Vera Mantero

Music is no stranger to the work of Vera Mantero, the Portuguese choreographer who decided to start singing in 2000, performing material from the classic American repertoire to songs by Brazilian composer Caetano Veloso and the Zen universe of Portuguese poet Herberto Hélder. Some of her previous choreographies already established a relationship of dependency on music and sound, to the point of almost becoming sound installations.

Such is the case in “The Dance of Existing“ (1995), where sound was a fundamental presence through which one formed a relation (via truthfulness, autobiography, dramaturgy) with what one saw on stage: a woman in a glamorous dress, a ripped t-shirt and a pair of sneakers. ­Later, in 1996, in the performance “One Mysterious Thing, Said the E.E.Cummings*,“ an homage to Josephine Baker, voice became the movement, impressing itself on the choreographic assemblage through a very intense monologue. In 2000, in a choreography for the defunct Ballet Gulbenkian, “How to Happily Roll Over an Interior Emptiness,“ composer Nuno Rebelo created a soundtrack using only the voice of the choreographer.

Just an interpreter

These examples can serve to define Vera Mantero‘s ...