Theaterschrift Extra. Intensification: Contemporary Portuguese Performance
Introduction by André Lepecki and Table of Contents
Transversed Body, Intense Body
Crossing
Theaterschrift's distinctive aspect has been its thematic editorial line. Each new issue has worked as a magnet, gathering artists from different nationalities, different fields of expertise, different theatre-houses, under a common hosting space where they meet by the means of their words and explore specific dramaturgical problems. Through text, artists share methods, projects, and points of view. With every new issue, a sense not only of familiarity but of community grows, as the reader recognizes names returning to write once again, but always in a different light, about a new theme. The pages of Theaterschrift are a stage where the reader comes back to find familiar voices giving yet another glimpse into the kaleidoscopic dynamic of the theatrical creative act.
Something altogether different happens with this "Extra" issue of Theaterschrift. The artists contributing to this issue are mostly unknown to the majority of the regular readers of this magazine. Moreover, the unifying theme is less conceptual than it is national: contemporary Portuguese performance. Thus, when Monica Lapa and Mark Deputter invited me to edit this "Portuguese issue" of Theaterschrift, the three of us immediately started a conversation on how to find a way to address the singularity of the project without betraying the spirit of the publication. The two directors of Danças na Cidade had a very clear idea regarding the project: it should establish a dialogue with the non-Portuguese artists and collaborators to Theaterschrift. This desire to organize the issue dialogically immediately brought about a series of editorial decisions. The issue should be inclusive regarding the artists invited to participate, yet without losing its coherence; it should keep in mind the necessity of a conceptual theme, and not to accept the boundaries given by the word "Portuguese" neither as thematically self-evident nor self-sufficient; it should not be too parochial nor too involved with discussions and problems only understood by, or pertinent to, a Portuguese reader; but it should not be so distant to a Portuguese reader as to become a purely "export-product" for Europe; graphically and content-wise, it should still be recognizable as a Theaterschrift issue. Finally, and definitely most importantly, the issue should absolutely never be a pedagogical display-case of exotic "Portugueseness".
After agreeing on the general editorial guidelines, I decided to start contacting the contributors to this issue by making them familiar with the dramaturgical universe Theaterschrift has been creating for its readers and writers since its first international edition in 1992. A series of texts, interviews, and essays were selected from previous issues and assembled into a basic dossier that was then sent to the invited Portuguese artists. Those texts worked as a net of references, defining a constellation of problems from which the several contributors could derive their inspiration from, if they so wished. The invitation was thus mailed with texts from five selected issues of Theaterschrift, with themes that seemed to me particularly relevant to the current socio-political moment in Portugal: "Beyond Indifference", "Border Violations", "The Inner Side of Silence", "City/Art/Cultural Identity", and "Time". I added a sixth theme of my own, to allow some freedom to the contributors. That theme was "What Really Matters" and, in a way, I feel it was the one that draw more responses, albeit in a non-explicit manner.
Telepathy
I started then to wonder how it would be possible to establish, within this "Extra" issue, a shared space of problematic and inventive imagination, relevant to the non-Portuguese creator and reader. Such a space, beyond the closed boundaries of national frontiers, cultural specificities, and intricate personal and political desires, would operate in a different, tectonic, level of shared preoccupations. Editorially, the trick was not to fall into a solution that would be confounded with a sort of "validation" of the Portuguese contributions by the means of the "foreigner" - I always thought that the voices in this issue should be heard purely, in and by themselves, and taken by their face value.
