Rui Horta – I admit I’m an optimist
A Portuguese man at ease with the world who resolved to bring the world to Portugal. A pioneer of modern Portuguese dance, he chose New York to begin his career, Frankfurt to make his name and Montemor-o-Novo to experiment with his dreams. Rui Horta has three children, three new pieces, his feet firmly on the ground and his eyes fixed on the future.
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“I’ve been a traveller all my life”, he says. It is an integral and defining part of what makes him Portuguese. He was a son of the Revolution; the 25th April 1974 caught him in the explosive energy of late adolescence. This political and social breakthrough corresponded to a physical blossoming, a new vision of the body, and his body understood it wanted dance to be his path. Modern dance was almost non-existent in Portugal. He rejected the classical ballet of the Conservatoire and the lessons at the Ballet Gulbenkian were not enough. He soon abandoned his plan to study Architecture and before he was twenty left for New York. He did a course in jazz dance – with Alvin Ailey, founder of the Alvin Ailey American Dance Theater – but something else drove him and suddenly he was having classical dance lessons and discovering modern dance at Merce Cunningham’s studio.
“I was lucky to inherit enormous creative energy. I grew up in a family which encouraged dialogue and critical discussion (mother and father university professors, eight brothers and sisters). It was a rich legacy. There was no money – I went to New York and washed dishes – but I always believed in myself. There were moments of great loneliness, others when I felt like throwing everything out of the window. But then my fascination for life returned. It was real optimism, not just some mental construct. The dream I was pursuing never left me.” The New York learning adventure, “which was supposed to last 3 months and went on for 10 years,” was followed by the creation of a company in Germany, which lasted another ten.
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On the way, Rui Horta directed the Companhia de Dança de Lisboa and opened a studio through which most of the first generation of new Portuguese dance passed. Then came the crisis, the feeling he was just marking time, a dark period full of doubt. It was then that he created two choreographies which made him visible internationally – Linha and Interiores – and which led to him being invited to found the S.O.A.P. (one of the iconic European companies of the 1990s), at the Kunstlerhaus Mousonturm in Frankfurt, where the choreographer made his name in the Germany of Pina Baush and William Forsythe.
It was the second phase of a dance career lasting three decades, when he staged an opera, directed a film, choreographed for numerous companies and was awarded many prizes. He created works which make us look at the world and ourselves in a different light.
I create, therefore I exist
“What artists do best is decode the world through themselves. We use our lenses to look at the world. This is not just some autobiographical act; that would be of no interest to most people. It is more like an oblique act of contamination. The wonderful thing about contemporary art is that it allows all of us to both enjoy and create. We are all co-creators of a work of art, especially in the performing arts, which are very difficult to justify. You don’t put them on the wall, they don’t have a definite value. A performance that you put up and take down is difficult to assess, but it is fundamental. We need performances to understand that the most important thing is our memory, our way of working, not what is left behind; it is in your power to carry that memory, and for it to influence you in life’s decisive moments. That is why the performing arts ought to be central to our idea of culture, because we need an intelligent society, which thinks for itself, which is capable of reinventing itself from its own memory. Art starts from doubt, which is the best tool for us to create another perspective, a different discourse.”
He has directed various training projects around the world and founded COLINA – Collaboration in Arts – an arts laboratory in several European countries bringing together hundreds of artists from different backgrounds who have learnt to collaborate with each other. But he is also the father of three school- age children and says everything is up for grabs in education. “We cannot support a system that turns out polite, well-manicured little children whose heads we fill with facts and whose free time is filled up. We need a system which teaches strategies, gives children responsibility and stimulates in them the sense of adventure which leaves them time to play, because play is the most creative form of learning about life -which is the opposite of what we’ve got. But we shouldn’t be afraid to do everything the other way round!”
He believes it is possible, that anything is possible, and that it is important that people believe. “Every one of us is born with a promise to fulfill. Some fulfill it, others don’t. I believe in bringing up my kids in this country. I’m not saying in this system, which has faults, but in this country. They were born in Germany, which has an incredible system, but we decided it was better for them to have Portuguese emotions, Portuguese smells, King Dinis instead of Bismark, our extraordinary historical legacy. This is a country that can inspire us. We have a fauna and flora which is amongst the best in Europe (and needs defending and enjoying!) and we have the endless sea, the balmy climate, and of course there are so few of us! Nine million and the rest a diaspora, Portuguese scattered all over the world, friends everywhere. We are not on the edge of Europe, we are in the middle of three continents! We have to let go of this stigma of being on the periphery. This was how we discovered new sea routes and other lands 500 years ago. We have a profound relationship with Africa and Brazil, an enormous field of possibilities at every level, cultural, economic, in business. We are natural networkers, what we lack is rigour and organization, we need to get together and develop active citizenship to allow us to become everything we could be and a system of education capable of moulding individuals who are creatively agile, rigorous and have a spirit of initiative.”
He speaks quickly, using his whole body (the voice is part of the body, after all), as though his words are struggling to keep up with his ideas, with an energy which is never negative, always contagious. Then he says “forgive me my bare-faced optimism, I don’t know any other way of living”.
Act locally, think globally
It is an optimism with a body, a realistic optimism. At the turn of the century, Rui Horta chose to live in one of the poorest parts of Europe – “but one of the richest in terms of biodiversity”, he adds – to return to Portugal and set up a futuristic artistic centre in the two-hundred-year-old Convento da Saudação, in Montemor-o-Novo. Every month artists come from all over the world for creative residences in deepest Alentejo. Artists who think and create in the convent and also in the town centre where they stroll, eat, drink, converse and go to the grocer’s, the haberdasher’s and the chemist’s with their clothes and haircuts and habits and foreign speech. A cosmopolitan revolution. “And their children go to school and play in the street. I’m a fan of these little great societies where we all have a name and it’s our first name. Mine was a love affair. The Alentejanos, who are famous for being wary, welcomed me with open arms. And here we are celebrating the fact, 10 years on” (see box).
Today Rui Horta’s daily life shuttles between the infinitely complex and the immeasurably simple. “The motto act locally and think globally is spot on. I can be doing a lesson on body movement at the Primary School in Montemor in the morning and performing in Paris in the evening. They are both equally fascinating and equally necessary parts of my life. Two dimensions of being. Virtue doesn’t lie somewhere in the middle. It is at the extremes. It’s not in the grey area, it’s in the dazzling white which we can hardly see without dark glasses or in the black, violence within us which enables us to overcome our fragility. It is at its greatest in New York’s super-Babel of information or the chaos of Jerusalem. Or in the total intimacy of nature, waking up and going for a bike ride in the country or going to a café in Montemor and striking up a conversation with Mr Agostinho, who is 75 years old and still prunes the oaks branch by branch. Small-scale living is as important as complexity. And we are in the middle. Caught between two wonderful extremes and there’s no grey area, this is where we are, moving backwards and forwards between these two points. And in that movement we create.”
His creations – and particularly the more recent ones, As Lágrimas de Saladino and Local Geographic, both conceived the season when he is the featured artist at the Centro Cultural de Belém – speak about this, this place in time and space and the being that moves within them. Us.
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by Maria João Guardão
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