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Vera Mantero’s latest piece, and het first group piece since 1994, should bes een keeping the title in mind. ‘The Fall Of An Ego’, premiered in Lisbon this September in the ACARTE festival, expands Mantero’s continuous interrogation of the process of choreographic creation and of the role of dancing in contemporaneity. Indeed, Mantero’s career, since her very first work presented in an informal workshop for the Gulbenkian Ballet dancers in 1987, has been dancing around the limits of authorship and of choreographing. But never as with ‘The Fall Of An Ego’ has Vera Mantero stretched her own emphasis on process sof ar. As is more and more customary with most contemporary choreographers, Mantero’s creative process has always been one of collaboration with her dancers. This time, however, the collaborative process was such as to lead the Portuguese choreographer to acknowledge this piece as a co-creation with the other five dancers, Margarida Mestre, Nuno Bizarro, Christian Rizzo, Frans Poelstra and Sofia Conçalves. One must ask, however, if Mantero’s decision to dilute her directorial rigor at this moment is the beste move for a group of performers working with her for the very first time.

It is a piece of timely unfolding. It begs for attention and carefull scrutiny. In Lisbon, the stage was a totally white box, a neutral space, which is not the same as saying an empty space. Such neutrality is that of the unmarked blandness of everydayness, that white noise in which our motions take place, in which our actions, decisions, desires are laid to rest under the veneer of the societal. But this blandness is undermined by beasts that crawl under our feet, surround us, that we prefer not to see. To reveal such bestiality is the ask of the fallen ego’s. There is a moment in the piece where metaphoric overcharge brings about the effect of this everyday white blindness: when Mantero enters for the first time, she brings a bag with her. The bag moves and moves – mechanical moving – She sits down, she lays the bag next to her. She observes the others going through mesmerised routines. As time passes, we notice with shock how, from the bag, a whole bunch of mechanical toys crawl out – an army of soldiers firing at random across the stage, forever crawling and shooting as dance goes by, the mechanical drive contrasting with the sensorial explorations of the dancers. Warriors crawl on the dance floor amid flowers and coins and trash, as they have always done.

From there on, the piece marches towards a parade of fools, a carnival of uncanny metamorphosis. It is not so much that ‘The Fall Of An Ego’ depicts or advocates social inversion (that is, carnival), or social disruption (that is, revolution): rather, it displays consistently and intensively a peeling off social veneer, an unrising of the social skin. This peeling of is done mainly metaphorically; indeed, if Vera Mantero has always privileged a certain obliqueness and ambiguity in het images, this time the metaphors emerge as blunt as punches. What makes such punching more effacious is their always announced and forever delayed delivery.