[For technical reasons, the graphical title of Mantero's piece couldn't be inserted: it concerns a phonetically spelled Portuguese text].

An impossible title. A range of characters and symbols that resist to be read straightaway, they do not release their meaning immediately, as if they remove themselves from the reader. It concerns a few lines in Portuguese. It is said to be an excerpt from an indefinable poem, written down in an imaginary phonetic spelling. Speaking of removal: the lines didn’t just leave behind the original writing and context, their initial meaning is also nowhere to be found. What you see is as much a graphic drawing as a capricious ornament, and it is in this way it should be read: it invites the eye to follow the lines of the characters, to move itself along the ductus of the writing, as if it concerned a choreographic indication, as if it concerned a choreography as such. Reading thus, since the graphic presents itself as an image, but asks at once for proximity, for participation in all its details, and therefore, the title loses its image value along with distance. But not customary reading, since in their linguistic quality the characters fold back into themselves; if they ever had a function as reference, they may now be empty signifiers, a peculiar projection surface. Once somehow linguistic, but now mute, taciturn, maybe speechless. Turned inward, but not obscene: isn’t phonetic spelling all about sounds? Speechlessness that speaks? Anyhow, an impossible title, but so temptingly paradoxical.

*

To set things straight: those three phonetic lines form the title of a piece by the Portuguese choreographer Vera Mantero, which was created in Lisbon in June 2002. From the beginning, the performance bathes in a strange taciturnity: the large scene is empty except for a white armchair which lies on its side, and it is quiet. After a little while you become aware of a strange sound, something between a machine-made noise and loud sighing. The dark green, half-transparent plastic aircushions of about two meters high, which surround the stage along three sides with a wide battlement pattern, move slowly up and down. They are deflated a little and then pumped up again, they shrink a bit to rise again. They breathe in a slow rhythm during the whole piece: inert as the stage remains, the scenic installation by Nadia Lauro acts lively.

Slowly, the performers enter this desolate landscape one by one. In their greyish, bleached superman outfits they look somehow bewildered, their faces dumbfounded as if they have accidentally arrived on the moon, or somewhere in an unknown, dehumanised universe. Their actions are simple, slightly hesitant and searching, cautious and uncomfortable, they give little meaning to the space: walking, standing still, lying down. There is no contact between the performers, they are there for themselves; their doings are atomistic, communication is strange to them. One of the performers walks suddenly backwards, as if drawn in by something that escapes his eye, and throws himself against the cushion wall. Another one clings to it heavily. The noisy mechanical breathing of the set claims even more space: not only is it the most lively element on stage, it seems to suck out all the life around it. The entire business appears dead, as a twilight zone, a post-apocalyptic world, or more abstract: somewhere beyond a certain end.

This tendency is sustained for ninety minutes, although the piece evolves: the actions become more complex and the interaction also grows, so that the dancers get space to draw their own course, even though they never let themselves be delineated as characters. Large time spans are also accompanied by the fragmented music of Nuno Rebelo, including thumb piano and all kinds of experimental guitar sound, as counter figure for the choreography which, in spite of the bizarre movement material, is not improvised but has a precise timing. A quick description of some scenes and material shows the surreal character of the show. One performer lies flat on the ground, the face tucked away, to move himself about crawling with short intervals. Another one jumps up and down in the armchair and makes wild obscene gestures, whereas a second looks on and remains totally indifferent. A fair bit of material looks slightly ‘animalistic’: someone has the collar of another in the mouth and drops him a bit further, like a lioness does with its whelp. But that is already too much of an interpretation; the majority of what happens is simply abstract. A dancer stands trembling for several minutes, with his back to the public. There are also moments which originate from improvisations with the capes: a dancer lies quiet on the ground, another one fans him. Two dancers are covering each other’s faces with a cape. A grotesque territorial battle for the armchair, where one performer undertakes a repeated but unfruitful attempt to push the piece of furniture in which two others have entrenched themselves. Et cetera – it could become a nearly endless enumeration.

