sarma

This is chapter 2 of André Lepecki’s doctoral thesis in performance studies (New York University, January 2001), Moving Without the Colonial Mirror: Modernity, Dance, and Nation in the Works of Vera Mantero and Francisco Camacho (1985-97), of which chapters 1, 2, 3 and 6 were prepublished on Sarma. 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.

The Portuguese do not have a body.

Alexandre Melo, Velocidades Contemporâneas

...it may be that performance, understood as "acting out," is significantly related to the problem of unacknowledged loss.

Judith Butler, Bodies That Matter

I. A spectacular absence

These epigraphs define the field I am trying to assess. On the one hand, it is the force-field of history acting upon the national identity of a country under historical denial. On the other hand, it is the manifestation of those historic forces through performance, most notably in choreography, as reminders of what has been, undeniably, lost: the empire, and, with it, a certain national identity attached to the colonial project. At the center, lies the body, not as metaphysical entity, nor as trope, but as flesh, as nervous system -- matter upon which history and choreography will construct new configurations, new images, new models for subjectivity. At the center, stands the body, ready to move in unexpected directions, tread unheard of paths, dance unimaginable corporealities. For it was dance, and still is dance, that, in post-fascist, post-colonial Portugal, stepped to the forefront of cultural production and started to generate discourses and images that evoke the nervousness of a country at the crossroads of history.

The activation of this dancing body immersed in contemporaneity and reflecting the nervousness of history was a complicated process. As Portuguese art and cultural critic Alexandre Melo writes, the body in public forms of representation in contemporary Portugal can best be described as invisible, absent, lacking. In a provocative essay for the influential, national weekly newspaper Expresso in May of 1993, Melo identified the image of the Portuguese body as pure negativity, as the absolute loss in the cultural national landscape. The absence of a public discourse on the body in contemporary Portugal led Melo to title his essay, ironically, "Do the Portuguese have a body?" Melo opens his essay by stating that "the question starts by seeming absurd, but it soon becomes disturbing, as an accumulation of evidence starts pointing towards a negative answer: the Portuguese do not have a body." Melo starts his argumentation by enumerating a distressing series of scandals in the late 1980s and early 1990s involving governmental agencies as well as State-run institutions. In one way or another, those scandals involved a certain denial of the body, and Melo was intrigued by the impunity as well as by the civic apathy regarding cases such as the one of the psychiatrist working for the National Public Health System that refused to treat a depressed HIV+ gay man, claiming he could not endorse the patient's “degenerate” life. Melo goes on to note the carelessness of State officials in providing an efficient public policy regarding AIDS prevention; he mentions the trial, and acquittal, of top officials in the Ministry of Health accused of knowingly supplying public hospitals with HIV-infected blood; he recounts the series of deaths of hemophiliac patients in a public hospital in the city of Évora, due to a deficiently operated hemodialysis machine, deaths that led to no punitive or criminal prosecution to either staff or hospital administration; and he points out the chronic and (always) "inexplicable" deaths of young recruits during routine military drills in the Portuguese compulsory military service. Despite the shocking nature of the events enumerated by Melo, they failed to raise public concern or outrage. Melo ironically proposes that such accumulation of discrimination and criminal carelessness regarding public welfare, the background of absolute impunity surrounding those cases, and the lack of widespread public outrage, could only be interpreted as symptoms that "the body has no place in the current and dominant discourses in Portuguese society and that is why all happens as if the Portuguese indeed do not have a body." Melo dedicates the second third of his essay to an archeology of this corporeal absence in Portuguese imagination, in Portuguese cultural representation, and in public discourse.

Rather than following traditional explanations of this absenting body as grounded in deep Catholicism or provincial modesty, Melo reminds us that a whole hermeneutics, mythology, and even ideology of bodily loss is profoundly rooted in Portuguese cultural tradition and popular imagination. This ideology of loss is attached to narratives of the traumatic death of the XVI century Portuguese king D. Sebastião. It is important to revisit the legend. For not only is its mythological echo still perceived today as a sort of national destiny (what the Portuguese call “fado” ); the legend also defines a symbolic field of image-strategies regarding representation of the nation. A symbolic field structured around the perception of a national body that is condemned to forever be trapped by the trauma of the King’s lost body.

Sebastianism takes its roots from historical “facts.” King Sebastião, also known as the "child-king," led the last crusade against the Moorish in Morocco, in 1580, and disappeared in battle, prompting a crisis in the regal line of succession (he had no children), and thus initiating 60 years of rule under Philippine Spanish dominion. Sebastião’s disappearance is thus attached to the end of the Portuguese dream of endless imperial prosperity, of national independence, and of international hegemony. His disappearance – the king’s dead body was never found -- symbolically collapses the lack of a body politic, with that of a national project, and the very disappearance of the country itself. The myth of Sebastião's return, in a "misty morning" to restore the Portuguese Empire, emerged soon after his death, and still constitutes today one of the strongest national myths, inspiring political as well as philosophical writings, profane cults as well as sacred. Such is the core belief of "Sebastianismo." The myth of the return of Sebastião and with him the redemption of the nation, led to the establishment of a type of messianic cult, which ultimately traveled to other Lusophone destinations, most notably to Brasil. Twentieth century Portuguese philosophers and intellectuals such as Agostinho da Silva, or Eduardo Lourenço, historians such as António Sérgio, or António José Saraiva, poets such as Fernando Pessoa, have all addressed the importance of this national trauma and of its mytho-ideological offspring, the messianic movement known as "Sebastianismo," in the shaping of the Portuguese ethos.

