Blackface

A late night show format you know well (Think Colbert, think Lubach) with music, satire and a live audience, turned towards something most hosts would rather skip. Portuguese theatre-maker Marco Mendonça takes this familiar format and fills it with something that is still avoided too often: an open, direct and sometimes uncomfortably honest conversation about racism and representation. 

Blackface, the racist theatrical practice in which white performers paint themselves as caricatured Black figures, has a long history of stereotyping and dehumanisation. Mendonça investigates how that practice came to exist, why it was long considered normal and what the shift in our thinking about it says about how we understand racism today.  

Intelligent, confrontational and surprisingly accessible. Blackface is not a finger-pointing sermon but an invitation to a much-needed collective conversation about history, responsibility and the world as it is today. 

Marco Mendonça was born in 1995 in Mozambique and has lived in Lisbon since 2007. He studied theatre at the Escola Superior de Teatro e Cinema and works regularly with the company Os Possessos. 

He was also a trainee at the Teatro Nacional D. Maria II, where he collaborated with, among others, João Pedro Vaz, Tiago Rodrigues and Faustin Linyekula. Mendonça has performed in productions by, among others, Liesbeth Gritter (Kassys), Tonan Quito and Mala Voadora. 

As a maker he made his debut with Parlamento Elefante, a project that won the Amélia Rey Colaço grant. In 2021 he received the Rede 5 Sentidos for Cordyceps. Internationally he can also be seen in Catarina and the Beauty of Killing Fascists by Tiago Rodrigues, with which he appeared at Noorderzon earlier in 2025 as an actor.