The majority of the action is surprisingly enough easy to describe, possibly because it seems to concern single, detached gestures and motions, although placed together, juxtaposed and superimposed with much sense for dynamic, rhythm and organisation of time and space, to become a choreographic whole. Nevertheless this description provides only a series of formulations and images which might call on to other images, but as such do not release their meaning, so that the taciturn nature of the piece is simply doubled in words. In that sense, Mantero confronts the critic with an interesting problem, since the status of his description is put at risk: it seems to lead nowhere. What part does the description play anyway, now that we have been aware for a while that language never coincides with reality: why still use such a naïve representational method as starting point for art criticism? Description still constitutes a specific moment of criticism, precisely because in this very description, criticism can foster the proximity to the work of art, although unceasingly at odds with its perpetual paradox: writing can never coincide with looking, but in the light of this consciousness it nevertheless continues attempts to that end. Differently said: the description reminds criticism of its epistemological limitations, and allows it to probe the distance between looking and writing, between the visible and the speakable.

Returning to Mantero: what is happening in the description or, even better, in that strange doubling? The gestures and actions of the performance are easy to describe: it is as if the linguistic nature of the piece and the material is simply being transported in a text, once again articulated in words; as if the writing relates rather to reading than to looking. And still they both remain silent, the critique as well as the performance; there is no eventual view upon meaning, only a void. The gap between language and reality, which normally allows the possibility of reference and thus the production of meaning, explodes in this piece, becomes unfathomably broad. It seems that the commitment of Mantero’s piece connects with the one criticism faces in its seeming failure, namely an ethical stake: because it shows susceptibility for something that radically exceeds the system and thereby puts it at risk. This antagonism pervades Mantero’s creation: new movements, gestures and actions are constantly accumulated, and yet nothing more is being said. On the contrary, the void that they leave behind is becoming only larger. Thus the interaction between the characters is at least strange: sometimes they can stare at each other for minutes, but the situation never arrives at something like communication. It is an open question whether or not they register, interpret and grant meaning to each other’s actions; even simple learning processes as repetition and ritualisation are out of order. And yet the whole universe has been well-composed in every detail; the movements are never just movements, but gestures or actions, and as such they invite us to read them, only then to withdraw themselves suddenly when the question of meaning emerges.

Nevertheless, in this disconsolate landscape there slumbers a desire for solace, intimacy and meaning. Halfway the piece, the characters seem indeed to meet each other, by grouping themselves more or less in the back against the wall as a small community, and even more by singing together. Through the introduction of the voice, Mantero explicitly brings in a human element. Where there is no place for words, there still are their sounds. By letting the speechless ‘speak’, giving it a voice, and in such an explicit and literal manner, it seems that the dramaturgy is heading towards humanisation. At the same time, it is a sign of recklessness and treason; after that strange unequivocal moment follows a madness scene, the dancers wriggling on the floor and eventually losing every bit of control. After that radical shattering a blackout follows, as a rift in the piece, before it resumes the earlier logic of the piece. The only difference is that from there on they will speak, although totally nonsensical, in free associations of words – another externalisation of the gibberish, which was already to be found in the movements.

That the viewer eventually shares in this confusion has also to do with the fascination for language which proliferates throughout the piece, and stands in the way of a comfortable visuality. Although the piece has a theatre set-up with auditorium as the fourth wall and the public simply ignored all the time, Mantero herself speaks in the programme about “an urge in my work to get closer to the public, to keep them no longer at distance from the image. The viewers are themselves no longer in a visual connection, a visual appreciation inherited from the pictorial culture; they must look at the propositions in a different way. There is no framework nor perspective, but proximity, details, close-ups; this rapprochement allows stepping into detail, what also modifies the nature of our work on stage. We are leaving the spectacular, trying not to overwhelm the viewer, but to impress him, touch him. We attempt to touch the lives of the people. Even though the frontality cannot be avoided, it is enough to put it into question, to know what one wants to do with it.” Only at the end is this frontality explicitly at stake, as if to indicate that we are nevertheless still in a theatre, when performer Paulo Castro runs back and forth along the fourth wall, and wildly gesticulating, delivers a long monologue that continuously falters: “Je pense que, euhmm...”. It is an extremely grotesque statement: after all, thinking was already dismantled along with language; the pictorial frame already folded down as a horizontal surface which only allows writing and reading. And what about the proximity then? It is a fiction that makes way for a choreography of the absent, for a groundless and obscene lack of meaning, for an immense distance. And isn't it exactly in there that the touch can happen?