In thinking on how to establish a relationship with Theaterschrift - both with the community of artists that contribute to it, as well as with the community of readers that usually read it - it occurred to me that the act of creating performances, be it theatre, music, dance, happenings, performance art, is one of sensorial intensification. The heightening of awareness of the creator, of the performer, is one that allows them to perceive yet unnoticeable tectonic tremors, anticipate winds of change, smell the faintest alterations in the air announcing an upcoming storm in the social realm. I like to call these capacities, half-jokingly, halfseriously, but somehow always in amazement by the awkward accuracy of the word, as "telepathic". Telepathy appears here, of course, as a metaphor for the strange coincidences that accumulate cross-nationally and crossdisciplinarily in the emergence, creation, and posterior circulation of similar images, metaphors, themes, sounds, preoccupations, and scenes for dances, plays, performances, music compositions. I gave this phenomena, that twists unexpectedly the aesthetic problem of "influence" (and that, as such, so intrigued Walter Benjamin, as well as Sigmund Freud before him), the provisional status of "fact", and found in it the common-ground that would guarantee the sharing of a performative temporality and spatiality between the Portuguese artists contributing to this issue and the ones regularly collaborating with Theaterschrift·
The idea of telepathic undercurrents, of subterranean preoccupations emerging among artists whose work is done far away and in different contexts, takes shape in the following pages as a literalization of the word "subtext". The pages of the Portuguese originals are rented, revealing under its surface excerpts of texts previously published in Theaterschrift. The same texts sent to the contributors with their invitation letter. Those excerpts establish less an "intertextuality" with the Portuguese ones than they operate as echo-chambers, reverberating in a parallel temporality shareable problems performance always poses. They are less anchors than doors, opening to the possibility of a more conscious trans-national and trans-cultural auscultation. The excerpts are telepathic devices. They erupt as well as they descend deep into the realm of creativity, inventiveness, and contemporaneity.
Intensification
Increasing sensorial intensification characterizes the Portuguese corporeal predicament for the past two decades. The end of half-a-century of dictatorial regime, the collapse of half a millennium of colonial empire, the hidden but quite present scars of thirteen years of bloody colomal wars, the demands of moving economically as well as culturally towards "Europe" - are all recent historical facts shaking the ground under the Portuguese body, abody that finds itself in the midst of a crisis of self-recogllltlon and of self-reinvention. Intensification, as dramaturgical tool, and by the means of a hyperbolic mimesis, makes manifest and corporeal the tremor such shifting ground provokes. Such an intensification is the main trait of the work of the artists contributing to this issue.
If there is something in common among the artists contributing to this "Extra" issue of Theaterschrift, it is the fact that they all are very much aware of the forcefields surrounding and informing the different bodies they stage. Even in an somewhat unexpected are~, music composition, we find that both composers contributing to this issue locate the problem of staging and of presence as fundamental to their music. Whether working with their own, or another person's body, the latter is lucidly perceived as intensely bound to, and constructed as well as destroyed by, multiple and conflicting discourses transversing Portuguese society today. Discourses of nation, of modernity, of periphery, of "Europe", of dramaturgical and performative affiliations crash upon the performing body with a force powerful enough to shred It nothingness. This shredding force - which is the force of history - is further intensified by quite explicit political demands of creating a "contemporary" temporality, m pace with a reified Europe. If this demand invades and shapes the social tissue at large, it has a very partlcular impact upon the artistic work produced III Portugal m the last decade.
Portuguese cultural critic Eduarda Dionisio shows, in her important book on the history of Portuguese culture from 1974 to 1994, how the demand of creating and performing some sort of "modernity" has been a constant III Portuguese cultural politics since the early 1980s, when the process of full membership to the EEC started. In this sense, the underlying, subliminal, and certainly ideological pressure that falls upon these artists can be seen as a temporal one. Once again, "intensification" leads us directly to the question of time and of the body's inscription within time. It leads us to the teleological expectations any country preoccupied in "becoming modern" cast upon their artists - to create today those desired images of the future the nation still does not possess, a future perceived as already available in more "developed" countries; to speed up in order to "catch up" with the actualization of this future as its image flickers in televised promises of a "more advanced" Elsewhere; to fall into synchrony with the "West". But then there is performance, whose "only life", as theorist Peggy Phelan perceptively writes, "is in the present". What needs to be added to Phelan's expression is that present shelters multiple temporalities. Within the different tempos present has to offer, performance fulfils its most transformative promise when it rents the discourse of "one way to the future" to invent otherwise unthinkable corporealities, to chart the ground the body rests upon, to make visible what is being forced into the shadowy territories of ideology. The body in presence some contemporary Portuguese performance brings about on stage is as transversed by those ideological forces and formed within those ambiguously peripheral boundaries just as the body of the nation itself is. It is the task of the director, the choreographer, the performance artist, the composer, to delineate the contours, probe the limits, explore the potentials and invent new possibilities of embodiment, of sensorial awareness: new grounds for presence as well as new vehicles for a deep auscultation of the present. Thus, one of the most prominent characteristics of the work these artists produce, whether in dance, theater, music, or performance art, is the staging of a certain dramatic savagery. The present moment and the present body must be intensified, so as to mark its positionality within an already overdetermined context of periphery.
