Connexive #1: Vera Mantero

Although she is considered a major choreographer from the nineties generation, there is few essayistic writing on Vera Mantero's work. Sarma presents a small collection on the occasion of Connexive #1. This includes a variety of genres: reviews, interviews, critical and theoretical essays, workshop reports, program texts and notes by the choreographer herself.

To retrieve the texts, use Sarma's Search form.

Sarma is currently preparing an anthology of the critical writings of André Lepecki. On the occasion of Connexive #1: Vera Mantero, a first selection of about fifteen texts is made available in Sarma's database. This contains essays on Vera Mantero's work, including four unpublished chapters of Lepecki's PhD that provide information about the artistic, cultural and political context in which her work came to emergence (see below). A taste of Lepecki's dramaturgical ideas is given by excerpts of the notes he wrote during his collaborations with Meg Stuart and Damaged Goods.

Later on, until Spring 2005, Lepecki's critical writings for the Portuguese weekly Blitz in the early nineties will be unlocked and translated into English.

To read more about André Lepecki and his activities as critic and theoretician, surf to Sarma's Lepecki page.

A report on Lepecki's seminar 'Sessions on issues', organised by Connexive in collaboration with the Vlaams Theater Instituut and the University of Ghent, can be found here

To retrieve his texts available in Sarma's database, go to Search.

Moving Without the Colonial Mirror: Modernity, Dance, and Nation in the Works of Vera Mantero and Francisco Camacho (1985-97)

A dissertation by André Lepecki submitted in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy, Department of Performance Studies, New York University, January, 2001. Advisor was prof. Barbara Browning.

Sarma prepublished chapters 1, 2, 3 and 6 in January 2004.

Abstract

The dissertation analyzes the work of Portuguese choreographers Vera Mantero and Francisco Camacho as cultural interventions into Portuguese national identity after the loss of the colonial Empire (1975), the end of fascism (1974), and the inclusion of Portugal in the European Union (1986).
Through Michael Taussig's notion of the "colonial mirror of production of reality," the dissertation locates dance as instrumental for an understanding of post-colonial Portuguese society. Through Eduardo Lourenço's notion of "imagology," the dissertation identifies the works of Camacho and Mantero as unique critiques of the images generated by the Portuguese about their own cultural and political identities.

Section I, "Outlining Positions," shows how the history of Portuguese theatrical dance in the twentieth century failed, until the mid-1980s, to generate an avant-garde movement. It locates this failure in the history of Portuguese fascism, its colonial policies, and their impact on the arts, particularly in dance. It discusses how Vera Mantero and Francisco Camacho's choreography was immediately perceived as exceptional, particularly by their innovative uses of the body as a positive point of departure for a critique of contemporary Portuguese culture.
Section II, "Mirrors," analyzes a solo by Mantero and a group piece by Camacho as choreographic deconstructions of colonial desire. When discussing Mantero's solo, it introduces the notions of "cultural anesthesia' (Allen Feldman) and of "still acts" (Nadia Seremetakis) to show how memories of the colonial war (1961-1974) are inscribed into everydayness. Through the Derridian notion of "adieu," it identifies in one of Camacho's group pieces a critique of colonial nostalgia.
Section III, "Agents," reads contemporary Portuguese society as politically driven by the desire to attain modernity. Modernity is described as a amnesiac, metamorphic, and choreographic Sate project. Three solos by Mantero are analyzed in terms of their critique of gender and race within this drive for the modern. Two solos by Camacho are analyzed as critiques of the forced sexual identities modernity seems to bring to the contemporary Portuguese body.

Table of contents

Part I. Contexts/Shifts

Chapter 1. Introduction. Outlining Positions

Chapter 2. Missing Body/Missing Dance/Missing Country

Part II. Mirrors

Chapter 3. The Shattered Mirror. The dance of existing

Chapter 4. The Prostitution of Time

Part III. Agents

Chapter 5. Experiments on the Subjectivity of Modernity, I

Chapter 6. Experiments on the Subjectivity of Modernity, II

Chapter 7. On Methods. Theirs, Mine