Taking a connection between Lisbon and Berlin as its starting point, Inverted Landscapes examines the history of two people from the Portuguese performance arts who exchanged geographical location in search of a common artistic goal: Ruth Aswin, German, who came to Portugal to dance in the 1930s, and Valentim de Barros, Portuguese, a student of Aswin’s who fled to Berlin in search of work and freedom.
Inverted Landscapes is therefore an homage to the sense of rootlessness shared by these two historical artists from two different countries, as well as an examination of two ways of living that have more to do with history than geography.
Their survival procedures and artistic interests, which a preponderant history cannot cope with, are the motto for a haptic experience. A series of gestures and sounds, movements and words, will be triggered and activated. By allowing communal engagement, these actions will offer expressions of identities without formatted purposes. Moreover, the performance speculates on how the history of performing arts could have taken a different course, by bringing to light the suppressed voices of these two artists and by revaluing their artistry, even if only through imagined forms. Taking performance as a relational support, representativeness becomes constitutive of the work by being able to gently deal with all matter and materials of the world. In this sharing of the somatic, where sensory mechanisms such as affection and sensation are the engine of production, the background falls, and a circumstantial flourishing is revealed in the present.
The landscape is inverted.
