Misia, her gaze hot as blood, round as pearls, salt as the sea… Her glowing, velvet, amber-brown eyes share the strange glow of steel plate heated red-hot. All the knowledge of a woman and all the innocence of a little girl; passion and play, laughter and tears…
Misia eludes the words of a biography just as she eludes the prison of a musical genre. She stretches far beyond her place of birth, the frontiers of a country… Misia was born in Porto, took Barcelona by storm and now lives in Lisbon, although she still has her haunts and hairdressers in Paris, Tokyo and Mexico. She has crossed mountains and laid siege to territories, but has above all created a space-time: her world, a weave of sounds buried in the very depths of her body, real-life words, subdued lighting…
Misia has been on stage since she was a child: "My grandmother had me pinned to her dress.“ A "frivolous star“, she wanted to spare the girl sleepless nights, cold hotel rooms, zeal and solitude. Misia barely describes her grandmother, so we imagine Colette´s Vagabond, moving from the music-halls of the port´s working-class districts to railway stations at dawn…
So how did Misia's grandmother and mother, two women from Barcelona, end up in Porto? It was a love story, one that went against the grain of the Portuguese upper middle classes into which her father was born… Her mother, Luisa, a rare beauty completely devoted to her passion, classical ballet, held a powerful attraction for the young, blue-eyed Portuguese who watched her on stage at Maxime´s in Lisbon, dazzled by her Spanish costume and flashing legs… He married her.
They made their home in the aristocratic city of Porto and Misia was born. Her given name was Susana Maria. She wore a navy-blue uniform and had to stand up straight in silence, a model little girl in the grand house of her father´s family. But then she would hurry down the streets of her chic neighbourhood to take refuge in the warm, perfumed embrace of her grandmother, Lolita, who - untipped cigarette in hand - would describe the adventures of her Bohemian youth…
Misia´s courage, thoroughness and extravagance of lifestyle can only be understood in the context of these two women - the first and second ant, as she sees them and herself: three hard-working ants, one after the other, perpetually searching for the Absolute of love and art. Misia and her line of free women, daring to live in defiance of convention, outside the corsets of musical genres and beyond the safe, smooth walls of middle-class order.
Misia is a committed woman in the Sartrean sense. She is concerned about the world, outraged by injustice and disgusted by hypocrisy and cowardice. Her friends, her tribe, are writers such as Lidia Jorge and José Saramago, poets such as Graça Moura, actresses such as Maria de Medeiros, singers such as Maria Bethania, painters such as Bela Silva and Carlos Torres, and artists such as Sophie Calle. Such encounters enhance Misia's life and fuel her art.
Political ethics are apparent in all her songs: ethics of liberty, tolerance and joy, ethics of life against death. "What I want is to talk about life, its miseries and grandeur…“ Misia defies the routine of opaque, closed days, urging us to journey through emotion, to dare to love, cry and laugh as she does each day.