This is the only piece I have seen to date by Vera Mantero, who to my mind is a thoroughly established figure working on the boundaries of performance art and choreography. I particularly associate her work with NYU Performance Studies professor, Andre Lepecki. Lepecki was, not incidentally, the curator responsible for this admirable and enigmatic performance’s inclusion in his the inTransit 08 Festival at Berlin’s Haus der Kulturen der Welt in June.

As is often the case with choreographers championed by Lepecki in his book, Exhausting Dance, there was virtually no movement in the piece, and the performers were restricted to their chairs and the thin strip of stage space before it.

The signature element of the performance was its use of language. Speaking as an uncoordinated chorus in English– which was evidently a second language for the entire group– in a wobbly syntax that erred between alliteratively related registers, they recounted nothing in particular, save perhaps their reiterated love of machines…