IP lectures: Vera Mantero

Looking Forward, Looking Back #4
Artist talk with

VERA MANTERO
Thursday, May 23, 2019, 19:00
Rezidența BRD Scena9, 32 I.L.Caragiale St., Bucharest
free access, event held in English

The Institute of the Present (IP) presents in the frame of its lecture series Looking Forward, Looking Back an artist talk with Portuguese choreographer, Vera Mantero. The event is organised in connection with a week-long workshop, Collegium—a new layer of action within the Institute’s educational programme centred on the artists’ engagement with pedagogy and other forms of reflection upon the process of working. Centered on questions around artistic production, on the transfer, reception and circulation of contents, materials and ideas in a given cultural environment and geopolitical reality, the Looking Forward, Looking Back lectures aim at opening a discussion about the afterlife of histories and the role played by artists in reshaping our understanding of a possible future.

“For me, dance is not a given fact. I believe that the less I acquire it, the closer I will be to it. I use dance and performance work to understand what I need to understand. I don’t see any sense anymore in a performer specialised in a single discipline (a dancer or an actor or a singer or a musician) and I now see some sense in a performer specialised in the whole. Life is a terribly complicated and rich phenomenon and I see the work I do as a continuous fight against the impoverishment of the spirit, both mine and others, a fight that I consider essential now and always.”—Vera Mantero

Vera Mantero (b. 1966, Lisbon) studied classical dance until she was eighteen and danced in the Gulbenkian Ballet in Lisbon for five years. She started choreographing in 1987 and her first works, as noted by theoretician André Lepecki, captured the attention of Portuguese critique in a time when the movement of Nova Dança Portuguesa [New Portuguese Dance] started, growing from the post-fascist, post-colonial history of Portugal, being composed of a heterogeneous group of choreographers from Mantero’s generation. From 1991, with the famous “Perhaps she could dance first and think afterwards”, her pieces were presented internationally. Among her best known performances are the solos “one mysterious Thing, said e.e.cummings*” (1996), “What can be said about Pierre” (2011), “The Caldeirão Highlanders, exercises in fictional anthropology” (2012), and the group pieces “Under” (1993), “For Boring and Profound Sadnesses” (1994), “Poetry and Savagery” (1998), “k(ɘ) su’pɔɾtɐ i s(ɘ)ˈpaɾɐ i kõˈtɐj uʃ dojʃ mu’duʃ i õ’dulɐ” (2002), “Until the moment when God is destroyed by the extreme exercise of beauty” (2006), “We are going to miss everything we don’t need” (2009), “The Clean and The Dirty” (2016) and “The Propitiatory Practices of Future Events” (2018). The piece “Eating your Heart Out” co-created with sculptor Rui Chafes represented Portugal at the São Paulo Biennial in 2004. www.orumodofumo.com

Looking Forward, Looking Back #4 is part of the project Presence, Ritual, Affect: Towards an Anthropology of Movement.

Cultural project co-funded by the Administration of the National Cultural Fund.
Partners: Rezidența BRD Scena9/ Fundația9, CEREFREA/ Villa Noël.
Photograph from “The Caldeirão Highlanders, exercises in fictional anthropology” (2012) by Humberto Araújo.
Communication design: Sebastian Pren.

The project does not necessarily represent the standpoint of the Administration of the National Cultural Fund. AFCN cannot be held liable for the content of the project or the manner in which the outcomes of the project may be used. These shall devolve entirely on the beneficiary of the financing.

Contact: ip@institutulprezentului.ro