A piece that places us before the unconscious, nearly an entry into the world of dreams, through a symbolic and simultaneously everyday language, attempting to reconnect with nature and to fight against all the frights in the world.
by A Oficina
Thus this piece simultaneously becomes the recognition of an awe before the possibilities offered by life, a game that precedes its own rules, a research on ways of building a possible materiality of the unconscious and the assumption of a non-normative diversity, a diversity that is constantly bubbling on the surface of the earth. (...) Vera Mantero's creation – with the precious collaboration of Henrique Furtado Vieira, Paulo Quedas, Teresa Silva and João Bento – adds irony to that sort of visceral doubt about the meaning of things and our way of inhabiting them. But there is also, more than ever, delicateness, attention to gestures, to their contours and their impact on others, human and non-human. A precious thing.
Daniel Tércio, Jornal de Letras
[The piece] is a plunge into deep crying, into minimal breath, into a wisp of voice, into the nature of what it is to be spirit – and the question is, how to keep it alive? I would risk defining Vera Mantero's work method as a hand-to-hand combat with the enchantment and the unease of not knowing. It frightens and makes one tremble. This will all make sense.
Vera Santos, Histórias(s) da Dança
‘Really try and let yourself be... in a different sphere. Maybe helping yourself by blurring your gaze […]. Losing your way, losing your bearings […].Not knowing what I do, unaware of what I do, it’s not part of what I know, I’ve never seen it, I don’t know where it comes from or where it’s going.’ This is a fragment of show’s script, in which dance isn’t what we can learn about or know, just as we also can’t know what is accomplished on stage. But that's all right, because the richness of the sound universe, the script and the stage actions’ surrealism, the recycling of objects and a certain appeal to a concrete and ecological materiality supersede any interpretation. I believe there is a rhythmic tension in the contrast between the extreme concreteness of the elements of the composition (for example, the concrete music that comes out of the interaction with the recycled objects) and the abstraction of the space and even of the performers’ presences. Also, perhaps, a mystical or transcendental layer. A kind of playful ritual that escapes knowledge and definitions, although it’s open to connections and associations.
Afonso Becerra Arrojo
A fright is a place within the world or even the world itself. A fright is that which falls on our senses when we don’t understand what’s coming our way. A fright is vitality in a numb world. Yesterday, the fright became even more of a world, in an apo(st)calyptic and pro-ritualist context whose interference, the interruption and the drawing of attention to the ‘I don't care’, left behind a strangeness in the cells, one that we badly need. The proliferation of frequencies always drives the body somewhere else, because it affects sensory perception. And the colours too. Perhaps the holographic jungle that forms in our minds can induce one last bastion of hope in our relationship with the planet. Because, as we hear at a certain point, we will need to ‘unlook inwards’. And in the end a plant will always remain, one that will sprout with no control from human beings. The capsule where Vera puts us is neither ahead nor behind, it is, to me, an awareness of winning back the present time.
Rui Torrinha
