teatro meridional | duration 1h20 | tickets 10 € / 5 € 
sunday _ 1 june 17h | monday _ 2 june 19h
in english without subtitles

A light and recalcitrant work, Vera Mantero and five performers explore a single proposition that revolves almost completely around language, or better around speech, but also mumbling, grumbling, growling, meowing, humming, stammering and singing. Gestures and dance emerge where the body transforms into an ear or a peculiar soundboard. The piece embraces with theatrical joy an (im)probable future social body and doesn’t shun from the literal or kitsch. Language as a possibility to say ‘we’ and thereby affirm or ‘speak out’ the actual difference of the world we live in – on a political level the work reminds me of Jean-Luc Nancy’s writings. Since collaboration and creation are a social process itself, The Extreme Exercise has travelled a great distance between its première in Brest and the performances in Brussels: from a strict version that stresses the group as an outlandish choreographic machine, to a loose, ‘juicy’ one that takes as a point of departure the performer’s freedom in dialogue with the public, as yet another social body. Yet potentially it still commutes between these two extremes, voicing the lingering energies and imaginations of a vast spectrum.

Jeroen Peeters

artistic direction vera mantero | performance and co-creation brynjar bandlien, loup abramovici, marcela levi, pascal quéneau, antonija livingstone (now performed by andrea stotter) e vera mantero | visual installation and costume design nadia lauro | live music and sound engineering boris hauf | light design jean-michel le lez | dramaturgic collaboration bojana bauer | executive production o rumo do fumo | co-production centre chorégraphique national de tours, centre pompidou - les spectacles vivants | festival d'automne (paris), culturgest (lisboa), le quartz/scéne nationale de brest, o espaço do tempo (montemor-o-novo) | support fundação calouste gulbenkian

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