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

This piece is the result of a collaboration that I developed with Karima Mansour, an Egyptian dancer and choreographer, between September 2004 and June 2006, in the context of two residency projects: “The Travel” (Italy, Spain and Portugal) and “Close Encounters” (Portugal, Brazil and Egypt). At the end was decided that each of us would do a solo. We were commissioned by Alkantara Festival to show the result and presented both solos in the same space, one after the other. I was first and Karima was after me. 

This was my proposal. 

[Miguel Pereira]