Alexandre Melo identifies the symbolic importance of this primordial lost or absent body as initiating a "precious collection of exiled bodies" in Portuguese cultural and artistic production. Portugal would self-represent itself in the collective cultural imaginary as symbolically dis-embodied, forever waiting for its primal model to return, in order to organize its otherwise absent corporeal schemata, its national image, its purpose in the world. In a metonymic move, the Portuguese would also participate in this dis-embodiment – the Portuguese, like their king Sebastião, would be a presence without a body. The theme of this lost body, this body exiled from itself, is quite present in twentieth century Portuguese artistic forms. These forms, include major works produced by the avant-garde, as in the case of the cinema of Manuel de Oliveira, of the shattering heterenonymity of modernist poet Fernando Pessoa, of the suicidal drive of Pessoa's contemporary, the poet Mario de Sá-Carneiro, or of the drama and art of the modernist Almada Negreiros. Later in this century, this body in denial would (dis)appear also, according to Melo, in the photography of André Gomes, and in the cinema of João Botelho. After a historical survey, Melo summarizes his argument in regards to contemporary Portugal in the following terms: "A reflection, or a piece that takes as its point of departure a positive understanding of the body, is something rare in our current artistic panorama."

It is important to emphasize that the identification by Melo of this lacking Portuguese body is not at all a nationalist call for the creation of a putative essential Portugueseness. Melo's questions in the early 1990s echo and re-launch important insights on Portuguese culture first brought forth by Eduardo Lourenço in the late 1970s, namely in Lourenço's extraordinary readings on Portuguese "imagology" collected under the evocative title O Labirinto da Saudade (The Labyrinth of Longing, 1978). Melo's observations must be read along the lines of Eduardo Lourenço's suggestion that the Portuguese have been, since the disappearance of D. Sebastião, and most strongly since the nineteenth century, "absent from our own reality," and therefore immersed in a type of collective self-invisibility, an unthinkable corporeality.

It is extremely important, however, to consider what prompted each author (Melo, Lourenço) to identify the bodily lack, the excising of the body's carnal presence in Portuguese cultural representation. Eduardo Lourenço's observations were inspired by very specific, very swift historical changes brought about by the revolution of 1974 and its impact (or lack of it) upon the formation of a national self-image. Those changes were: the fall of a 500 year-old colonial Empire, the end of 48 years of fascism, the incipient "Europeanization" of an utterly isolated and highly underdeveloped country, and the large immigration of an African population (black as well as white) to continental Portugal. If Lourenço’s observations on lack were provoked by a historical moment of intensified loss, Alexandre Melo's identification of a corporeal absence in contemporary Portuguese cultural production was prompted by something altogether different. Melo identified the lack of the body by means of two very explicit corporeal presences -- the moving bodies of Vera Mantero and Francisco Camacho, performing solo works in a shared dance program in Lisbon. Alexandre Melo's powerful essay, written in the cultural section of what is arguably the most influential newspaper in the country, was a response to a shared dance program held in the black box stage of the National Theatre D. Maria II in Lisbon, where Mantero and Camacho presented two solos. Their work, albeit different in dramaturgical style and on choreograhic style, was perceived by Melo as rare exceptions of publicly imagined, and politicized version of what had so long been a ghostly absence in Portuguese cultural production: the bluntly physical body -- desiring, sexualized, visceral, carnal.

This is an extraordinary change, which signals also the rapid transformations in Portuguese cultural production between 1978 (when Lourenço wrote his essay) and 1993, when Melo saw Mantero and Camacho dancing. Their moving bodies were promptly perceived by Melo as treading a revolutionary path in Portuguese cultural production. For Melo, those moving bodies, or rather the images those bodies proposed in their very moving physicality, represented one of those very rare (but also one of the most gratifying) examples in the Portuguese art scene of treating and understanding the body positively. (The only two other examples Melo finds in twentieth century Portuguese art are some pieces by visual artists Rui Sanches and Julião Sarmento).

What in the choreography of those dancing bodies, in their disturbing presence and confined motions, so powerfully provoked in Melo the sudden illumination of a corporeal void in his society's cultural production? To answer this question is the purpose of this dissertation.

2. "Portugal has no dance tradition"

There is more to Melo's identification of Camacho’s and of Mantero's solos as the rare exceptions in Portuguese artistic expression positively addressing the body. The simple fact that these two artists are dancers and choreographers further complicates their "exclusive" positioning within contemporary Portuguese performing arts. This is due to the absolute non-existence of a national theatrical dance tradition on the Portuguese stage -- not a classical tradition (ballet), nor a modern one (based on Duncan's, Graham's, Cunningham's or any other twentieth-century dance techniques and styles), not even a popular-based one (on ball-room dancing, social dancing). Vera Mantero and Francisco Camacho are pioneers, co-founders of a larger movement, initiated by a heterogeneous young generation of dancers, who came of age about a decade after the revolution of 1974. By the late 1980s this movement became known as Nova Dança Portuguesa (New Portuguese Dance).

