Photo: Jorge Gonçalves

VERA MANTERO
Olympia + uma misteriosa Coisa, disse o e. e. cummings
PT
DANCE

Espaço A Bruxa Teatro, Évora
August 14th, 9.30PM

Duration: 55min.
M/12A
Free Entrance

Olympia
Conception and performance - Vera Mantero
Lights - João Paulo Xavier
Adaptation and light operation - Bruno Gaspar
Text - Jean Dubuffet
Music - music excerpts by Pigmy Bakma, Cameroon
Vera Mantero thanks to - Ana Mantero and Miguel Ângelo Rocha

uma misteriosa Coisa, disse o e. e. cummings*
Conception and performance - Vera Mantero
Make-up - Alda Salavisa (desenho original de Carlota Lagido)
Props - Teresa Montalvão
Original light design - João Paulo Xavier
Executive production - Forum Dança
Support - Casa da Juventude de Almada; Re.al / Amascultura
Production - Culturgest, 1996 Homenagem à Josephine Baker

On Olympia
Vera Mantero conceived Olympia to be presented during Maratona para Dança (Dance Marathon) (1993). Her aim, influenced by that of the event, was to “‘wake’ people ‘up’”. This was the axiom that guided Vera Mantero in the articulation of excerpts of Jean Dubuffett’s Asphyxiating Culture and the figure of Olympia, painted by Manet. An assemblage whose strength lays on the act of re:creating, re:thinking, and re:inventing artistic objects bearing an autonomous history, which the artist re:writes, re:inventing, by this means the practice and aesthetic pleasure of dance, as well as its history. 

When presenting Olympia at Escrita na Paisagem, Vera Mantero not only acknowledges the works in which she grounds her work, but she re:thinks and re:actualizes her own work as well, performing it in a new space and context. A double re:play rising core questions to the debate the Festival proposes for this year, reading re:petition as a core strategy of contemporary art. Why should onere:think a creation? What is changed, added, or lost in each re:petition? These are some of the questions to which we try to find possible answers – not only with Vera Mantero, but also with the spectators that join us. 

On uma misteriosa Coisa, disse o e. e. cummings*
one mysterious Thing, nor primitive neither civilized, or beyond the time, in the sense that the emotion is beyond the arithmetic. (e. e. cummings on Josephine Baker)

In 1995 Vera Mantero met Josephine Baker, e. e. cummings, and a speech by Mário Soares (President of the Portuguese Republic at the time). And then she met the pianist Glenn Gould and his “Goldberg Variations”, as well as the butoh master butô Kazuo Ohno. These encounters nurtured in her the need to conceive and materialize a sense of “greatness of spirit”, “[her] deep desire for a victory of spirit”, which is not devoided of the existence and pleasure of the body – conceived as equally grand. In a transdisciplinary assemblage of western contemporary dance, butoh, politics, and music, Vera Mantero embraces the challenge of choreographing and embodying a spirit “willing to annul [...] rudness, overwhelming stupidity, deep ignorance, shortness of view, materialism...” 

With  uma misteriosa Coisa, disse o e. e. cummings* the Festival Escrita na Paisagem addresses one of various modalities of the theme chosen for its program in 2010: re:play, that is, to approach practices of re:petition and re:creation as core aspects of contemporary creation. In this piece,re:play is present in various levels, the most obvious of them being the fact Vera Matero is going to re:perform one of her solos, placing it in a new context. The true is that re:play  is a core concept in uma misteriosa Coisa, disse o e. e. cummings*, since this piece, as André Lepecki argues, is a re:actualization of ghosts – those of Josephine Baker and her choreographies, and consequently, those of racial problematics and colonialism, which affect post-colonial Europe and which are particular sensitive (and silenced) in Portugal. In short, as Lepecki states: “the way Mantero’s European, female, white body chose to address (the ghost of) Josephine Baker as precisely a haunting subjectivity and a haunted body thickens the streams of European colonialist histories and memories, of current European racial fantasies and current colonialist amnesia, by offering an uncanny presentation of a challenging, improbable image of a woman, of a dancer, and of a subjectivity.” (Lepecki, 2006: 111)

Lepecki, André. 2006. “Melancholic dance of postcolonial spectral: Vera Mantero summoning Josephine Baker”, Exhausting Dance: Performance and the politics of movement. Londres / Nova Iorque, Routledge: 106-122.