colaborations — beatriz valentim

DISTANTE – Paisagens, Máquinas e Animais | Né Barros | 2023

photos by Pedro Figueiredo e José Caldeira/TMP

There are forms of combat that have evolved to the dimension of a game, such as fencing. Throughout the piece Distante, the third of the series Landscapes, Machines, Animals the dancers are players, they call upon technique as an evolved way of relating body to body. The body-machine should, above all, follow this line, be able to shape instinct, and give it a new ethical life. The machine, in this sense, is the possibility, through technique and technology, to expand the body and the place without territorializing it. An anti-war message if we wish. Distant by the ethical dimension before the other, distant by a time ruled by repetition, a machinal time used above all to remember. The motivation to make a series of projects around landscapes, machines, and animals arises from the need to think of a piece that is not exhausted in a single performance, but that could dialogue with other works. The recurrence of the landscape and the body as the landscape in my projects, even if not always in an obvious way, determined this cycle of work that began with IO, will continue with Neve [Snow], and will have the third part with Distante. This fictional adventure should result in an inter-piece and intra-piece dialogue. Landscapes, Machines, and Animals, the concepts involved here, show three vanishing points in the definition of the human and, simultaneously, open themselves as categories to think of the performing body. In all the pieces, these dimensions are present and intersect, although the starting point for each one is respectively in each of the dimensions. If in IO the body convokes the animal and the mythological, the primitive and the technological, in Neve, the landscape emerges in its variants, that is, landscape as the outside, the exterior, the individual as intelligent landscape, the emotional and sound landscape, the filmed image as narrative landscape. In Distante, we start from the idea of a body-machine that allows us to work in this paradox of distant- proximity and that starts from the technique as a fundamental tool for humanization. I dedicate this performance to our beloved José Álvaro Correia. — Né Barros