Until the moment when God is destroyed by the extreme exercise of beauty

As if you were walking through a wood

Até que Deus é destruido pelo extremo exercicio da beleza is a line of verse by the Portuguese poet Herberto Helder and means: ‘until God is destroyed by the extreme exercise of beauty’. The first sentence of the Judaeo-Christian story of the creation is: ‘In the beginning was the Word’. But now that God is dead, perhaps the word should also be destroyed.

In Vera Mantero’s new project there are six dancers on stage; they talk under their breath without interruption. It is important that they speak but we do not need to understand exactly what they are saying. The silences, the gaps they leave between their words, are just as eloquent as the words themselves. It is as if their sung meditation is constantly changing but ultimately always remains the same as itself. As if you were walking through a wood where everything was constantly changing yet always remains the same.

The music produced by these six talking dancers gives the viewer the feeling of walking round inside someone’s head: a galactic journey in the void or in the space of memory. And yet their speech is not turned inwards: they address the audience, inviting them to follow them on their exhausting journey. In this production, the viewer experiences the essence of theatre – the experience of a ‘here and now’ – as one great slow motion: as if time and space were being stretched further and further until they were so thin that they no longer existed.