A BEING HERE FULL
Artistic Direction
Vera Mantero
Visual Concept / Installation
Nadia Lauro, assisted by Thérèse Beyler
Creation / Performance
Sabina Holzer, Vera Mantero, Martin Nachbar, António Poppe, João Samões, Litó Walkey
Sound Track and live performance
Boris Hauf
Video
Helena Inverno
Light Design
Jean-Michel Le Lez
Texts
Herberto Helder / William Shakespeare
Production
O Rumo do Fumo
Co-producers
Le Quartz-Scène Nationale de Brest, Balleteatro Auditório, Teatro Nacional de São João, Porto2001 Capital Europeia da Cultura
For this piece, commissioned by Le Quartz, in Brest, and by Porto 2001 European Cultural Capital, Vera Mantero decided that she wanted to think together (one of her favourite activities!). She gathered several artists during one month in Brest, with the aim of thinking with them: the choreographers/performers Sabina Holzer, Litó Walkey, João Samões and Martin Nachbar, the writer-performer António Poppe, musician Boris Hauf and, in the field of the visual arts, Nadia Lauro and Helena Inverno. For four weeks the subjects turned around some of the following: how does energy appear? How does it appear in our lives? What makes us move in life, what is it that makes a human being get into movement? What is it that creates curiosity, what is the motor of curiosity? How to go through an existence that takes advantage of all of its potential?
These nine artists had the desire of inhabiting, and making others inhabit, these other places of existence, less tangible, less linear, less functional, but equally necessary. Or actually more necessary, since its hard to find sense to our “functions” without inhabiting such places. Inhabiting those things, which seem inexplicable and indescribable through our daily language, but possible to say through these other languages that are in our body, in our perception, in the existence of all of us. They thought we need this practice of tuning in to these other languages, of emitting and perceiving what crosses us across them.
In a process of one month they reflected upon, talked about, improvised over and observed thoroughly. They exchanged and created links between words, actions, movements, sounds, spaces or objects. A performance created by artists of different fields and which takes, successively or simultaneously, several forms: the concert, the reading, the choreography, the installation... and where the public will find its place likewise under different forms, be it in terms of space, time or perception. Jean-Michel Le Lez joined this group to work the lights of the performance, which concluded this whole path.
Vera Mantero
If they ask: of the arts of the world?
Among the arts of the world I choose the one of seeing comets
crushing down
on the big masses of water: then, the hot coal over the nooks,
marshes between them.
I want in the darkness digged over by the lights
to win baptism, skill.
Burned on the edges of fire of the puddles.
That is my name.
And the days cross the nights until the other days, the nights
fall into the days – and I study
crumbled heavenly bodies, abundant sources, the secret.
Herberto Helder in “Do Mundo”
translated by Vera Mantero with the help of the French translation by Christian Mérer and Nicole Siganos
“If I can’t dance in your revolution, I’m not coming”.
Emma Goldman
the connections between freedom and desire. between openness and the emergence of motion/movement. to create that which creates motion. to create that which creates desire. to create that which creates openings.
to include in life all the potency of the body, all the potency of its knowledge, and all the potency of its desire, of all its extremely varied desires.
to understand life sensually, to understand life socially.
to live in the presence of the whole poetic pattern.
to continue doing readings of the world, creative readings of the world, readings which create meanings. to give sense to the being here. a being here full. which necessarily implies a being here full of exchange.
Vera Mantero
Vera Mantero got together a group of artists, writers and thinkers determined to put into practice, and through different fields, the idea of a potent life.