Vera Mantero

Vera Mantero studied classical dance with Anna Mascolo and worked in Ballet Gulbenkian in Lisbon between 1984 and 1989. She started creating her own choreography in 1987 and since 1991 she has been showing her work all over Europe, Argentina, Brazil, Canada, Singapore, South Korea and USA. From her choreographic work she points out her solos "Perhaps she could dance first and think afterwards" (1991), "Olympia" (1993) and "one mysterious Thing, said e.e.cummings*" (1996), as also her group pieces "Under" (1993), "For Boring and Profound Sadnesses" (1994), "Poetry and Savagery" (1998), "Until the moment when God is destroyed by the extreme exercise of beauty" (2006) and her latest piece "We are going to miss everything we don't need" (2009).
Vera Mantero participates regularly in international improvisation projects alongside improvisers and choreographers as Lisa Nelson, Mark Tompkins, Meg Stuart and Steve Paxton.

Since the year 2000 Vera Mantero is dedicating herself also to vocal work by singing the repertoire of several authors and co-creating experimental music projects.

In 1999 the Theatre Culturgest in Lisbon organized during one month a retrospective of her work created until then, which was entitled "Month of March, Month of Vera".

"Eating your heart out", a work created in collaboration with the sculptor Rui Chafes, represented Portugal at the 26th Biennial of São Paulo 2004. In 2002 Vera Mantero was awarded the Almada Prize (IPAE/Ministry of Culture) and in 2009 the prestigious Gulbenkian Art Prize for her career as a performer and choreographer.

For me, dance is not a given fact; I believe that the less I acquire it, the closer I will be to it; I use dance and performance work to understand what I need to understand; she sees less and less sense in a specialized performer (a dancer or an actor or a singer or a musician) and more and more sense in an especially trained total performer; she sees life as a terribly rich and complicated phenomena and work as a continuous fight against the spirits' impoverishment, hers' and the others', a fight which she considers essential at this point of history.