*

A dramaturgical approach. About one month after seeing the group piece I observed a workshop given by Vera Mantero during ten days. Thought, poetry and the body in action took place in July 2002 in Vienna, as a component of the ImPulsTanz festival research programme. The strategies which Mantero developed in working with dancers are similar to the ones she uses in a creation process, and therefore add an interesting perspective to that of the viewer in the theatre. For example, how does work with a fascination for language, for reading and writing, how does it affect a movement language to let this work eventually become stranded in that strange speechlessness? This time it concerns working methods and processes, of which we will leave out an exhaustive description here; instead, we will examine if an internal view will allows us to straighten out the tangle. Moreover, a description of a working process is also faced with specific problems, it’s tempting to trace particularly that which already consists of words, whether in spoken, written or mental form, namely tasks, discussions and concepts. That initial univocality appears to remove itself at the same time from the movement material, which during the Mantero’s workshop adopted less and less readable forms, although it bursts with language-based procedures.

Mantero had not formulated a clear aim for working, rather the inverse: a chain of tasks and questions, which had to lead both body and mind to a point “where you normally don’t find yourself”, a point which is no longer recognisable as known or familiar, let alone as comfortable. Rather a situation of ignorance, inconvenience and doubt, but also of openness, discovery and surprise, but not a primary state that would precede language. Language is an important instrument for Mantero, the main point of her thinking on choreography. A returning task consisted of a writing session, where automatic writing was used, a method developed in the 1920s by surrealists to try to gain access to the subconscious, which at that time had recently been discovered by psychoanalysis. Concretely, it concerns writing with all registers open, in a constant flow of free association of words and ideas, without cares for the meanings that play along. Writing in one’s mother tongue is thereby a manner in which to promote the rhythm of writing, openness and freedom of imagination. Afterwards everyone analyses his own texts, in search of surprising images on one hand, but especially in search of all kinds of phenomena which emerge in writing itself and influence its course. Think for example of juxtaposition, superimposition, non-redundant combinations, rhyme, rhythm, invention of new words, et cetera. Sometimes there is talk of nonsense, where writing is faster than a perpetually meaning-producing thinking. Which doesn’t guarantee a valuable text though: sometimes simply nothing happens.

After automatic writing and the analysis of it follows the same task, but this time by dancing in the space, whereby the analysis consists of an attempt to revisit this movement trajectory, with a simultaneous oral explanation. This type of exercise is further developed by allowing random memory order, the application of principles that came up during writing, and also by performing the revisiting and elucidation ‘here and now’, so that they become a tale in itself, in which both the temporalities and the meta-level merge. In adding extra principles and refinements, it concerns itself each time with an unravelling, whereupon the different elements are reassembled. Thereby the apparent simplicity of the material (speech and movement) has at the same time a high density due to all processes slumbering in it.

Other principles that lead to variations are, among others, ‘automatic talking’ and articulation of the movement material through the use of gestures. Gestures aim to bring out more details, to make movements speak without becoming mime. According to the principle of non-redundancy, speech and gesture should not coincide, but have their own life so that they can resonate. Finally, it’s never simply about movement material; the gestures call for the performer’s concentration, which lies beyond indifference, ask him even to put his person, his background, memories, habits and knowledge at stake. To avoid known paths, Mantero develops exercises which hinge upon ‘opposites’ of one’s character and movement habits, especially as they are perceived by others, so that comfort is once again far away.

