When I started thinking about this creation and outlining it, I thought that, in a period of fewer commitments, I could allow myself some time and space to reflect upon and understand what I go through today as a person and as an artist and how I could turn it into a solo piece. I sought an object which could bring together as a whole my artistic convictions and simultaneously contain a survival strategy.

I became aware that I have been working in this business for about 25 years, thinking and experiencing ways of talking about my personal and intimate vision in relation to the world's complex experience, projected and amplified in the scope of theater and scene. I have tried to never put the economic (or material) need before the artistic one. I think there was always an “amateur” approach in the way I gave myself to the pleasure of making art, which, as Barthes used to say, is the way of the one who “loves” what he does. Only after that, comes career and its status.

However, in an increasingly faster and capitalized world such as the one we live in, it seems that space for time to experiment, make mistakes, wander, search, get lost and find oneself (the amateur time) has been lost. So, instinct and the need for survival started to prevail over any and all artistic reverie.

After deciding that the solo would be presented in the venue "Negócio" (which means Business), in Lisbon, I thought that this venue's name would be a good theme and provided a strategy. Is it possible to think profitably upon the nature and object of artistic research? How to manage that paradox? How to reinvent oneself in the moments in which we question our own ability to pull through? How not to fall into oblivion?

Miguel Pereira

"To have a new strategy.
To make my work more appealing, more profitable!
To take the existing elements, shuffle, deal again, change the package.
And show it to the world, in a new global push, a planetary one!
To think big! [...] This has to be something great!”
[Miguel Pereira in Piece for Business]

Ficha Artística

Creation and Performance
Miguel Pereira

 

Dramaturgical Collaboration
Joclécio Azevedo

 

Artistic support

Nuno Lucas

 

Light and special participation
José Alho

 

Music

David Wolfert and Sandy Linzer

 

Co-production
Negócio/ZDB

 

Production
O Rumo do Fumo

 

Artistic Residencies
Circular Associação Cultural, Negócio/ZDB and O Espaço do Tempo

 

Support
Forum Dança

 

Acknowledgments
Ana Pais, António Tagliarini, Dina Magalhães, Luísa Veloso, Marta Furtado, Natxo Checa, Paulo Vasques, Pedro Nuñez and Rui Catalão 

 

Special thanks to Sérgio Matias for his collaboration in the early stage of the project
Project supported by Calouste Gulbenkian Foundation
O Rumo do Fumo is supported by Ministério da Cultura / Direcção-Geral das Artes