DOO

Back to Africa

DOO is the result of Miguel Pereira’s renewed acquaintance with Africa. After 31 years away, this dancer and performer returned to his native country, Mozambique, which he only knew as a child. As he says himself, his cultural identity was not shaped until he was in Portugal and elsewhere in Europe. In DOO he confronts the European identity with that of the African ‘other’, and the 70s (the time of the 1974 Portuguese Revolution and other things) with the early 21st century. Together with the dancer Bernardo Fernando (PAK) and the DJ Jari Marjamäki, he gives an intense performance that combines words, pure physical dance and music mixed live.

“I was eleven years old, the independence was imminent, it was an early afternoon filled with sunshine, very hot, full of expectations. Under a porch, on the rutty ground, we were waiting to enter to the stage. The public outside was arriving, meeting and little by little was moving towards the pavilion. I was wearing, as well as the other boys, a coloured capulana, rolled up around the waist, with naked chest and barefooted. It was then that we entered the improvised stage and, nervous, we executed the steps at the same time that we were singing “Wa'mutiva Txava Txava Yuí anga'ni n'dlala ya Maheú .Yuí Wa'mutiva Caetano Yuí Buyá gandzaia Salazar.”

• Miguel Pereira (1963) is one of the enfants terribles of Portuguese dance. He has worked with Jérôme Bel, Vera Mantero and Francisco Camacho. During Spoken World ’08 he performed the solo Miguel meets Karima in the Kaaistudios, giving his account of a planned joint venture with the Egyptian choreographer Karima Mansour, which, because of cultural and personal differences, never actually came about.

‘Miguel Pereira shows that it is possible to combine entertainment with contemporary questions. And that it is possible to do it with intelligence and talent.’  Expresso on Corpo de Baile