Aquilo que Ouvíamos

Joana Craveiro uses memory as raw material for the explorations with her company, Teatro do Vestido. In Aquilo que Ouvíamos [ Stuff We Used to Listen To ], she revisits a time when music gave its listeners a sense of identity and belonging. This concert-play, based on the musical life experiences of its band/cast – four actors and five musicians (including the Loosers) that are the authors of the project’s original soundtrack –, is a journey back to the formative years of adolescence in the 1980s and 1990s. These “musical stories” tell us how important music’s materiality was: purchasing vinyl records with your meagre allowance, reading the lyrics sheet, trade them and make friends while doing so, display a favourite record as a badge of honour, a means to identify as part of a group and separate yourself from others, make tape recordings of borrowed vinyl discs, rare concerts or improvised home radio shows, precious material evidence of who you were. Aquilo que Ouvíamos revives a past, “a time when we had time”, with full tender and ironic awareness of its being lost, and yet present in the identity-developing bonds that were created through music and still persist.