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Alexandra Calado
Alexandra Calado:
about me
Biography
According to my aunts, since I was a kid I used to perform plays and song festivals at family parties. I gathered the adults in the living room or on the patio (depending on the season) and represented the
pieces that my imagination invented (with matching costumes), imitated advertising spots or sang the latest hits.
In my early teens I was an avid consumer of Pop Music. At that time, I decided to form a band with a group of friends and for that I enrolled in a Music School to learn the guitar and musical training. I was so excited about this project that I woke up earlier every day to play the guitar before going to school. Needless to say nobody at home liked this idea very much…
One day, my mother showed me an article in a newspaper about a Theatre school in Porto that was accepting applications. We both went there and I signed up for the auditions. A few weeks later, I auditioned for the school and was accepted. The great adventure began! Living in Trofa, a small town in the north of Portugal, I had to travel by train to Porto every day to attend the ACE. My relationship with public transportation started right there…
The end of my teenage years at ACE allowed me to meet fantastic people with whom I still have a strong connection. There, I was finally able to do theatre lays for people other than my family. And I went to Manchester twice to do an exchange programme between the school and the Arden School of Theater. I did a semester of the course in England, where I had subjects as cool as Trapeze or Stage Combat!
In the last year of ACE, the professor of Music and Voice, João Lóio, suggested that I should study Lyrical Singing. In his words, I could become “a beautiful Mezzo-Soprano”. That surprised me! I enjoyed singing but I realized that my voice was different from that of other colleagues and that it stood out when we sang in chorus - in my opinion, that could only be a bad thing, right?
I gave this subject a lot of thought and then decided to apply to the Porto Conservatory of Music. And you know what? I was accepted! And that's how I started having Singing lessons, with Professor Palmira Troufa. From then on, I combined Theater and Singing in my life, having made my debut at the National Theater of São João. Many plays, concerts and auditions followed and I kept my passion and the desire to learn and improve. And, in between, I completed a Degree and a Master's Degree and worked as a University Teacher.