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During a short stay in Lisbon, I spent an afternoon and evening conversing with Portuguese choreographer, dancer and performer Vera Mantero. The talk was planned as a long and well disciplined interview on Mantero's work, part of a larger writing project that has been occupying me in the past few months. As we started our conversation in Mantero's living room, it became clear from the very first minutes we were not going to spend that afternoon and most of the evening talking about dance. Under Mantero's guidance, the subject became books, and for the most part, we read. To every question asked on her dance, the inevitable reply was that of Mantero pouring books after books on my lap, opening up dossiers full of her own writing, printing out more of her writing from her computer, and citing author after author.

I felt as if I was on a stage, perhaps feeling just what the Batsheva Dance Company felt when performing Mantero's 'Different Clouds Different Skies' (1995) - a piece where dozens of books hover over the dancers' heads. I remembered another cene, this time from Mantero's ' 'Different Clouds Different Skies' > Poesia e Selvajaria (Poetry And Savagery (1993), where dancer Lilia Mestre and Mantero try to hold books on their hands while reading them, and always unable to grasp them fully, books and meaning forever failing to be held. Mantero's living room in her small apartment in Lisbon Iooks like a writers: carton boxes are spread around the room, filled with photocopies and old, yelowish, newspaper clippings; her books, with a range of subjects ìnd authors going from the I-Ching to Jacques Derrida, from Gregory Bateson's writings on ecology to Gilles Deleuze's writngs on ethics, from child psychology to pornography, piled up in mysteriously balanced formations. On the walls, large white sheets of paper are fiiled with sentences, poems, interjections, manifesto-like words of order. She had turned her c.d. player on, and in a repeat-loop mode we listened to Brazilian singer Caetano Veloso's latest album, titled Livro (Book).

Taped to the wall in front of her desk large print announces the title of her production in the summer of 1998 as part of Lisbon's Expo 98: Poesia e Selvajaria (Poetry And Savagery). And all over the place, under your.feet, on the way to the kitchen, next to te!ephone, pasted to the front door, to her bedroom door, to the windows; hundreds of little recycled pieces of paper in different shapes, colours and textures read ideas, annotations, interrogations - some on the new piece, some on pieoes that may one day come to light, most on her ongoing question since she first started choreographing, in 1987: how is it possible to create a dance piece that is meaningfully true to life? In the past decade, the answers to that question led Mantero to a dance she likes to describe as "philosophical."

The relationship between choreography and writing, dance and the text, bas been recently explored thanks to semiological (particularty Roland Barthes) and to grammatological (Jacques Derrida) propositions that approach non-textual artistic forms as Ecriture, as writing, in a different manner, notation has accompanied Western dance at least since the late seventeenth century, and choreographers' relation to writing bas been a constant trait in twentieth century dance history: Duncan, Wigman, Graham, Halprin all produced extraordinary writings on their work and on dance in general.

And, as we all know, literature inspired many romantic ballets. But Mantero's relationship to writing is altogether different. It certainly does not derive from a theoretical hermeneutic position (grammatological or semiological) of perceiving dance as text. It certainly has no mnemonic purpose, as in notation, and even less so, does not serve as narrative line, or plot, for the dance; and it exceeds, in an important manner, the limitations of autobiographically writing "on her work." Hers is not the same relationship to language one finds so well explored, for instance, in Jérôme Bel. Her use of voice differs also from the soliloquies tanz-theater has accustomed us. In a lecture at Lisbon's Universidade Nova in the spring of 1995, Mantero clarified her retation to text: "I started using text more as a working tool, a way of touching more directly in the meaning of the things to be said, rather than having the text apparent in the performance."

