MISSION
Every Portuguese person only buys tickets for a show every two years. This includes concerts and festivals – if we only talk about theater, the numbers are even more worrying.
Working in culture in Portugal is living trapped in a paradigm that is of no interest to anyone – from agents to spectators – and which, even so, seems to be perpetuated daily: that we are forced to choose Art or the Public. Between the Public and the Respect.
We reject this paradigm. As a method, as a work philosophy and as a vision of the future, we refuse it.
The Production Force believes, from the first moment, that there is no serious Theater and Commercial Theater, but good Theater and Bad Theater. That a commercial piece can be extraordinary and an experimental piece can be a blockbuster.
We believe that the only way to reverse the dramatic numbers we have today and to regularly bring the Portuguese to the theaters is by combining these two currents in the service of a revolution, a manifesto, a new paradigm. A new way of looking at Theater, in which we all have to learn from each other. In which the conquest of a new theater spectator, in whatever room, benefits everyone and becomes a ticket sold in another show, in another room, in another idea. In which being able to continue the love of the stage – a continuous, contagious love, much greater than a single producer or chain – is not a marketing tool, but a clear and audible cry about the Cultural Responsibility that belongs to all of us, agents of this area, so diverse and so noble.
We arrived at this moment and this opportunity – that of creating culture at Maria Matos – guided by this commitment. For the notion that being chosen to enter Maria Matos is the Responsibility and Honor of becoming part of a network of people and stages that together shape the collective memory of a city.
Anyone who arrives here motivated by economic ambition or ego will quickly recognize a difficult, heavy, risky challenge. A challenge that should – can only – be accepted in the light of this Responsibility – to give our children a Lisbon with memory, with ideas, with fresh air and with people in the chairs to breathe.