The eruption of such a movement, in its explosive energy, creativity, technical skill, as well as choreographic inventiveness, is in itself a mysterious occurrence in the Portuguese cultural and dance scene. Indeed, Portuguese dance historian José Sasportes argues convincingly that although dance events can be traced throughout Portuguese history and at least as far back as the Baroque period, those events never left any enduring impact, pedagogical or artistic, so that they could crystallize or energize a Portuguese dance tradition. In an essay published in Dance News in 1968, appropriately titled "Portugal has dance history but no continuing tradition," Sasportes tracks, in a linear manner, dance events since the "heterodox pagan origins of the kingdom of Portugal" in the twelfth century until 1968. Despite some surprising methodological flaws, particularly in his uses of anachronisms (Sasportes insists on applying terms such as "choreographer" to twelfth-century figures), and despite an odd teleological exposition (Sasportes’ argumentation is structured as if history was a linear flow of causal events leading towards a pre-scripted goal), his essay, (a summary of a larger essay, published in English in 1970 as a whole issue of Dance Perspectives ) is useful as it underlines the notion of an important hiatus in the history of Portuguese dance production. Despite the continuing presence of important dance companies, dance masters, and choreographers in Portugal, particularly from the eighteenth century on, this presence absolutely failed to generate a dance community or a dance tradition in the country. If one takes the twentieth century as example, this hiatus between presentation of dances by foreign companies and their impact upon the artistic community assumes stunning proportions. One can not blame fascism and cultural and political isolation for any deficit in the presentation of dance companies on the Portuguese stage. From 1902 until 1974 (the year of the democractic coup), one hundred and ninety four different dance productions from non-Portuguese companies were performed in Lisbon alone. Loïe Fuller opened the new century to Lisbon's dance audience, performing in 1902, and returning again in 1912 and 1930; La Argentina came in 1908; Les Ballets Russes performed in 1917, and 1918, staying in the country for a period of four months due to the war in Europe -- to the satisfaction of the Portuguese futurists, who advertised and praised the Ballet’s presence in Portugal. Anna Pavlova, Josephine Baker, La Argentinita, La Révue Négre, The Saddler's Wells, the New York City Ballet, American Ballet Theatre, José Limon, Ballet Theatre de Maurice Béjart, Jerome Robbins, The Joffrey Ballet, Merce Cunningham Dance Company, Martha Graham, Nederlands Dans Theatre, are but a few examples of the most reputable international dance-companies, some of them with strong avant-garde aesthetics, that both shaped the history of twentieth century dance and that visited Lisbon on a consistent basis from 1902 until the early seventies. Among those companies, one should also add dozens of several "National Ballet" companies from different parts of the world, the visits of traditional Chinese opera, as well as of Kabuki theater, African dance troupes, as well as a number of less influential or less famous choreographers and companies coming from all over the world. Once again, their continuous presence on the stages of Lisbon and of some of the main cities of the country, failed to generate or energize a dance movement. To investigate the reasons for this failure is to enter into the realm of corporeality and its implications within a cultural context in which the body “does not exist” to use, once again, Alexandre Melo’s expression.

The most significant example of a Portuguese imagology in which the body is identified as absent, as exiled, happened in the early 20th century. I am referring to the failed attempt made by Portuguese modernism to embrace dance as a valid art-form. For a brief moment in the pre-fascist decades of the 20th century, the Portuguese avant-garde articulated an explicit desire for modernity, in which was clear the desire to metamorphose the national body (perceived as anachronistic), into an European one. With the Portuguese irreverent futurists, we see not only the proposal for one of the rare manifestoes for dancing in the country, but also the desire to shape and radically transform the perception of the national body from pure negativity into agent of transformation. The articulation of this project and the failure of its implementation only reinforce the idea that the transformation of corporealities depends on major social and historical shifts. Shifts that were only to happen decades later, with the end of the colonial regime and with the radical transformation the empire’s debacle would bring to the Portuguese self-image.

As mentioned earlier, numerous dance companies visited Portugal from the very first years of the 20th century. Among the modern dance companies, Diaghilev’s Ballets Russes, arguably the most important dance company of the early 20th century, performed in Lisbon and Oporto in the last months of 1917, and provoked the imagination of the Portuguese Futurists. Remarkably, the first issue of the futurist magazine Portugal Futurista, opens with an energetic manifesto, urging the Portuguese audience to attend the Ballets Russes. The manifesto is signed by one of the most important Portuguese avant-garde artists, the painter, playwright, and novelist José de Almada Negreiros, along with composer Ruy Coelho and architect José Pacheko. It is worth quoting extensively:

THE BALLETS RUSSES IN LISBON

Portuguese, attention!
It is to you that we are talking to. We
came to give you your freedom! Listen:
[…]
We know very well of the beautiful
brutality of our mission. We have
weighted well that quasi-impossibility of
turning you into an European, but,
nevertheless, we are resolved […] to hand
you the method by which you may achieve
your freedom by your own hands.
[…]
Listen: THE BALLETS RUSSES are in Lisbon!
This means: one of the most beautiful
steps in modern European civilization is
in our country!
[…]
Having gathered all the extraordinary
achievements of modern Art, as well as
wonderful scientific applications, the
BALLETS RUSSES comprise all the positive
aspects needed to facilitate the
understanding of the synthetic attitudes
of youth up until this Grand Victory of
Modern European Civilization: the maximal
individual discipline, the absolute
dominion of personality.
This is precisely what you, Portuguese,
will learn from the BALLETS RUSSES: how
to educate yourself. […] You will learn
how to fulfill all your potential, that
is, you will learn how to be complete,
how to give yourself completely to the
Modern European Civilization.
[…]
So, enjoy, Portuguese!
Go see the BALLETS RUSSES.
Go see how beautiful and luminous is the
brain of Europe!
Go see that dominating and sumptuous
gesture of Modern European Civilization!
Go learn how to be free and happy by your
own initiative!
Go learn that mechanics of discipline
where your youth is graded until your
total emancipation!
[…]
To you Portuguese! To all Portuguese!
With the brutal energy derived from our
pure blood of knowledgeable artists, with
our eyes aimed attentively at Europe, we
demand immediately the differentiation
between servilism and discipline!

