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Vera Mantero, Francisco Camacho, Clara Andermatt and João Fiadeiro currently tread distinct paths and approach their art with distinct agendas, after emerging in the late 1980s as choreographers. Under the surface, however, lies a mutual preoccupation: to theorise ways of embodiment, which is the same so to say: to choreograph presentness. To this, one may add another biographical coincidence or maybe another shared artistic necessity: their first years as creators were spent travelling – to New York, to London, to Barcelona- and learning different dance and theatrical techniques. Their diverse formation as dancers and creators is deeply embedded in this early disciplinary nomadism. As their work would later on be.

Vera Mantero

An extraordinary dancer and performer, Mantero started choreographing in the late 1980s in the workshops of the Ballet Gulbenkian in Lisbon where she danced for 4 years. Her solo ‘Em corpo com Som’ (1988) and particularly the quartet ‘ As Quatro Fadinhas do Apocalipse’ (1989) captured the attention of the Portuguese critics, in a time when some were announcing the beginning of a New Portuguese Dance – a new dance movement emerging with the post-fascist, post-colonial era in Portuguese history, and constituted by a heterogeneous group of choreographers of Mantero’s generation.

Mantero’s international exposure increased after 1991, when Bruno Verbergt, then director of the Klapstuk Festival (Belgium), convinced her to “present something” despite Mantero’s insistence on her lack of “something to say or dance, at the time.” By then, Mantero had left the Gulbenkian Ballet and spent a year in New York studying acting, contact improvisation, and voice – re-learning what it could be to dance and searching for a purpose in the labour of choreographing (Camacho, by the way, was her colleague at the Lee Strassberg Studio in NYC). Out of this (re)search, and out of an almost paralysing radical doubt, Mantero responded to Verbergt’s invitation by creating an improvised solo titled after a line of Samual Becket’s Waiting for Godot: ‘Perhaps she could dance first and think afterwards .’ Despite the longevity of ‘Perhaps…’ (it is still touring), Mantero’s solo work have been lately veering mora and more to a delicate form of performance art – altough without performance art’s attachment to autobiography, and with dance’s trust on the body’s presence and mobility – as one can see in her disturbing and magnificently minimal solo based on the figure of Josephine Baker. ( Mantero had already choreographed and performed another solo inspired by that other modernist dancer-revolutionary, Vasilav Nijinsky, ‘Uma Rosa de Músculos’).

Both in her solo and group work, Mantero inhabits and displays private museums of domestic absurdities. Mantero’s is a dance-of-images insisting on scrutinising those public secrets we hope to keep invisible, spectral, un-shown, never to be discussed, even less performed. It is in this sense, that we can say that if there is a questioning of “the dance” throughout Mantero’s choreographic career this questioning differs radically form the explorations of media and movement typical of the “post-modern” American dance tradition. Instead of the formal experiments of the “post-moderns” that dance historian Susan Manning identified as a re-enactment of the same old paradigms of dance modernism, Mantero’s probing is much more eerie, unsetling. Strange things happen in her pieces, as “astrangement” is one of the key concepts in Mantero’s dance-of-images; less in the Brechtian sense of alienation and more as in the Freudian uncanny –homely objects and a powerful femininity, through repetition and revisitation, be together in choreographic imageries of lucidity. A lucidity that haunts us in Mantero’s all-woman trio ‘For Bored And Profound Saneness’ ( 1995), and punches us slowly in her later group piece, ‘The Fall Of An Ego’ ( 1997; see preview in the November issue of bi/ta.).

Francisco Camacho

Just as Mantero, Francisco Camacho is also an extraordinary performer and it is perhaps as such that he is better know to the European audience. Camacho was, along with Portuguese dancer Carlota Lagido, in the original cast of Meg Stuart’s breakthrough trio piece ‘Disfigure Study’ (1991). More recently, Camacho performed whith Les Ballets C. de la B., in Alain Platel’s ‘Bonjour Madame…’ (1993). Camacho’s work as choreographer shares with Mantero the same preoccupation wiht the uncanny aspects of everyday life. However, Camacho constructs his scenes with more specific references to Portuguese icons, Portuguese historical figures iosyncrasies. This does not make his work hard to read for the non-Portuguese audience. Camacho’s work impact derives from his sense of the ridiculous in our human condition and from his profound critique of modernity as a disciplinary of bodily, sensorial, sexual, and semantic control. Thus his choreography always verges on the edge of discomfort. That explains the importance of architecture as a trope in his work. He choreographed two long group pieces inspired by the figure and modernist utopianism of Le Corbusier. In these pieces, ‘Quatro e o Quarto’ ( ‘Four And The Room’, 1990) and (‘First name: Le,’ 1993), architecture and modernity are both subjected to an exploration of uneasiness, following in a bizarre way Dali’s observation that Corbusier was the inventor of the architecture of self-punishment.

Camacho’s work is often associated with his interest in Portuguese historical figures. We can first identify this concern most clearly in his solo, ‘O Rei no Exílio’ (‘The King In Exile’, 1991), and his group piece ‘Dom São Sebastião’ (1996). But Camacho’s visitation of history is less a pedagogical endeavour rather than a wonderful shattering of any hope for a linear historical progression, of any possibility of a pedagogical narrativisation of the nation(al). If history emerges in the work of Francisco Camacho, it does so as a mnemonic spur, by the means of the traces organising the physiology of our desire and the anatomy of our social body.

In his choreographing of convulsion, of obsession, of failing physiological systems, of the collapsing body, of the dance in absolute sensual pleasure; in his invocation of ghosts, of ridicule and laughter, of sensuality and of obscenity, Camacho organises a dancing body that “fragments what was thought unified; it shows the heterogeneity of what was imagined consistent with itself” (Foucault).

