Qualla: New Jerusalem Theater

New Jerusalem Theater: Introduction

Fri, 04 Sep 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit User:Patrick-br, CC BY-SA 3.0. A stone wall runs three and a half kilometres through the dry scrub of Brejo da Madre de Deus, punctuated by seventy towers. Behind it sit nine stages, artificial lakes and streets that lead nowhere in particular. For fifty-one weeks of the year the place is essentially empty. Then Holy Week arrives, and Nova Jerusalém fills with roughly five hundred performers and an audience that walks rather than sits, following the last days of Jesus from stage to stage across two hours and a hundred thousand square metres of rural Pernambuco.

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New Jerusalem Theater: Epaminondas Mendonça's Idea

Fri, 04 Sep 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit CC BY-SA 3.0. It began without a wall, without a stage and without money. In 1951 a marketer named Epaminondas Mendonça decided that the streets of Fazenda Nova — a rural district of Brejo da Madre de Deus, some 180 kilometres from Recife — would serve as the setting for a reenactment of the d...

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New Jerusalem Theater: Ten Hectares of Jerusalem

Fri, 04 Sep 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit CC BY-SA 3.0. What Pacheco finished in 1968 covers roughly 100,000 square metres — about a third of the area Jerusalem itself occupied in Jesus's time, by the theatre's own reckoning. It is regularly described as the largest open-air theatre in the world, a claim that is hard to audit and easy...

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New Jerusalem Theater: Five Hundred People

Fri, 04 Sep 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit CC BY-SA 3.0. The cast is a mixture that would be difficult to assemble anywhere else. Actors known nationally from Rede Globo take principal roles alongside regional performers and a large body of extras drawn mostly from Pernambuco — around five hundred participants in all. The 2022 edition,...

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New Jerusalem Theater: Plínio Pacheco's Forty-Six Years

Fri, 04 Sep 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit CC BY-SA 3.0. Pacheco directed Nova Jerusalém until his death in 2002. Set that against the year he arrived and the arithmetic is worth sitting with: forty-six years attached to a single production in a single rural district, twelve of them spent laying stone before a word was spoken on the fi...

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New Jerusalem Theater: Two Kilometres Away

Fri, 04 Sep 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit CC BY-SA 3.0. About two kilometres from the theatre, the Parque das Esculturas Nilo Coelho spreads across seventy hectares of open ground and granite. The figures carved there are northeastern rather than biblical — types and traditions of the sertão rendered in stone, some of them seven metre...

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