José de Almada-Negreiros, Futurist Poet
Ruy Coelho, Musician
José Pacheko, Architect

The manifesto ends with a “note,” in which the three co-signers claim to be the authors of four bailados (“dances”), created and performed in private homes between 1912 and 1916, and of two more “under preparation” at the time of their writing. The manifesto “Os Ballets Russos em Lisboa” is important, inasmuch as it articulates quite clearly what could be termed as the political-metamorphic desire modernity always seems to implicate. The manifesto explicitates in which ways socio-historical transformation towards modernity requires a reconfiguration of the subject’s experience of corporeality. In the case of the Portuguese futurists and their hopes regarding the impact of the Ballets Russes on the general population, that desire remained unfulfilled. It is important to understand why. Firstly, the program presented in Lisbon was certainly the most conservative within the company’s repertoire. The ballets with score by Igor Stravinsky, the ballets choreographed by Vaslav Nijinsky, and the more recent modernist manifesto-choreography “Parade” by Leonide Massine, Jean Cocteau, Erik Satie and Pablo Picasso were not presented in Portugal. Indeed,

The majority of the dances presented manifested an orientalist, art-nouveau taste, and the two pieces by the troupe’s youngest choreographer, Leonide Massine, “Soleil de Nuit,” and “Les Femmes de Bonne Humeur” were received by the critics with great discomfort.

Most extraordinarilly, the company, due to financial problems and the tribulations of war, remained in the country for 13 months! Nothing came out of this prolonged stay in Lisbon of the most revolutionary dance makers of the time.

Pedagogically, the situation was as dire as it was creatively. The following evaluation of dance education in the Lisbon National Conservatoire by José Sasportes summarizes the country's predicament as far as the classical dance training is concerned:

The history of the dance school at the Lisbon conservatory is a sad one; between 1839, when it opened, to 1869, [when the dance school closed] only 430 pupils passed through it. After a long lapse, it again resumed but between 1913 and the present time there have been less than 900 pupils all told. [...] In general the teachers were mediocre and working conditions even worse.

To this scenario, one must add that only in 1973 was Modern Dance included in the National Conservatory's Dance School curriculum, which, also according to Sasportes, underwent in that year "its first reform in 40 years!" It is no wonder that Sasportes, in his 49 page essay on the history of dance in Portugal published in 1970, dedicates only the last two pages of the essay to cover all national dance manifestations in the entirety of twentieth century Portugal.

Efforts to overcome the highly sporadic nature of theatrical dance in Portugal were largely institutionally promoted, which, at least until the mid-sixties, meant essentially State-promoted. The first major effort to create a national dance company occurred during the few years between the late 1930s and mid 1940s, years in which fascist ideology had been most explicitly embraced by the repressive regime of chancellor Oliveira Salazar, mirroring the political situation in Franco’s Spain. Salazar's regime, known as Estado Novo (literally, New State), ruled the country between 1928 and 1974, enforcing a repressive policy, an economic closure of the country, and a colonialism predicated on the exploitation of natural resources. It was through a decree of Salazar's right-arm, the Secretary of Propaganda and Ideology, architect António Ferro, that in 1940 the folkloric-balletic group Verde Gaio was created, supposedly "inspired" by Diaghilev's Ballets Russes. The year is certainly relevant to understand the motivations behind the improbable act of providing a country with no dance tradition, and highly mediocre dance education, with its sole theatrical dance company. In 1938, Salazar had announced that 1940 would be the year of staging a grandiose "national celebration" commemorating a double anniversary: that of national independence in 1140, and that of what is known in Portugal as Restauração -- the restoration of independence from the Spanish dominion in 1640, that ensued D. Sebastião's death in 1580. The body would be brought into movement to affirm the liveness of the country after the death of Sebastião. This celebration of the regime and of nationalism would take form as a world fair, the Exposição do Mundo Português (Exhibition of the Portuguese World). The whole ideological project of this celebration is summarized by Portuguese historian Júlia Leitão de Barros:

Instead of the legitimization democratic régimes receive through elections, the Estado Novo engaged in an effort to associate the most marking aspects of its nationalism -- authoritarianism, elitism, paternalism, conservatism -- to a mythic past that would legitimize its present. More: it searched, through the hand of artists and the feather of historians, to divulge, with the possible "clarity," those invisible lines of continuity, uniting the past, present, and future greatness of Portugal.

Such an ideological purpose -- "corollary of a ‘politics of the spirit,' launched in the previous decade by (...) Secretary of Propaganda António Ferro" -- linking under the umbrella of fascist nationalism the traditional with the futuristic, clarifies the historical urge for the Estado Novo to create, finally, a national dance company. It also explains the odd stylistic oscillation between folklore and modernism that would be the aesthetic program for Ballet Verde Gaio , as well as clarifying the striking contrast between its explicit "inspirational source," Diaghilev's Ballets Russes , and its awkwardly exotic sounding name (literally, the Green Parrot's Ballet). Verde-Gaio's entire history, until the early seventies, when it finally subsided along with the régime that had brought it to life, could never escape the historical and ideological contradictions embedded in its propagandistic birth, and failed to create any sort of theatrical dance tradition, to create a style as well as a Portuguese dance community, or to create audiences as well as critics, writers, and stimuli to other companies. Sasportes summarizes in 1970 Verde Gaio's accomplishments, by noting that after its State-sponsored beginning as a folk-ballet company, Verde-Gaio

later turned into classicism, and then to expressionism under the direction of Swedish choreographer Ivo Crámer. Though still in existence, it has produced nothing of interest and seems to have no settled policy.

Immediately following this observation, Sasportes writes on a new Portuguese Ballet company, recently created at the time. This dance group, that later will be known as Ballet Gulbenkian, will play an extremely important role in the formation of contemporary Portuguese theatrical dance, including that of Vera Mantero and Francisco Camacho. However, writing in 1970, Sasportes still questions the future of this group: "how this company will develop remains to be seen. The lack of well-trained dancers is still a problem." The, second professional dance company in the country was also created institutionally, albeit this time through a private arts and science foundation established in 1956, in Lisbon -- the Gulbenkian Foundation, a powerful educational, philanthropic and artistic institution resulting from the last wishes of Armenian oil-magnate Calouste Sarkis Gulbenkian (1869-1955). Calouste Gulbenkian wanted to create an arts foundation after the "model of the Rockefeller Foundation, or the English Nuffield Foundation." Despite the "private" character of the foundation, the links and complicities between the Foundation and the régime of Salazar were many, beginning with Salazar's success in captivating the Armenian magnate, and in keeping the location for the headquarters of the future Foundation in Portugal, after Gulbenkian's death. According to an official biography of Gulbenkian published by the Foundation itself, Gulbenkian "did not hide to anyone his admiration for the ‘man at the helm,’ Oliveira Salazar." The bond between the two men is evidenced also in the fact that after Gulbenkian's death in 1955, the Foundation's juridical statutes were written by Oliveira Salazar himself, along with the man who would succeed Salazar in power after his death, Marcelo Caetano. The other co-writer was Lisbon lawyer and future president of the Foundation, Azeredo Perdigão, whose wife, Madalena Azeredo Perdigão, would play an instrumental role in the development of the Portuguese dance avant-garde in the 1980s.

