In Adilson, Dino D’Santiago does not simply tell a story. He fractures it, stretches it, repeats it until the echo becomes unbearable. The opera—his first—unfolds not in the grand tradition of tragic heroes or mythic sacrifice, but in a far quieter, more intimate key: a man waiting for his name to be recognized. A citizen without citizenship. A son of empire, stranded on its shores.

Premiering this September at the Centro Cultural de Belém as part of the BoCA – Biennial of Contemporary Arts, Adilson arrives at a symbolic juncture: fifty years after Portugal’s military retreat from its African colonies. While the state celebrates that past as a peaceful revolution, D’Santiago insists on asking: Who got left behind? And who still isn’t allowed in?

The Citizen Who Wasn't

The opera follows the life of Adilson—a fictional character who feels painfully real. Born in Angola to Cape Verdean parents, Adilson has lived in Portugal for over forty years. He has paid taxes, voted in local assemblies, raised children, and buried relatives. But he is still undocumented. Still waiting for the same status granted to tourists who spend a week in Lisbon’s Alfama district sipping ginjinha.

His name changes throughout the piece—sometimes Nuno, sometimes D’Afonsa—an homage to the real bureaucratic absurdities many Afro-descendant residents of Portugal endure, where identity is provisional and belonging always questioned. What anchors him is not a passport, but the refrain that gives the opera its title:

“Eu não sou português. Eu sou Portugal.”
“I’m not Portuguese. I am Portugal.”

It’s not a demand. It’s a mirror.

Portugal’s Quiet Erasures

To outsiders, Portugal is the gentle colonizer. A nation that ended empire without bloodshed, gifted the world fado and custard tarts, and now enjoys the hipster glow of a renovated Lisbon. But D’Santiago belongs to the generation that has always heard the silence beneath the saudade.

“Portugal was never decolonized,” he once said in an interview. “It just moved the empire inward.”

Today, descendants of African, Cape Verdean, and Guinean families who arrived in the wake of decolonization—often encouraged by the state—continue to be overrepresented in Portugal’s precarious labor market and underrepresented in its cultural narratives. They are security guards, cleaners, delivery drivers, and nurses. Rarely, if ever, the ones telling the national story.

With Adilson, D’Santiago insists on taking up that space. Not just sonically, but structurally. This is not music about marginalization. It’s music that occupies the center stage, literally—backed by full orchestras, scripted in operatic tradition, and introduced at a festival that usually leans experimental rather than political.

Music as Migration

Born in Quarteira to Cape Verdean parents, Dino D’Santiago (real name: Claudino Pereira) has always moved between genres and geographies. His career has fused morna, funaná, and batuku with trap, gospel, and soul—rooted as much in the rhythms of the diaspora as in the spiritual demands of history. In 2020, as Black Lives Matter protests spread across the globe, D’Santiago emerged as one of the most articulate voices demanding a reckoning with racism in Portugal.

But opera is a departure even for him. A genre often associated with whiteness, wealth, and frozen repertoire, it’s an unexpected platform for a man whose musical activism has always lived closer to the street than the stage. That’s what makes Adilson so subversive. It bends the opera form to bear the weight of migrant fatigue and Black endurance.

“I wanted to turn silence into music, to make even the waiting rooms sing.”

A Cast Without a Nation

The opera’s cast is almost entirely composed of Afro-descendant Portuguese artists: Michelle Mara, Cátia Freitas, Soraia Morais. It was co-written by playwright Rui Catalão and musically arranged by Martim Sousa Tavares, with support from orchestras in Lisbon, Braga, Aveiro, and the Algarve. This collective authorship, spread across regions and backgrounds, reflects the fragmented identity at the heart of the piece.

There’s no linear plot. Instead, the narrative is cyclical, looping around moments of deferred hope: the immigration office that closes before his turn, the job application that’s rejected again, the birthday party where he’s the only one stopped by police. These moments are broken by bursts of rhythmic call-and-response, ancestral drum patterns, or long silences.

“Adilson Is All of Us”

At a time when far-right parties in Portugal gain momentum by vilifying immigrants and glorifying imperial nostalgia, Adilson refuses to play the polite role. It names what others euphemize. It speaks from the margins, but not for pity. It speaks as a warning.

In one of the final scenes, the main character walks the streets of Lisbon while an unseen choir chants his name. Not Adilson. Not Nuno. But all the names he could have had if history had looked at him differently. In this moment, the opera shifts from portrait to prophecy.

“I’m not Portuguese,” he says once more. “I am Portugal. A country still waiting.”

And somehow, in that echo, we hear not just one man’s longing—but a whole nation’s unfinished reckoning.

Adilson premieres September 12–14 at the CCB in Lisbon, followed by performances in Braga, Faro, and Aveiro. Commissioned by BoCA 2025.
Tickets available through bol.pt.