Eventually, the free association removes itself increasingly further from a gratuitous emptiness by means of this accumulation of strategies, set off through a multiplicity of regimes of speech and movement, of event and recurrence, of body and mind. These antagonisms indicate that Mantero initiates a range of dissociations that branch off, as a result of which finer elements can be developed and articulated. It concerns a remarkable working method: the idea, for example, of disentangling body and spirit, of bringing them both separately in a different state through a series of modifications, is slightly paradoxical. That dissociation is always hypothetical, but it permits challenging permutations, such as the desire for a body to be as malleable as thinking. A process of disengagement can get off balance, whereas tracing it can lead to the emergence of new figures. Better still: Mantero disentangles the eternal intertwining of body and mind by means of language, after which the knot becomes even more impossibly entwined. Meanwhile, with the difference that it speaks, in the sense that its silence, its taciturnity betrays processes and poetry, it becomes an eloquent speechlessness.

*

In 1991, Vera Mantero created the solo Perhaps she could dance first and think afterwards, which is still running and can be seen as an example of her bizarre, capricious movement language. Mantero dances three times in a row to Thelonious Monk’s song ‘Ruby, My Dear’, and there is simply no telling what she does. Her eyes turn away each time to then bathe in absence, by which the co-ordination between her perception and limbs seems to be pushed aside. She hops around, there isn’t a link really between her steps and gestures, as if the meaning of everything around hercontinuously escapes her. Just like in Mantero’s latest show the movement material is bewildering because there is a yawning gap between the dancer’s perceptions and her response to them: the learning processes are not quite right. After more than ten years the solo remains intact, as if the time has no grip on it. Possibly its commitment has been modified: what to think nowadays, for example, of the grotesque movement language and the resulting body image? Is that still connected with the surrealist desire to enter the subconscious or a dream situation?

Mantero again: “I’m not trying to find out to know whether what I do is dance or not, but I aim to create different bodies, stripped of stereotypes, of habits, of conformable movements. On the stage one can experiment, trace lost situations; therefore dancing, as I understand it, is perhaps this: working on what we have lost.” It is an ambiguous statement: is that which is lost not always already lost? The always recurring question of the anamnesis is in any case at stake in Mantero’s most recent piece: it seems to be permanently in a situation of loss, of absence, of disappearance, of death. If the piece breathes a post-apocalyptic atmosphere, treads beyond an indefinable end, then it proves itself exactly on those many points where language fails, whereas the characters that inhabit the scene are nevertheless language-ridden. Therefore, everything appears to be dehumanised, even inhuman. What are human beings without language?

The question of the role and the meaning of the body has not yet been taken into consideration. One final suggestion about that, which grants an additional perspective to the reflections in this essay, but at the same time opens entirely new ones: Compared to what is to be seen these days in the performing arts, Mantero’s work stands far from an aestheticised body, but also from a quotidian body, and actually also from a deformed body. Rather, it concerns a post-human body, and to be more specific, a ‘deprogrammed’ body. This formulation finds a ground in the critical and dramaturgical thoughts above, and also provides a possible answer to the question of the current familiarity with a work such as Perhaps she could dance first and think afterwards: it can also be read as a response to the digital era, or to the possibility of engineering life through biotechnology.

A post-human body does not serve itself of language to give meaning to the surrounding reality, but to construct its own reality, whereby language becomes programmer’s language and is no longer referential but a new kind of inscription. Thereby, the post-human body not only cuts the link with reality, but can travel beyond death into an open field of possibility, of possible bodies. The deprogrammed bodies in Mantero’s piece didn’t come any further than halfway though: sucked in by the temptation of unprecedented possibilities, but nevertheless wrestling with their anchoring in reality. That which doesn’t function any longer is their language, for that has also lost its status as it is floating somewhere between two regimes. And, possibly, therein lies their trauma – and their actual post-human character? A speechlessness which appears very eloquent, but eventually is still speechless – that’s why it asks to remain silent.