Anthology André Lepecki: The Portuguese years

“I knew that if the experimental and avant-garde dance had any chances of survival they had to pass through the test of being properly accounted for in printed form. My dance reviewing has always been very engaged and not at all neutral, documental, nor objective. I had and still have an agenda.” André Lepecki

André Lepecki has been writing on dance and performance for Blitz, a rock&roll magazine and by that time the most read Portuguese weekly, between the summer of 1990 and the spring of 1993. At that time and as the opening quote remarks, André Lepecki clearly had an agenda: to give a solid base to Portuguese dance to launch itself into the international arena. In his later writings for magazines such as Ballet International, this aim was still vivid. Lepecki’s background was actually that of a cultural anthropologist, and as a scientist he wrote columns and book reviews for Diário de Notícias and Público. The encounter with dance happened almost by coincidence, since a new generation of artists, such as Francisco Camacho, Vera Mantero, Carlota Lagido, Paulo Abreu and João Fideiro, had interest in Lepecki’s anthropological writings and invited him for dramaturgical assistance or simply as an interlocutor (we speak about a time that the term ‘dramaturg’ may not have been coined in that context). At that very point, Lepecki realised there was a lack of knowledge about art and even about the body within anthropology, which prompted him to work with choreographers and dancers, who also were or became friends, lovers, etc. When shortly after, in 1990, the magazine Blitz invited him to review dance, he accepted immediately, and found himself confronted with a medium that gave him an unprecedented freedom in style and detail, which allowed him to set his agenda.

Looking back on that period, several interests came together and surpassed by far what seemed to be at first sight a coincidental encounter with dance. Besides the local boom of dance in Lisbon, important international choreographers (Pina Bausch, Trisha Brown, Merce Cunningham, Anne Teresa De Keersmaeker, DV8, La La La Human Steps, Sankai Juku, Susanne Linke, Meredith Monk, Joseph Nadj, Karine Saporta, Meg Stuart, Wim Vandekeybus etcetera) performed in Portugal, whose work was also reviewed by Lepecki and provided a frame for the local scene to gain a wider and international visibility. This pivotal period in Portuguese arts, and Lepecki’s coming to writing dance criticism happened in a context of historical break, as he points out: “In post-revolutionary, post-colonial Portugal, the new regime meant the opening up of an extremely closed and underdeveloped society to the world at large. It meant also the coming of age in the 1980s of the first generation of very young artists that had been brought up fully in democracy, and without censorship nor the prospect of colonial war. The country had hardly a dance tradition. Dance boomed in Lisbon with a force that was unstoppable. The New Portuguese dance galvanised a whole set of cross-collaborations across artistic fields between choreographers, musicians, composers, architects, designers. And, with a specific group of artists, the crossing aimed at directions that at the time were not so much explored: between dance and theory, dance and writing, dance and epistemology.”

What can then be Sarma’s agenda more than a decade and half later when expressing the desire and need to collect and republish these writings in their original language as well as in English? Why give them a second life in a new historical epoch? What can be the rationale of such enterprise? The struggle of survival of dance through the tools of writing technologies, to which Lepecki refers, is not over. Portuguese dance is not any more standing at the verge of the international scene, as was the case in the late eighties, but now it is standing at the verge of entering history.