and an identity; a symbol of one or many peoples.
This crucial meeting, which brought together these diverse creative universes in person, marks a decisive step in a project where many of the artists have already developed significant work in dramaturgy and visual planning.
The next phase of this creation will take place later this month in Norway, with a multi-week artistic residency. Featuring both the artistic and visual directions, this moment will serve as the fundamental cornerstone for the production: a journey through the art of puppetry where figures are plastically molded to the demands of the narrative.
This perspective is a structural pillar of the company, where puppets, techniques, and artistic choices are built and outlined under the guidance of the dramaturgy. It is an endeavor to bring a text to the stage not only through words but through a visual and plastic language—the object and the object in motion—a fundamental aesthetic choice that has always been the hallmark of Teatro e Marionetas de Mandrágora.
The Ancient Olive Tree : https://marionetasmandragora.pt/oliveiramilenar
Two actresses on stage.
12 Jan 2026 . MondayTwo actresses on stage, puppeteers and puppets, a house, a tree, roots, characters, and objects. A transformation where words give rise to objects that hold within them poetic dimensions and symbolism. The structuring of characters that are born from the actresses but shared through the hands that manipulate them. What we see, when we see, what we see.
The narrative possesses a vast poetic and metaphorical depth, conveying the experience of someone uprooted from their home. It features moments of diverse dimensions where the interplay of scales is symbolic—a play of proportions that allows for the shifting between intimacy and distance proposed by the scenic world and its creative structure. Beyond the puppets, the symbolism of costumes and masks enables the puppeteer to traverse various realities.
These creative processes bring together artists who become part of a text’s narrative, which the dramaturgy transforms into converging languages: time, color, image, figure, sound, and speed. It is the creation of worlds that lead us to reflection and analysis—a theatrical journey that immerses us in a sensory and cognitive process. This is an emotional and theatrical experience; a journey of both aesthetic and cognitive depth.
The puppets begin and end in distinct forms and dimensions, transposing both the visual image and its poetic essence.
The language of this production converges into a deliberate creative choice by the artistic direction: a perfusion of relationships between people and social dimensions. It is deeply rooted in an analysis of contemporary thought and geopolitical consciousness, reflecting the social reality that surrounds us. It is an active thought process, marked by a gaze upon a global society grappling with conflicts, confrontations, and evolutions that face dilemmas of freedom within a disruptive world.
The Ancient Olive Tree : https://marionetasmandragora.pt/oliveiramilenar
The Casa Educativa da Marioneta program is kicking off.
6 Jan 2026 . TuesdayThis program, which will run throughout 2026 with clear objectives in the area of cultural mediation, was born several years ago from a partnership between the Municipality of Gondomar and the Teatro e Marionetas de Mandrágora. The project aims to consolidate a training space in the area of puppetry with various purposes: educational, through plastic and theatrical learning; recreational, promoting play; artistic, promoting the exploration of manipulation and construction; and social.
The initiative encourages collective work and family activities, promoting joint artistic experiences and the creation of memories within the family and the group, where creativity becomes a structural axis. As an intergenerational program, it has a comprehensive component that extends to teachers: they attend training sessions in search of new tools that can assist and enrich their own educational programs.
Regular training sessions are held on the last Saturday of each month. Throughout the year, there are other activities aimed at adults and arts professionals, which complement the program we are now presenting.
We hope to see you there; we are ready and waiting!