Artist statement
My name is Leonor Cabral. I was born in Lisbon in 1983, but grew up in the middle of the Atlantic, on an island called São Miguel. I have been working for almost two decades as an actress, an assistant director, a cultural mediator, a theater creator and as a person who seeks others.
I have a BA in Theater (ESTC) and MA in Theater Studies (Faculty of Humanities of Lisbon University). I also studied with A. Gutkin, Antonio Fava (Italy), New Actors Workshop (NY), Ávila Costa, John Mowat, Nuno Pino Custódio, Minako Seki, among others.
In 2015, I participated in the XXIV edition of École des Maîtres, directed by Ivica Buljan. It enabled me the possibility of working in Belgium, Croatia, Italy, Slovenia, and Portugal, with people from these different countries.
As an actress, I have worked with directors such as Madalena Vitorino, Giacomo Scalisi, Cláudia Gaiolas, Tónan Quito, Pedro Alves (teatromosca), Tiago Cadete, José Peixoto, Elsa Valentim, Gina Tocchetto, Rui Rebelo, Sofia Cabrita, Nuno Pino Custódio, Joana Antunes, Francisco Salgado, Carlos J. Pessoa (Teatro da Garagem), Marco Paiva, Catarina Vieira e Solange Freitas, Gonçalo Amorim (TEP), Tiago Vieira, among others.
As a theater creator, I created the shows “When the lights go out”, “If I would go up as well as I drink, I would already be in the air for a long time”, “Ex-Symbol”, and the video performance “Atmosphere”.
I was the artistic director of the project “The barber of Intendente”. A community and tandem project, created to and for the people of Intendente (Lisbon’s neighborhood), produced by Largo Residências.
I also created the following performative tours to exhibitions: “Surreal(sismos)”, for “A partir do Surrealismo” exhibition, at Millennium gallery (2017); “Proibido calar cartazes!”, for “Querido, reorganizei a colecção… por artista” echibition at Culturgest (2015), and “Outros modos de ver”, also at Culturgest (2018).
For many years I worked at the Education and Participation center at Culturgest, where I developed a lot of work with children, either teaching, acting, or creating theater shows.
I am now creating a new solo theater piece, “CICLONE”, for Temps d’Images Festival, that will premiere at Centro Cultural de Belém in May 2022. In my master thesis, I wrote about how a theater show changes something in the spectator. Now I also think about how it can change something in me, or in other people involved. Artistic creation is a quest for discovery, knowledge and tandem. I believe in theater as a powerful mechanism to bring people together, to create commotion, to reconfigure the world. My main motivation when creating is getting closer to people. Either by telling a story, or creating an immersive or sensorial experience, or collaborating with people that want to reinterpret their experiences, societal pressures, the life they are living, successes and failures, into a reimagined form that can reconnect people and communicate. I am also extremely interested in the process, and I am sorry that sometimes the final object is the main goal. The experience of sharing and being together should be the most important thing.