Blimund (working title)

Marlene Monteiro Freitas was born in Sal and grew up in São Vicente, two islands of the Cape Verdean archipelago. Alongside Florentina Holzinger, she serves on the artistic advisory board of the Volksbühne am Rosa-Luxemburg-Platz, under the artistic direction of Matthias Lilienthal. Over more than two decades, her work for the stage has carved out an unmistakable territory – one defined by impurity, heterogeneity, hybridity, intensity and openness – and has earned her recognition across the international performing arts landscape.

Her pieces build their own form of narrative: not through characters and plot, but through rhythm, figures and situations. Music is not backdrop but architecture. What emerges is less a composition than a friction – between different ideas, worlds and logics, rubbed against one another until something catches light. Contradictions are not resolved but held in contact, generating heat, texture, residue.

For her first creation at the Volksbühne, Freitas turns to Blimund – a Cape Verdean folk tale threaded through with violence, inequality, sacrifice and the longing for freedom and love. At its heart is an ox, a figure that echoes across myths and stories from cultures around the world, carrying within it something ancient and unresolved.

But for Freitas, a myth is never a story to be retold. It is a surface to press against – a starting point from which she works associatively and vertiginously, placing foreign ideas and worlds in close, charged contact. The result is a stage universe entirely her own: precise, hypnotic, and intense.