For Camacho, and quite literally, the body in performance emerges as that nervous system shattered by a fragmentary, violent past that is neither dead nor for away in time, but a past inscribed in our own bodies, a past surviving its own absurdities within the living bodies on both sides of the stage at the very of performance. Thus, in ‘Dom São Sebastião’ (1996) where the figures of both the Portuguese king D. Sebastião and of Saint Sebastian are invoked and revisited, we have that extraordinary moment when the dancers break down the fourth wall and, exhausted after a dionisical dance, hold the spectator’s hands against their breasts, over their racing hearts: dancers and spectators meets as living co-presence.

Camacho has given us this history of the body in pain and pleasure in ‘Nossa Senhora das Flores’ (‘Our Lady Of Flowers,’ ‘92) ‘Com a Morte me Enganas’ (, 1994), and ‘Primeiro Nome: Le’ (1993), although we may find already traces of it throughout his work since ‘3 Em Meio Acto’ (‘3 In Half Act,’1988). In his latest group piece for 14 dancers, ‘Gust’, premiered last November, history is metaphorised as a Benjaminian gust of wind, blowing upon the dancers’ bodies who bend and thrive through an inhospitable present, only to re-invent and survive themselves.

Clara Andermatt

Andermatt’s choreographic career has been marked by continuous travelling. Andermatt studied classical ballet in London; she started her professional career in Lisbon in Rui Horta’s Commanhia de Dança de Lisboa. She then moved to Barcelona to work with Ramon Oller. Back to Portugal, she gets involved with two major projects in Cape Verde, with residencies in 1994 and 1995. It is, perharps, this continuous travelling that lies at the root of her choreographic explorations of the problem of encountering (the other).

In 1992, Clara Andermatt created a duo entitled “The Tiredness Of The Saints” . It was certainly not her first piece, but one that marks a shift in her choreography. In his duo for women, the scenic elements are reduced to a table, ready for a meal that will never happen- since the two dancers will engage in a ritualistic destruction of the set. The movements are energetic, compulsive, and more abstract than narrative – desire and sexuality ambiguously linger between the animalistic and the mechanic. A blue shadow saddens the atmosphere and the two dancers almost devour each other in their hyper-energetic moves. This gifted dancer and choreographer has recently started to invent bodies whose level of desire and energy is condemned to express itself only by the means of an inhumanely muscular tension. Her dancers transform their flesh into stone. Thus, desire, love, sex can only happen as a violent shock of surfaces. If we first had everday objects and props populating Andermatt’s early choreographies, in her later works, namely ‘Cio Azul’ (‘Blue Rose’, 1993), it is the body itself that metamorphosises into a kind of object – the body as hard surface subjected to all sorts of manipulations and dislocations. Such object-body is the problematic centre – choreographically as well as cenographically- of Andermatt’s latest pieces. The eruption of this body in a state of emergency accompanies the gradual disappearance of set and props, till their ultimate reduction, in ‘Anomalias Magnéticas’ (‘Magnetic Anomalies,’ 1995), and mainly in ‘Poemas de Amor’ (‘Love Poems’ , 1996), to a signifying absence. It will be within this emptiness, in this world devoid of objects, cold, that the hardness of the skin, and the cruelty of the surface (as space for contact but also as insurmountable barier of being), can be choreographically expressed in its most intense fashion.

João Fiadeiro

Perhaps the most eclectic of all, João Fiadeiro allies his work as performer, choreographer and director with a profound investment in researching and promoting trans-disciplinary workshops, seminars, encounters amongst artist, scientist, scholars. This multiplicity of endeavours positions Fiadeiro in a peculiar stance in the Portuguese dance scene. Recently, in festival Danças na Cidade , the audience could witness how Fiadeiro seems to be more and more working on a performed schizophrenia of authorship: in the first part of the programme titled ‘Silent lives’, Fiadeiro performs a solo, based on Alvin Lucier’s sound experiments on repetition, meaning and entropy, and where Fiadeiro’s body resists the violence of reproductive technologies, by the means of an insistent (re)presentation of his maniacally living presence on stage.

On the second half of the evening , the simple, bare staging of the solo piece gave place to Fiadero’s latest group work, undoubtedly the most theatrical of his endeavours so far, and also a critique of massificaction by the means of saturated reproduction. This group piece for three male actors, constitutes his most openly attempt to construct a theatre of cruelty. Theatre must be the logical formal choice for Fiadeiro at this moment of his career, for one of the dramatic elements Fiadeiro has been working on since his solo piece ‘Selfish Portrait’ (1993) is on the redemptive force of violent regurgitation of the soul’s angst by the means of the voice. This voice might not necessarily articulate angst, but its sonic reverberation. Fiadeiro’s acting bodies must resonate (as lucier’s echo chamber) the violence of their everydayness.

Since 1991, with ‘Retrato da Memória como Peso Morto’ , Fiadeiro has been working towards a certain theatricality in his dance pieces. However, and until now, he had always cast dancers in his work, and a strong physicality based on Fiadeiro’s training in material arts and contact improvisation gave those pieces a distinct choreographic signature. It is with Fiadeiro’s exploration of his performing persona in a series of solos, most notably in the aforementioned ‘Selfish Portrait’ that a reconfiguration of his group work takes place and distances those works more and more from the formal boundaries of dance theatre to approach them to theatre and performance art.

It is as if Fiadeiro’s investment on the self(ish) destruction of his body-as-author (a destruction we can observe in the solo part of ‘Vidas Silenciosas’), had triggered a provisional destruction of his faith in collective movement. Wait… that’s not quite it yet: for the collective remain central in Fiadeiro’s art. Perhaps, then, we should write instead that it is a need to verbalisation the sonic and physiological power of the revolted scream that is leading Fiadero to theatre.