Voices
The conversation between choreographer and dancer Vera Mantero and philosopher Jose Gil that opens this issue explores precisely the shifting sensorial awareness and the metamorphic powers of the body in a context of crisis. Mantero and Gil rehearse philosophical and choreographic moves towards an "intense movement" leading to a "enriched spirit". Choreographer and dancer Joilo Fiadeiro, in a text where his own creative process is interwoven with his political concerns, contextualizes the current sociological moment in Portugal as indissociably linked to a performance of the nation within the larger international context of Europe. Political concerns and their impact upon staging and rehearsal practices are also present in the text by theater director Jorge Silva Melo, where he introduces the problem of a certain "democratization" of the rehearsal process, by discussing the role of the actor as director. Theatre director and visual artist Joilo Garcia Miguel plunges into the performative aspects of writing and takes us for a walk through the nervous system of a city (Lisbon) and of a narrator (Garcia Miguel) both performing themselves as beings alarmingly in a state of emergency. How such a state of emergency is inscribed upon the body and then denied, revisited or acted out by some contemporary Portuguese visual artists working with performance is analyzed by visual-arts and cultural critic Alexandre Melo. An example of the metamorphic element of performance as well as its ambiguous status between public and private act, is given by performance artist and dancer Paulo Henrique, when he writes on his ongoing project "Deixei de Fumar" ("I Stopped Smoking"), thus giving an example of how the body is the contentious site of conflicting social forces and how it performs social illumination and change. The thematics of auscultation and of performative presence are made explicit in the realm of music composition. Two composers- musicians explain how performance, and particularly dance, influences their art. Sergio Pelagio writes about his dialogical experience as composer for some of the most notorious names of Portuguese dance, and how dance changed his way of thinking on composition. Carlos "Zingaro", in a conversation with music critic and journalist Rui Eduardo Paes, considers the problem of improvised music in an electronic age - his emphasis on the performative aspects of music sheds new light to the debate between "reproduction" and "performance". Finally, choreographer and dancer Francisco Camacho, and theatre director and actress Lucia Sigalho, critique the concepts of avant-garde and experimental performance by discussing some ethical implications of contemporary rehearsal methods bound to the depiction of the "real".
Bodies
In a recent essay, performance theorist Philip Auslander writes on a contemporary performing body that "asserts the body's materiality" while it critiques modernity3. The materiality of each performing body described, theorized, and invented by each of the contributors to this issue constitute a vibrant and powerful vision into the imagination of a changing European nation at the end of the twentieth century. These writings push the reader right into the tumultous problematics of defining "contemporaneity" on stage when artists create performances on the fringes of Europe. They also propose alternative stances regarding what it means to create performances today. It is now time to give them the floor.
André Lepecki
Table of contents
Editorial
Monica Lapa & Mark Deputter
11
Transversed Body, Intense Body
An Introduction by André Lepecki
19
Richness of Spirit, Intense Movement
A Conversation between Vera Mantero and José Gil
39
... do we act after understanding or under after acting?
A Text by Joao Fiadeiro
65
Being Directed by Actors
A Text by Jorge Silva Melo
83
Useless Angels. Stories of people living in a city on the verge of an attack
A Text by Joao Garcia Miguel
101
About Performance
A Text by Alexandre Melo
123
I've Given Up Smoking
A project/performance by Paulo Henrique
139
"What do they want music here for?"
A Text by Sérgio Pelagio
151
To Structure Improvisation is to Direct
A conversation between Carlos "Zingaro" and Rui Eduardo Paes
169
The Responsability of Inventing
Francisco Camacho und Lucia Sigalho interviewed by André Lepecki
197
Biographies
212