The Gulbenkian Foundation, as well as the dance company supported by it, occupied, until the early 1990s, an important, if not exclusive, role in Portuguese cultural production. It was generally considered, until quite recently, the "true" (and only) Portuguese Ministry of Culture. The importance of the Foundation in defining cultural policies and, with them, of cultivating a regular audience for the arts in Lisbon, and the role of the Ballet Gulbenkian in presenting regularly works of contemporary choreographers to the Portuguese public, thus creating a much needed professional class of Portuguese well-trained dancers, as well as an audience for those dancers, are particularly relevant for this dissertation. It is not by chance that both Vera Mantero and Francisco Camacho were trained in the Ballet Gulbenkian schools, and Mantero had a brief but highly successful career as a dancer there, rising within the company's structure from apprentice-dancer to soloist in 3 years. It was also on the Foundation’s main stage, with dancers from Ballet Gulbenkian, that she presented her first choreographic work, in 1987.

3. Missing country

Such was the general situation regarding the dance world in Portugal until 1974, the year when a group of mid-ranked army officers (mostly Captains and Majors), revolted against the government's incapacity to manage a colonial war that was clearly lost. The military coup of April 25, 1974 -- soon derailed to a full-blown revolution -- finds its origins in the ever escalating colonial wars the Portuguese fought on three fronts in Africa between 1961 and 1974, first in Guinea-Bissau, then in Mozambique and Angola. It is important to concentrate for a moment on the April 25, 1974 coup. Its origins and consequences are of primary importance to understand the transformations of Portuguese society in the past quarter of a century -- including Alexandre Melo's comments on the Portuguese body as absent, and the disturbingly insightful analysis of Portuguese imagology as marked by loss, proposed by Eduardo Lourenço. Ultimately the revolution is the historical event behind the development of a young generation of artists able to create in freedom, among them Vera Mantero and Francisco Camacho.

The coup of 1974 brought with it the collapse of what had been, for five consecutive centuries, the first and last of Europe's colonial empires, and with it brought a dramatic change in "the very definition of Portugal as an independent country." Portugal had indeed been a colonial ruler for five hundred years, but it was during the 48 years of the Estado Novo that it had radically and completely invested its national identity and its self-image as indiscernible from that of its colonial Empire. The Estado Novo was Salazar’s response to the highly unstable and violent First Republic era (1910-1926). Oliveira Salazar, a professor of economy at the university of Coimbra, was chosen as premier by a group of military insurgents. Political scientist Thomas Bruneau summarizes Salazar's political program from day one of the new regime, contrasting it to the preceding tumultuous but progressive First Republic -- "whether the Republic aspired to bring Portugal at least up to the nineteenth century; the "Estado Novo" would leap back to the fifteenth." Salazar was determined to maintain the country under his firm rule. His policies were based on an idealized, patrimonial rural model. Until the 1950s, these policies meant almost no industrialization, no effort to modernize the country, and no willingness to open the borders to international investment or any foreign "contagion." Such policies were carried ruthlessly thanks to a strong secret police, an ever active censorship, and the absolute centralization of the civic life under Salazar's personal, direct management. Portuguese historian José António Saraiva noted that "Salazar administered the State as a small-business manager from the province administers his business." This is even truer for the so-called “economic miracle years” of the 1960s and early 1970s, in which the country saw constant economic growth, but remained under fierce political and cultural repression. Such repression included an absolute refusal to admit any changes in the colonial policies, and an intensification of hard-line policies regarding the colonies, with the beginning of the colonial wars in 1961.

The empire was indeed crucial at many levels for the Estado Novo. Thomas Bruneau finds "illustrative of Salazar's priorities that he decreed the Colonial Act before the Constitution of the Estado Novo (1930 and 1933 respectively)." Bruneau makes a good case for the centrality of the colonial Empire in the ideological sedimentation and economical survival of Salazar's Estado Novo, when he writes that "the fact of empire was cemented in the whole historical definition of Portugal as an independent country." It is one of the major contradictions of the Estado Novo that the very definition of Portugal-as-independent-country which the Estado Novo was implementing was at the same time so desperately dependent upon the maintenance of an empire twenty-two times larger than the Metropole (Portugal’s was the third largest empire in the era of European colonialism), an empire Portugal clearly could not control militarily, develop economically, or contain ideologically. Perhaps perceiving the precariousness of its colonial control, Salazar voiced many times the notion that "the colonial empire was both integral to the definition of Portugal as a nation and was necessary for the economic health of the country." However, as one commentator noted,

It has convincingly been argued that Portugal was not the dominant power in the imperial system but rather its prisoner. Modern Portugal was too small, weak, and economically underdeveloped to fully exploit its colonies. But, for these same reasons it could not afford to give them up, and premier Oliveira Salazar frequently stated that Portugal without its Ultramar would not survive as an independent country.

