Performance: The Caldeirão Highlanders, exercises in fictional anthropology, by Vera Mantero

Uncensored Act
Performance event

The Caldeirão Highlanders, exercises in fictional anthropology
by Vera Mantero

Saturday, September 11, 2021, 19:30
German State Theatre Timișoara
2 Alba Iulia St.
www.tgst.ro

event held in English
performance followed by a discussion with the audience

The Institute of the Present (IP) launches its “Uncensored Act” long-term programme in Timișoara with a performance by internationally renowned Portuguese choreographer, Vera Mantero, on September 11, 2021, presented in partnership with the German State Theatre Timișoara. The event is part of the series “For an Anthropology of Movement,” dedicated to various artistic proposals similarly engaged in the ethnographic field, though located in different social, political and cultural contexts, at different moments in time.

The work “The Caldeirão Highlanders, exercises in fictional anthropology,” created for the Encontros do Devir Festival in Faro, was developed around the process of desertification/ dehumanisation of the Caldeirão Mountain, in the interior of Algarve (south of Portugal).

Vera Mantero states: “One of the conditions of this commission was that I would have to record and use video images made on site. I did film at the mountain and I did incorporate images of mine in the piece but I mostly used the films of ethnomusicologist Michel Giacometti, especially the recordings of work songs. The whole piece is peopled by voices that come from afar. (…) I reinterpret some of the songs brought to us by Giacometti and sing them to the workers I found on the mountain, reclaiming lost traditions, trying to re-enact them.

But it is not just the music that is here at stake, it is also the spoken Word and the Earth; the words of an Antonin Artaud in combustion, of a Jacques Prévert hammered in the way of sound poetry (his words on ruins combining perfectly with the images of ruins I found on the mountain). The piece sheds a look on Giacometti’s precious musical (re)collection, on traditional rural practices and livelihoods, on oral cultures from the north to the south of Portugal and also from other continents, such as the references to South American native tribes (…) brought to the piece through the research of anthropologist Eduardo Viveiros de Castro.

With this “broad picture” of the Caldeirão highlanders I address in this piece all the different people that possess a knowledge that we have lost, a knowledge on the link between body and spirit, between ordinary life and art. A knowledge that we can (and should, for our own good) retrieve. My dance at the end, with my precious cork trunk, is my tribute to this knowledge.”

Concept and Performance: Vera Mantero
Lighting design: Hugo Coelho and Vera Mantero
Video script and images: Vera Mantero
Video editing: Hugo Coelho and Vera Mantero
Video excerpts from Michel Giacometti’s complete film works: Salir (Serra do Caldeirão), Cava da Manta (Coimbra), Dornelas (Coimbra), Teixoso (Covilhã), Manhouce (Viseu), Córdova de S. Pedro Paus (Viseu) and Portimão (Algarve)
Text excerpts from: Antonin Artaud, Eduardo Viveiros de Castro, Jacques Prévert and Vera Mantero
Artistic Residences: Centro de Experimentação Artística  Lugar Comum/Fábrica da Pólvora de Barcarena/Câmara Municipal de Oeiras and DeVIR/CaPA/Faro
Coproduction:  DeVIR/CaPA
Production: O Rumo do Fumo
Acknowledgment: Editora Tradisom
A commission for Encontros do DeVIR by DeVIR/CAPa.
O Rumo do Fumo is supported by República Portuguesa—Cultura | DGArtes—Direcção Geral das Artes
Premiere: 2012
Duration: approx. 1h20

The tickets can be acquired from the German State Theatre ticket office or online from Eventim.

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

The Institute of the Present’s collaboration with choreographer Vera Mantero will continue in 2022–2023 with the development of creation featuring Romanian performers.
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IP—The Institute of the Present is a research and an artist resource platform in the field of visual and performing culture conceived by Ștefania Ferchedău and Alina Șerban, established in Bucharest. Centred on artists and their personal accounts, on time-specific encounters and forms of (self) archiving, the Institute looks at various practices and situations from the recent past until today from a transnational and transcultural perspective.

The “Uncensored Act” programme is initiated and directed by Ștefania Ferchedău.
The intersecting point between the main programme strands, one dedicated to research and creation, and the other to mediation and education, lies in the idea of community, collective thinking and action, sharing and exchange of resources and collaboration and solidarity in the spirit of shared values or with the aim to reclaim and consolidate shared values.

Project developed by The Institute of the Present in the frame of the Cultural Programme Timișoara 2023—European Capital of Culture.

Partners: German State Theatre Timișoara, O Rumo do Fumo, FABER, Art Encounters, TRIADE Foundation
Photograph by Luís da Cruz
Visuals: Sebastian Pren

Cultural project included in the TM2023 RESTART priority cultural programme of the Projects’ Centre of Timișoara Municipality, undertaken with the support of Timișoara Municipality and of Timișoara Local Council. The cultural project does not necessarily represent the standpoint of Timișoara Municipality and of Timișoara Local Council. The content of the cultural project and the way in which its results may be used represent the exclusive responsibility of its authors and of the beneficiary of the funding. Timișoara Municipality and Timișoara Local Council cannot be held liable for the content of the project or the manner in which this may be used.

Note: The event will take place in observance of sanitary rules in force at the date of its performance.

Contact: ip@institutulprezentului.ro, www.institutulprezentului.ro