Para que os Ventos se Levantem: Uma Oresteia [So That the Winds May Rise: An Oresteia] is a new chapter in the Teatro Nacional São João’s ongoing internationalisation process. KastroKriola and Blindness – collaborations with the Cape Verdean Ministry of Culture and the Teatre Nacional de Catalunya – are now followed by an Oresteia rewritten by Gurshad Shaheman, which we are producing in collaboration with the Théâtre national de Bordeaux en Aquitaine. Aeschylus’ trilogy sings of all that is essential: pain, death, revenge, madness, justice. The French-Iranian playwright has preserved its original characters and narrative structure, while performing a number of metamorphoses, deviations, and updates. Here, Troy is the nom de guerre of the whole Middle East, that perennially devastated land; Agamemnon and Orestes are emblems of emerging imperialism and populism; the choirs, a combination of feminists and ecologists, resist barbarism. Catherine Marnas and Nuno Cardoso, the artistic directors of the two collaborating institutions, work with a cast of young French and Portuguese actors. A bilingual exercise of “onstage training”, a show that questions (and vivifies) the foundations of democratic thought.