Such dependency on the colonies, both in economic and in terms of national identity, was cleverly reversed by the Estado Novo terminology to emerge as the country's "vocação" (vocation, a term implying both destiny and choice, that is, as we saw it earlier, “fado”). To the Estado Novo, Portugal's fado, its true "vocation," was a vocação colonial. Thus the imperative for Salazar to proclaim the Colonial Act even before defining a Constitution for his own Estado Novo: Portugal was mirrored by the empire, the empire gave Portugal its only self-image, and thus the empire had to be defended and defined prior even to the metropole. The empire functioned as the body of King Sebastião: a ghostly, redemptive absence, a far away promise feeding the illusion of a national re-awakening.

This observation helps us understand the role of the empire in a country so utterly underdeveloped, as well as to understand Salazar's emphasis, his quasi-obsession, in making clear from very early on the indissoluble link that his regime would trace between Portugal and its colonies. The ideological purpose of the Estado Novo was to glorify that link by the means of essentializing the very core of "Portugueseness" in terms of a "colonial vocation." Discourses overlapping Portugal and its colonies as one entity bound by the forces of destiny and of Portuguese vocation, increased exponentially in the very first years of the 1960s, with the beginning of the colonial wars in the African colonies. In grammar school textbooks, a current image was that of the map of Portugal having attached to its political borders with Spain the contours of its colonies; this hypertrophied national body, expanding its shadows over the European continent was the pedagogical magical projection of a monstrous national body -- all was Portugal, and Portugal would stand alone, proudly, against the winds of anti-colonialism.

Eduardo Lourenço emphasizes this circular pattern of national imprisonment regarding the idea of the empire, as manifested in the ideology of imperial vocation, to propose that the core image with which Portugal can represent and think itself, particularly in the twentieth century, and particularly after the Estado Novo, is inextricably colonialist. "[F]or five hundred years," he writes, the imperial reality and vocation, "were part of our historical activity, and their memory, more or less intermittent, but never totally erased, constituted for that period of time the very nucleus of the image of Portugal that defined us internally." This image was a specular trap. Indeed in a reading book for the fourth grade, published in the very year that would see the first armed insurrections against the Portuguese colonizers in Angola, one can read under the chapter “Portugal”:

Portugal is our Fatherland [Pátria], the country in which we were born, the country in which we live and work. It is not a small country, for, besides its continental territory with 89 thousand square kilometers of surface, it possesses still, spread throughout the four corners of the world, other territories with a total surface of over two million square kilometers. […] Overseas Portugal is constituted by the territories of Cape Verde, Guinea, São Tomé e Principe, Angola, Mozambique, Indian States, Macao, and Timor – all of which … attached to the Mother-land [Mãe-pátria] by ties of centuries. Such ties are so strong that Continental, Insular and Overseas Portugal constitutes one single nation, large and well united, populated by over twnety million Portuguese.

Understanding of the mythical function of this all-encompassing, monstrous empire in the construction of an national(ist) image of the nation's body, is crucial to grasp the tremendous historical transformations the revolution of 1974 brought to the country and to Portuguese discourses on identity and national “vocation.”

The group of young military officers who headed the coup against the Estado Novo were initially inspired by the views of the more liberal, Western-friendly political writings of General António de Spinola, former chief of staff of War Operations in Africa. It is important to note that Spinola himself was not involved in the preparation of the coup, but was rather considered as a lesser evil by the mid-ranked officers who needed someone with a higher ranking and some political expertise to control the military and guarantee some political stability after the revolution. As radical as the revolution latter became, initially the very idea of decolonization was not necessarily the major priority in the coup. Certainly the end of the devastating colonial wars was indeed not only a priority for these young officers -- most of whom had had several commissions in Africa -- but the very reason for attempting a coup against the Estado Novo. The choice of General Spínola for first president however, as someone who had publicly defended a sort of "Lusitanian Federation" in his influential 1973 manifesto Portugal e o Futuro, does suggest that the end of war in Africa was not synonymous with to total decolonization at the time of the coup. Bruneau even suggests that "democratization" as a political goal of the coup happened more as a sort of reward to the Portuguese population to compensate for the inevitable "loss of Africa." It is congruent to both Bruneau's and Lourenço's analyses of the centrality of the empire for the country's self-identity that decolonization entered the political agenda only when the coup unraveled to political radicalization and, ultimately, to revolution. This move towards decolonization coincided also with the acknowledgement of the military supremacy of the guerilla, and the recognition by the Portuguese military that control of the situation in the three fronts in Africa was an unattainable goal. The terms under which Bruneau describes the revolutionary process are relevant:

The revolutionary process was based neither on a popular consensus nor on the power of an hegemonic party. Rather, the revolution is best visualized as a tremendous "leap ahead" in which structures of economy, polity, and society were thrown into the air, so to speak, without a coherent plan or program.

The dust raised by this structural dismantling functioned as the veil that helped the country to erase from its imaginary sight the image of the Empire. With it, the self-image of the nation entered into a crisis, whose full proportions and pathologies are elegantly identified by Lourenço.

4. Moving without a mirror: Nova Dança Portuguesa

As mentioned earlier, the end of the Estado Novo brought with it the end of Ballet Verde Gaio. But, now the pressures upon the country were to "modernize," to become more "European." As a candidate to becoming an advanced democracy, and a candidate to becoming a member of the European Economic Community, the new democratic, non-colonialist, "open" Portuguese State could not pass without a Companhia Nacional de Bailado (a National Ballet Company), entirely dedicated to the romantic and classic repertoire, which was created by decree in 1977. Thus, in the first decade after the revolution, the national dance scene remained quite similar to the one preceding it: two institutional dance companies, one promoted by the State, the other by the state-within-the-state Gulbenkian Foundation -- with no independent dance scene.

