We can only observe the past. In each and every moment the present we are inhabiting, becomes the past for somebody else. The same can be said in relation to the way our gaze meets the immensity of the universe or the personal histories. The distance travelled by the gaze to meet its object turns everything into past. 

How is history becoming movement, how is a theme or an interest becoming movement, what can be uttered through movement and what procedures to use are the issues at the core of the working process of the LUCKY DUST project. 

How is history becoming movement, how is a theme or an interest becoming movement, what can be uttered through movement and what procedures to use are the issues at the core of the “Lucky Dust” performance, created by Vera Mantero, Mădălina Dan and Ștefania Ferchedău, in a Romanian-Portuguese coproduction by The Institute of the Present and O Rumo do Fumo.

“Lucky Dust” is triggered by a selection writings and performances of the Portuguese choreographer Vera Mantero, dating mainly from the late 1980s and the 1990s, together with recent texts written during the working process in 2022 and 2023, and has generated two solos performed by Mădălina Dan and Vera Mantero.

A body is what we are in the world. Then there’s a number of things we can do and which can project us out of our bodies. But we cannot leave our body temporarily, we cannot do so until a pain passes, for example. No one can get rid of their body; we cannot exist beyond our body. It is as if there really was a destiny, a corporeal destiny: everything that will happen in our body that we cannot control, be it good or bad, is our destiny.

[Vera Mantero, My Body and the Body of Other People, 1988]

“We are our age, we are our demons, we are our energy. Anatomic body, phantomatic body, humoral body, fixed biography body, preserving artistic persona body, self-sabotaging in real life body. Companionship of hormones, intense emotions, flush of feelings. Hormones that deform you, emaciate you, make you somebody else. You can only defy them with a huge exploded laugh.”

[Mădălina Dan, Entities, notes from the LUCKY DUST process 2023]