Miguel Meets Karima is a one-performer show. On stage, there is only Miguel Pereira, but the audience only sees Karima Mansour, an Egyptian choreographer. They met at a residency in Italy, did a small performance and received several proposals to develop a work together. For a year, they travelled through three continents in residencies and preparatory work, until two weeks before the premiere, at the Alkantara festival, after many differences and misunderstandings, they got angry for good and decided to do each their own piece. Miguel Meets Karima is the story of these meetings and disagreements, of what brought them together and then came to separate them. A detailed account not only of their relationship, but also of the intricacies of the arts and the obsession of programme-makers to generate partnerships that explore the games of complicity and contrast between two creativities, two cultures, two genders.
Hello Karima,
I'm sorry [not] to give you news sooner but actually I just had a very rushed time with all these travels and works so close. I've been thinking a lot in our collaboration and the way things ends in Rio - for me at least - and I have a very weird sensation of it. Actually I start to realise that our collaboration it's not definitely a cultural but a personal problem, so my difficulty is more about to deal with you as a person than with your cultural frame. And it's not a problem of difficulty or fear or given up. Usually I like to work with difficult challenges but I don't think that it's healthy to punish ourselves (at least I). As we developed our collaboration in a very psychological way, 'like a marriage' - and this is not a criticism - for me now it's impossible to separate this item from our artistic process. I feel that I don't want to continue something artistically based on that. But I don't have any solution for it. So, if you have an idea or if you have thought about it, please say something. Otherwise it's better to admit that our collaboration doesn’t work and we have to stop it and continuing our own processes. I'm sorry to be so direct. I would like that things were different but I cannot afford to change it. I hope that everything is going well with you, hope to hear from you soon,
Kiss, Miguel
Ficha Artística
Miguel Pereira
Dramaturgical Collaboration
Roger Bernat and Rui Catalão
Costume Execution
Mónica Bertran
Executive Production
O Rumo do Fumo (Lisbon), Alkantara (Lisbon) and Panorama Rio Dança (Rio de Janeiro)
Coproduction
Festival Alkantara 2006, Panorama Rio Dança, O Rumo do Fumo, Festival Mapa / Cel.lula Sant Mori, Jangada de Pedra, Galeria ZDB
Artistic Residency
CENTA - Centro de Estudos de Novas Tendências Artísticas, Cel.lula Sant Mori, Negócio/ZDB
Support
European Cultural Foundation, Telemar (Brazil)