Given this historical context, the extraordinary dance explosion that occurred in Portugal in the mid-1980s (an explosion that still endures) emerges as a peculiar event: despite the lack of tradition identified by Sasportes, and outside of any institutional or governmental framework, a very vivid, creative, and professional independent dance scene emerged, and quickly found a space in the European dance market, achieving notable success. In less than a decade Portugal had invented a dancing body and, with it, a unique specific choreographic imagination, an imagination dance audiences are getting to know better and better as the works of Vera Mantero, Clara Andermatt, Paulo Ribeiro, João Fiadeiro, Francisco Camacho, Margarida Betencourt, Joana Providência, Rui Nunes, Madalena Victorino and Paula Massano (some of the most successful choreographers who began creating in the late 1980s) are now part of a canon solidified by very recent governmental support, and, in the cases of the first five names of this list, of international circulation and critical recognition. Its explosion as art-form, particularly its explosion as an art-form of choice among the first generation of youth culture after the debacle of the fascist regime, is intriguing.

Independent theatrical dance in Portugal emerged as an amorphous movement of mostly very young dancers and choreographers, who started presenting work under extremely precarious conditions in the mid-1980s, in the country’s capital, Lisbon, about a decade after the “Revolution of Carnations” of April 25th, 1974. Choreographers Paula Massano and Madalena Vitorino, both trained abroad (Massano in New York, mostly in Cunningham technique; Vitorino in London at the Laban Institute), are considered the initiators of what soon became known as Nova Dança Portuguesa (New Portuguese Dance). Massano and Vitorino started showing their work in informal venues, such as galleries, or factories, as well as informally training a slightly younger generation of their peers – to supplement a very scarce context of dance presentation and training in the country. The work and the careers of those two choreographers, and of those who immediately followed them in their choreographic impulse -- among them Vera Mantero and Francisco Camacho, but also João Fiadeiro, Rui Nunes, Joana Providência, Margarida Bettencourt, and others -- are profoundly marked by the convoluted historical upheavals endured by Portugal in the two and half decades since the revolution of 1974. Those historical turmoils include not only the already mentioned end of the longest dictatorial, fascist regime in Western Europe (overthrown by the military coup of 1974), but also the end of the longest colonial empire in European history (with the de-colonization of 1975); the end of 13 years of bloody colonial wars in Africa (1962-1975), and the return of physically and psychologically scarred veterans to the continent and to unemployment. They include the two years of revolutionary and counter-revolutionary turmoils in which the country was on the verge of civil war (1974-1976); the social adjustment to, and tensions erupting from, the great influx of African population (both white and black Africans) from the ex-colonies; and the adhesion of Portugal to the European Economic Community in the mid-1980s, with impact resulting from the implementation of a liberal economy and the resulting pressures for modernization. Needless to say, all these social, historical, and political changes had an enormous impact in the reformulation of Portuguese national identity, and in the construction of new strategies for national representation. It was within this context of radical bodily reconfiguration that Vera Mantero and Francisco Camacho started to dance, and soon, to choreograph dances.

