A Collection for Tomorrow
(the people we are going to be)
Before the world underwent the great change that 2020 brought us globally and almost simultaneously, dance was no longer just the art of the virtuous, aerial, indisputable body outside the canons that allowed it to fly, but at the same time locked it in a code that removed it from the larger discussion of the body. The dancing body opened the way to the expression of many other bodies and to a diversity of experiences that created a mixture. Cutting short the story, which is after all recent, we decided to add the word and reflection to formulate in another way, and in parallel, the discoveries that the bodies led us to make.
The imposition of social distance brought us other possibilities of having or provoking unlikely encounters. It gave us ideas about the questions we hadn't yet asked, about the resonance of experiences beyond the subject matter dealt with at the time.
For the collective memory, thousands of themes that made us the people we are today remain unnamed. We want to know more about the paths of the people who, in the past, led to breakthroughs in Portuguese performing arts, whether that time was ten, 20 or 30 years ago. We want to know who they are today and why they are like that. And to discover who we are after having come across them.
Dance in Portugal has traveled. It went outside and came back, it compared itself. To compare oneself to the reality of the other is the greatest and most essential experience in the construction of the self. At what point do we discover things that are better than us at the same time that we discover in ourselves traces of what we imagined to be in others?
Dance relates to a multiplicity of "layers" of all people and, therefore, of the public too. We might be more used to resorting to reason to discuss what we saw in a performance, but our muscles "saw" us at the same time. Did the muscles "talk" about the experience? Probably not. Hence, the series of interviews promoted by the EVC will be dedicated to the questions that were never asked to people who were there at the time, and are here again. Maybe they were headliners then, yet now they will be reflecting. And they are going to transform those who were not headliners into protagonists of the change that made us as we are.
I, Cristina Peres, will ask the questions and lead people to question themselves. I was there ten, 20, 30 years ago, but I haven't seen everything, either. As we can never have a clear notion of the present, the past, and the future in a single moment, we will try to look at the trace that remained, valuing our being a point of arrival. And, even more, serving as a bridge to what is to come.
One or two guests. One theme. A conversation that is meant to travel as far as dance can go. Without limits of time or space, building a collection for tomorrow.
Cristina Peres, 2021
Part I
Marlene Monteiro Freitas Pieces are living entities
Part II
Clara Andermatt To choose the best surprises
Part III
André Guedes Generating spontaneous complicity
Part IV
Vera Mantero The party of conjugation
Part V
António Pinto Ribeiro We are willingly going blind
Part VI
Mark Deputter The first impulse is to be fascinated by the work
Part VII
João Fiadeiro Suspending Certainty
Part VIII
João Lucas Discovering the world beyond what it is
Part IX
Miguel Abreu The non-coexistence of diversity destroys culture
Part X
Olga Roriz The soul of the shoe is me
More information
You can watch the entire collection here.