Dance Week Festival

The artist, born in 1966 in Lisbon, discovered dance in her early childhood. She became a ballerina, but was soon to discover the boundaries of classical dance. Although she worked with the Ballet Gulbenkian for five years, it was only with her stay in New York that she completely abandoned classical training. Consequently, she expanded her expression, moving it in the direction of theatre, connecting it closely with speech and music.
To Vera Mantero, the dance vocabulary seems simply to poor to be able to display that side of the inner being which doesn’t contain only pleasant things. Instead of using the term dance performances she prefers to call them simply performances or spectacles. The lion’s share of her many times awarded “creative despair” lies in her solo performance.

Até que Deus é destruido pelo extremo exercicio da beleza is a line of verse by the Portuguese poet Herberto Helder and means: ‘until God is destroyed by the extreme exercise of beauty’. The first sentence of the Judaeo-Christian story of the creation is: ‘In the beginning was the Word’. But now that God is dead, perhaps the word should also be destroyed.

In Vera Mantero’s new project there are six dancers on stage; they talk under their breath without interruption. It is important that they speak but we do not need to understand exactly what they are saying. The silences, the gaps they leave between their words, are just as eloquent as the words themselves. Their sung meditation is constantly changing but ultimately always remains the same. The music produced by these six talking performers gives the viewer the feeling of walking round inside someone’s head: a galactic journey in the void or in the space of memory. And yet their speech is not turned inwards: they address the audience, inviting them to follow them on their exhausting journey. In this production, the viewer experiences the essence of theatre – the experience of a ‘here and now’ – as one great slow motion: as if time and space were being stretched further and further until they were so thin that they no longer existed.

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Artistic direction : Vera Mantero

Co-creation & performance : Antonija Livingstone, Brynjar Bandlien, Loup Abramovici, Marcela Levi, Pascal Quéneau & Vera Mantero

Visual installation & costumes: Nadia Lauro

Live music: Boris Hauf

Light: Jean-Michel Le Lez

Dramaturgical collaboration : Bojana Bauer

Co-production: Centre Chorégraphique National de Tours, Centre Pompidou – Les Spectacles Vivants / Festival D’Automne, Culturgest de Lisbonne, Le Quartz/Scène Nationale de Brest, O Espaço do Tempo de Montemor-o-Novo

Supported by: Fundação Calouste Gulbenkian/Lisbon

O Rumo do Fumo is supported by the Portuguese Ministry of Culture / Arts Institute

Duration: 74´.