Notes

(1) I am using this term in the sense Michael Taussig theorizes it in The Nervous System. A mode of production of reality, a systemic interface between body and world, where sensing and sense-making spring from the visceral and cut deep into the real only to entrap the subject within the very nervousness of his or hers worldly creations. See Taussig, Michael. The Nervous System. New York and London: Routledge, 1992.
(2) A reprint of this essay appears in Melo, Alexandre. Velocidades Contemporâneas. Lisboa: Assírio e Alvim, 1995.
(3) Ibid., p.174.
(4) Ibid., p.175.
(5) “Fado,” from the Latin, fatu , means destiny, someone’s good or bad luck in life. It is also the designation of a popular, urban form of song, originated in the brothels of nineteenth-century Lisbon, usually melancholic and fatalistic. By the 1940s, through the voice of the most important figure in fado singing, Lisbon-born singer Amália Rodrigues, fado went mainstream to be assimilated as the quasi official expression of the “Portuguese soul.” Amália Rodrigues, a daughter of the poorest neighbourhood of Lisbon, and considered, until her reccent death, the “absolute expression of fado,” defined the genre as the vocal expression of national destiny -- a destiny in which the survival of the nation in its colonial impulse is “destined by the swords of Spain on one side, and the terrifying Ocean, on the other.” See, Almeida, Bruno de. Amália. Estranha Forma de Vida. 6-episode TV documentary. Lisboa: Valentim de Carvalho, 1996.
(6) In a different historical and political context, Diana Taylor makes a striking remark on the mythical proportions of the “disappeared” within a society’s collective imagination. She writes, “the desaparecidos (the disappeared) are, by definition, always already the object of representation.” See Taylor, Diana. Disappearing acts : spectacles of gender and nationalism in Argentina's "dirty war". Durham, N.C. ; London: Duke University Press, 1997,p.36.
(7) Francisco Camacho treated the theme of sebastianismo in his group work “Dom São Sebastião.” I address this work and Sebastianic messianism in chapter 3.
(8) Melo, p. 176.
(9) Ibid.
(10) Lourenço, Eduardo. O Labirinto da Saudade. Psicanálise mítica do destino português. Lisboa: Publicações Dom Quixote, 1991.
(11) Sasportes, José. "Portugal has dance history but no continuing dance tradition." Dance News, February 1968, 14-15.
(12) Sasportes, José. Feasts and folias: the dance in Portugal Dance perspectives 42. New York,: Dance Perspectives Foundation, 1970.
(13) For a complete listing see Coelho, Helena, José Sasportes, and Maria de Assis, eds. Dançaram em Lisboa 1900/1994. Lisboa: Lisboa 94 - Capital Europeia da Cultura, 1994.. These numbers refer to the different titles presented, not the total number of performances (one title could be performed three nights in a row).
(14) In the twenty years after 1974, the number of visiting companies was approximately the same as the ones visiting in the first three-quarters of the century, indicating the cultural opening of the country after the revolution of 1974.
(15) The Portuguese Futurists, also known as the “generation of Orpheu,” after one of the journals they published, comprised key figures of Portuguese modernism such as Fernando Pessoa, Almada Negreiros, Santa Rita Pintor, and José Pacheko among others.
(16) Negreiros, Almada. “Os Bailados Russos em Lisboa.” In Portugal Futurista. Lisboa: Contexto Editora. 1982 [Facsimile edition of the 1917 first edition], p.3-4.
(17) It is hard to test the veracity of those claims regarding the actual staging of those dances. One must remember that Marinetti, in his “Manifesto for Futurist Dance,” outlines a series of scenarios for possible futurist dances, never staged. It could well be that the bailados described by the Portuguese futurists were just another dadaist pun. Dance historian José Sasportes tends towards granting the Portuguese Futurists the benefit of the doubt. The composition of the musical score of a 1913 dance by Ruy Coelho seems unquestionable. The ballets by Almada-Negreiros seem to have remained as projects. However, still according to Sasportes, this “group of progressive young dancers learned from [the Ballets Russes’] appearance, organized a troupe made up of society amateurs, and flourished briefly.” See Sasportes 1968, p.15. Sasportes is referring to the well documented public presentation by the Portuguese futurists of an evening of dance in the S. Carlos theatre in Lisbon, in 1918, just four months after the Ballets Russes presentations in Lisbon. According to Sasportes, “the pieces presented did not contain any modernist proposals, at least not at the level suggested by [Almada-Negreiros’] previous literary work.” See Sasportes, José. Trajectória da Dança Teatral em Portugal. Vol. 27 Biblioteca Breve. Lisboa: Instituto de Cultura Portuguesa, 1979., p.66. The ravishing reviews this presentation received from the Lisbon critics, comparing the dances as superior to the Ballets Russes, is characterized by Sasportes as an example of “the typical nationalism masking the lack of professionalism.” Ibid., p.67.
(18) Coelho, Helena, José Sasportes, and Maria de Assis, eds. Dançaram em Lisboa 1900/1994. Lisboa: Lisboa 94 - Capital Europeia da Cultura, 1994, p.18.
(19) See Sasportes, 1968, p.15.
(20) Oliveira Salazar died in 1970. His death prompted an "opening" of the dictatorial régime, mostly in terms of external policies and an attempt by the Portuguese government to be accepted in the international community. Political repression, however, manifested in broad State censorship of all news, incarceration of communist party members or of any political dissident, State sanctioned torture of political prisoners, and escalation of the colonial wars against independentist groups fought in Angola, Mozambique and Guiné-Bissau all clearly continued Salazar's repressive legacy.
(21) Barros, Julia Leitão de. "Exposição do Mundo Português." In Dicionário de História do Estado Novo, ed. Fernando Rosas and J.M. Brandão de Brito, vol.1. Lisboa: Bertrand Editora, 1996, p.326. Translation mine.
(22) Ibid., p.326.
(23) See Sasportes, 1970, p.46.
(24) Ibid.
(25) Rosas, Fernando, and J.M. Brandão de Brito, eds. Dicionário de História do Estado Novo. Lisboa: Bertrand Editora, 1996, p.442.
(26) Gulbenkian had not made explicit in his will where the Foundation should have its quarters -- Washington DC was one of the candidates, for Gulbenkian had much of his art collection on loan to the National Art Gallery. Given this context, Salazar’s feat was unique. See Rosas, p.442.
(27) Ibid.
(28) Bruneau, Thomas C. Politics and Nationhood: Post-revolutionary Portugal. New York: Praeger, 1984, p.23.
(29) Ibid., p.17.
(30) For vivid account see Bruneau, p.19.
(31) Saraiva, José António. Do Estado Novo à Segunda República. Amadora: Livraria Bertrand, 1974, p.84.
(32) Bruneau, p.23.
(33) Ibid., p.22
(34) Ibid., p.23
(35) Ibid., p.64
(36) Until the fourth grade, I learned to recite, like every other Portuguese boy or girl educated under the Estado Novo, the formula: "Portugal is a pluricontinental, multiracial country, with borders from Rio Minho [northern natural border with Spain] to the forests of Timor." Camacho and Mantero were also brought up under the same indoctrination.
(37) Lourenço, p.37.
(38) See Machado, Adolfo. “Portugal.” In Livro de Leitura para a Quarta Classe. Porto: Editora Educação Nacional, 1961, p.11-12.
(39) Spínola, António de. Portugal e o futuro : análise da conjuntura nacional. Lisboa: Arcádia, 1974.
(40) Bruneau, p.63.
(41) I am referring to the structural changes in cultural policies brought by the elections of 1996. With the Socialist party in power, a Ministry of Culture was created. Under this Ministry, the Instituto Português das Artes de Espectáculo (Portuguese Institute for the Performing Arts) was created. This Institute regulates the monies and policies for independent dance. It generally follows guidelines that had been outlined by the independent dance community as a manifesto, already in 1993. For the first time in Portuguese history, independent dance has governmental support in terms of pedagogy, partial financing of venues and dance festivals, and yearly and triennial distribution of subsidies to dance companies and choreographers.
(42) Dance critic and historian António Pinto Ribeiro locates in Massano’s Na Mão a Lâmpada de Guernica (Holding Guernica’s Lamp in the Hand), first performed in November of 1985, the first work of what he then called Nova Dança Portuguesa. It is important to note that the term always referred to a very heterogeneous group of choreographers and very diverse body of work; it never claimed to define aesthetic, stylistic, or ideological similarities underlying the various works. See Sasportes, José, and António Pinto Ribeiro. História da Dança Sínteses da Cultura Portuguesa. Lisboa: Comissariado Para a Europália 91 - Portugal. Imprensa Nacional / Casa da Moeda, 1991, p.83.