MÃO NA BOCA (HAND ON THE MOUTH)

mão na boca

By Jessie Emkic

Turning paintings of vomiting monkeys and aborting women into a dance performance may sound like Sisyphus’ labour, but to Joana Providência it was sheer pleasure. In 2009 she will be celebrating twenty years of her work.

The Portuguese choreographer Joana Providência was commissioned by the Fundação de Serralves in Oporto, Portugal, to produce a performance based on the work of the famous Portuguese painter Paula Rego. The performance was shown in parallel with the exhibition of Rego’s work in Fundação de Serralves in 2004.
“To me this work is very important,” says Providência. “What I consulted first was a book with graphics from Paula Rego. These graphics were based on tales and children’s stories.” Rego researched Portuguese fairy tales in the 1970s with grants from the Gulbenkian Foundation, using characters that appeared in the fairy tales she read, to paint provoking images. In one of her paintings, a red monkey vomits as his wife cuts off his tail. “As soon as I encountered Rego’s work, I knew it would be a strong experience,” Providência continues. “Her work has a great power and I realized I would have to find a way to transport that power onto the stage.”

Transporting Rego’s work onto the stage was rather challenging. Rego’s paintings don’t appear static and can be described as somewhat organic. They change their meaning with the spectator, exposing ambiguities and combining extremes. In her 1987 painting ‘The Policeman’s Daughter’, an obedient daughter is polishing her father’s jackboot and at the same time holding her arm inside it in such a manner as if she were saying ‘up yours’. Obedience and rebellion, humiliation and submission, violence and revenge: these themes are the foundation of Rego’s work.

“The title of the performance appeared before I began producing it,” says Providência. “To choose the title, I did an exercise while watching a documentary about Paula Rego.”
She would note down the words she’d hear in the documentary. Some of the words appeared to be too strong and far too direct. The words ‘mão na boca’ seemed open without being offensive. “Somehow, Paula Rego holds her hand over her mouth because she uses the hand to scribble and while doing so, she is expressing everything that happens inside of her. The hand functions as a mouth,” says Providência. “When a work is developed by being commissioned or by an invitation, there is a goal that is set at the beginning. I realized I would need performers for this show who were already known to me.” Knowing they were available for this type of work, she also knew how they would respond to this material that “...demands literary everything from a performer.”

For Providência, “...the creation of Mão na Boca developed in two ways: On one hand, the drawings and paintings as universes of tales, fables, and novels, were generating impulses. On the other hand, the hidden or less readable marks in Rego’s work of memories, fears, sounds, and imagination, worked as a motor for the performance. To the performers it was proposed to improvise using their shadow as a way of reducing the body to a smudge that transforms, deforms, and folds itself in scales, shapes, and tensors. The body was interpreted as a technique of physical narration, filled with conflict, evolving through various states, having skin, flesh and tendons.”
With the strong visual character that endorses her work, Providência achieved the likely impossible: to breathe a life into paintings by turning the imagery into movement, and to evolve the movement into an epic of extraordinary stills.

Providência belongs to a generation of choreographers who have been influencing the development of contemporary dance in Portugal significantly for the past twenty years. She has been the director and professor of the Movement Department for Interpretation Studies at the Academia Contemporânea do Espectáculo in Oporto since 1995. She is a part of the theater company promoted by the ACE/Teatro do Bolhão and is a member of their artistic board. She teaches choreographic composition at various schools and workshops in Portugal and abroad. Her work has been shown in Glasgow, Salamanca, Madrid, and several dance festivals across Europe.

published in Art in Migration, November 2007

mão na boca


Joana Providência