Água Viva in Caldas da Rainha

Performance Água Viva, Saturday September 21 at 9.30pm
Igreja do Espirito Santo,
Largo Joâo De Deus
(Free entrance)

In her 1973 novel, Água Viva, the Brazilian author Clarice Lispector presents us with metaphysical reflections of the most spellbinding nature. It embodies the power of artists to speak to us from beyond the grave through their surviving works. By reading their creations we can become surprisingly intimate with artists whose physical bodies are long dead. We can reflect on how some aspects of life are timeless: such as our fascination with and fear of death. We become conscious that our lives are played out in the paradoxical tension between continuity and discontinuity. The performance is a reflection about this strange form of communication, drawing upon many of the temporal, musical, and metaphysical themes found in Água Viva.

The Swedish dancer and choreographer Carima Neusser moves to a soundscape created by the Portuguese musician Garcia da Selva. It has been composed from audio taken from a rare 1977 interview with Lispector on Brazilian television. Her words, distorted and amplified, shed light onto her creative process, – providing an arrhythmic dynamic for a choreography performed in her honour.