This statement helps understand not only the centrality of text in Mantero's work, but most importantiy the function of its significant displacement, its refusal to take centre stage. For, even when words are uttered, they do not fill a need to add "discourse," or"narrative" to the pieces; they are uttered because text allows Mantero to engage in a certain use of time and of ailegory that approximates her dance to living - as one can witness particularly in the solos 'Olímpia' (1993); 'Foda de Morte' (Death Fuck, 1996); ‘anduma misteriosa Coissa disse o e.e. cummings’ ([a mysterious Thing said e.e. cummings, 1996). Foda de Morte'Justine’. Mantero appears dressed as a wellmannered, young, successful businesswoman. She sits on a desk, like a writer. Surrounded by commodities of beauty, medical instruments, toys, Mantero proceeds with utmost carefulness to dissect a dead pheasant. The textual quality of the work emerges not in any reference to Justine, nor in speech, but in her mastery of tempo; she unfolds the performance as one turns a book's pages. Only at the end, as in a novel, can we grasp the totality of the solo, as if Mantero was less concerned in serving the eye, always starved for the image that enchants, than the inner ear whispering the unfolding argument of a text. In 'Olímpia,' Mantero appears naked, dragging a bed across an empty stage, and concentrating cn reading a bock. She reads in French, mumbling. The audience can sometimes hear a full sentence, sometimes just a Ioose word. After crossing the stage Mantero assumes the well-known pose of Manet's homonymous painting. However, she cannot rest - she falls back, she falls forward, she can not find balance. Her only way of being peaceful is while reading and dragging around the weight of an object that forever fails to give her the rest it promises. Mantero's 'Olímpia' is obsessed in achieving truth by the means of the word. A truth always escaping us, just as words do when - thanks to the performative act of reading - they free themselves from the surface of the page and plunge into the realm of the living.

In her more internationally well-known solo, the astounding uma misteriosa Coisa disse o e.e. cummings, inspired by the figure of Josephine Baker, the voice of a poet announces itself in the title, only to be displaced again. The power of the word in this solo is certainly not narrative, nor is it biographical, confessional, semiological, mnemonic. As in 'Olímpia,' Mantero's body can only hold itself up, sustain meaning, as Iong as it is supported by a text. The tension created by her voice and the inescapable presence of her naked, darkened body is so powerful one cannot help but to think that in this solo, Mantero shows how text, repeated as an incantation, becomes the only effectively potent movement, the movement that strikes. As her body struggles to find balance, its expression confined to small gestures, the text punches us as a forceful gesture. Words become the dance.

Some in the audience cannot help but see those words coming from and attaching to that unstable, darkened, monstrous body. Mantero's manipulation of the text as a "tool" of her choreography entails a re-organization of the sensorial: one can only see her dance once one decides to listen to it. This is her most notable achievement as a choreographer. In the introduction to his anthology on choreographer's notations and sketches, 'Traces Of Dance,' Laurence Louppe writes: "the drawings and notations of choreographers can interest the entire range of critical inquiries linked to the question of sight, which, at this century's tutu, seems increasingly to bear on the limits of the imaginary." Mantero's ongoing work as choreographer has been to step outside this collapse of the optical with the imaginary. She seeks to truly find a dance whose imaginary can exist in a multiplicity of sensorial levels. She relies on writing - on its aural, rhythmic and semantic inner music - to awaken the senses of an art so invested in the scopic. By implicating us in an aural level she brings forth the sensorial realm of philosophy in its most traditional - and performative - form.

The translation of such a delicate relationship to text, to the senses, to the body, into movement; the grounding of her dramaturgy in what she once referred as her "absolute doubt in dance"; and the mistrust of the eye as the hegemonic sense in Western culture, all imply a very specific rehearsal process in Mantero's group work.

In 'A Queda de um Ego' (The Fall of an Ego, 1997), Mantero tried absolutely to deny the privileging of the eye in the creative process. No outside observer was allowed during the rehearsals, and she tried to remove herself from a directorial position as optical mastery. She described these rehearsals as continuous talks, continuous reading and writing sessions, punctuated with Iong walks in the Portuguese countryside. Scenes emerged very late in the process. In the studio, movement was not secondary- but it was refrained from its blinding power, displaced from its drive to overtake the stage as first impulse, the impulse a dancer has when asked to exercise his or her art. Mantero rather Iistens first, Iistens carefully, and truthfully, to inner motivations, and then dances. Her choreography thus unfolds like a well-structured poem. And, as in a poem, it is a work both for the eye, and for the ear. Mantero's pieces always seem to keep echoing somewhere inside us.