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Autumn 2004

April in Rio

The Dança Brasil festival and other contemporary dance in Rio de Janeiro


For more than a decade, Rio de Janeiro has been the pre-eminent centre for independent contemporary dance in Brazil. The city witnessed a veritable dance explosion in the 1990s, stimulated by municipal funding policies which encouraged independent, small-scale choreographic activity; most recently, the city opened a new Choreographic Centre in August 2004. Today, some 13 contemporary dance companies are funded by the city council, and Rio is also host to several annual showcases for contemporary dance, including the Panorama RioArte (November), Solos in Sesc (March), and Dança Brasil, which coincided with my own trip in April.

Dança Brasil was founded in 1996 by Leonel Brum. In contrast to the larger and more international Panorama RioArte, which sees three or four performances a day over a fortnight, Dança Brasil has just four shows featuring Brazilian choreographers (mostly sharing a double bill), but runs over a month, with each programme shown over four consecutive evenings – a feature that’s partly dictated by the small theatre capacity of the Banco do Brasil Cultural Centre. The festival has also developed a programme of video screenings, and since 2002 it has run in Brasília alongside the Rio season. Each season is loosely organised around a particular theme. In the past these have included music and technology; the 2004 theme was ‘space’, whether physical, personal or theatrical.

The festival opener was Eu só existo quando ninguém me olha (‘I only exist when no one is watching’) by Brasília-based company baSiraH, a piece long on concepts but short on substance. The idea is to explore the ‘intimate spaces’ we occupy in our everyday lives when we believe no one is looking. The stage is duly set as a living room. Dorka Hepp distractedly dribbles tea down her dress as she daydreams. Édi Oliveira pulls on several pairs of underpants so that they form a ladder up his legs. Alessandro Brandão mops spilt water with his shirt; later he vomits down the toilet. The performance style is deliberately flat, neither dramatic nor demonstrative, and the glimpses of thematic interest – windows onto inner lives, questions about audience voyeurism – remain undeveloped. Instead of being an insight into solipsistic spaces of boredom and distraction, this work risks becoming an example of one.

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By contrast, the four fearsomely athletic women of Kaiowas Grupo de Dança aim for a direct physical impact on the audience in Pausa. They fling themselves floorward with such gusto that you can almost feel the visceral shock of their flops and thuds. It opens with two dancers launching up and rolling down a ramp, and continues with lunging leaps and crash landings. Like many Brazilian women, the dancers have long flowy hair, and they evidently enjoy the way it swooshes about as they move. Pausa was inspired by Mondrian paintings, but this is less evident in the choreography than in the primary colours and angular planes of the décor – the angled ramp, the coloured floor, a free-standing wall with a geometrical pattern of velcro strips. The dancers, with velcro stripes on their own costumes, repeatedly hurl themselves against and peel off the wall. It’s like watching designer flypaper bombarded by killer Amazonian bees. The women then slip into chic high heels, and, amazingly, they still manage to hurtle about, jumping and kung-fu kicking – the action of Buffy the Vampire Slayer in the shoes of Sex in the City, though without quite the polish of either. What this all amounts to I’m not sure, but it is certainly an energetic ride.

Shoes, velcro and swooshy hair also featured in another four-woman show, Volume, by Celina Portella and Flávia Costa. ‘Space and sound meet in the word volume,’ write Portella and Costa, though in fact the work is driven more by rhythm than volume. No matter, for this simple but showbizzy piece, melding Portella’s jazz and contemporary background with Costa’s tap training, proved perhaps the most popular piece in the festival. Wearing tap shoes, the dancers form a chorus line, dragging their shoes along the floor before springing into some upbeat tap. They go through a number of turns, including making some rasping rhythms against a wall (velcro strips again), some piss-takes of pop songs, and stamping on a big box-like construction on which is projected an LED display of the sound they make, as if the stage were some giant hi-fi system powered by their stomping. This may be no more than light entertainment, but it’s a crowd-pleaser, easy on the eye and served up with plenty of youthful vim.

On the same double bill was Espaço de Luz by Celina’s much more experienced aunt, Carlota Portella, one of the most celebrated jazz dancers of her day. In recent works Portella has been experimenting with the jazz dance vocabulary, but in Espaço de Luz her focus is on the lighting, and she uses a more or less familiar jazz dance idiom for the choreography. “Normally you make the dance first and do the lighting afterwards,” explains the gravel-voiced veteran, pulling on another cigarette, “but this time it was the opposite. We created all the spaces with the lighting and only then made the choreography.” The opening set features caveman fires, from which follows a serious of diverse episodes: one depicts firefly patterns in the air, another is a flirtatious disco number, and in another the dancers brandish fluorescent tubes like force-be-with-you light sabres. It takes a while to realise that there’s no connecting narrative, that the this is essentially a sequence of separate studies each based on a different lighting idea; once you get that, the piece works very well.

If Portella shapes her spaces with light, for In Situ the dancer/choreographers Luciana Gontijo and Margô Assis construct it using the set, a long table-like structure strung with a sea-blue trampoline. When Gontijo pogos up and down, one awkward arm flailing on each jump, it seems like a launchpad for some ungainly bird who can’t get airborne. When she sits above, with Assis below, they form a strange bipartite body, with the trampoline like a watery surface bisecting a half-submerged creature. And when Assis hangs suspended from the frame, it becomes a low roof from which she dangles. Floor, surface, ceiling – it’s the dancers, not the set, that define these attributes. The imagery is striking, yet the choreography itself is curiously static: each spatial idea finds its appropriate planes, directions and angles, yet you hanker for development and dynamic variety.

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The sound for In Situ, a sputtering collage of plucks and chimes, was made by musical duo O Grivo, who also provided the score for the following piece on this double bill, a trio of solos by different choreographers made for dancer Thembi Rosa – resulting in a certain sameness of sound during the evening. A certain sameness, too, in the first solo, a study of anatomical planes and tilts again by Luciana Gontijo. Better is Adriana Banana’s more dynamically charged sequence, in which Rosa bursts into flurried phrases, tripping over her own limbs as if lifted and flung about by a force that arises within her body but of which she is not the source. Better still is the final section by Rodrigo Pederneiras, which sees Rosa in trainers, frantically bouncing about and flicking her limbs in synch to a scratched and spliced voice commentary, like a peppy aerobics student gamely keeping up with a mad soundtrack when all she was expecting was Jane Fonda.

And finally, what to make of Zikzira Physical Theatre’s Verissimilitude, a sprawlingly unpredictable piece which is by turns surprising, exasperating, chilling, deadening and beguiling? According to the programme note, it was inspired by an essay by Michel Foucault – but we could have been spared that knowledge. The two men and two women start in isolation and come together only gradually in a series of ambivalent, edgy relationships. A man restrains and  controls a women as if she were a puppet; another flails his arms as if in a straitjacket. A woman swivels and ducks neurotically as if dodging imaginary creatures flapping about her body; someone else scuds against the floor like an upturned beetle.

Though the performers are individually convincing, their forces are somewhat dissipated in the choreography. The most gripping part of this piece is undoubtedly its aural and visual environment: set, lighting and music. A large propeller blade hangs above the stage, occasionally rotating lazily – an oppressive ceiling fan that flaps menacingly above the dancers. The stage is studded with lights that spill out across the auditorium, where all the seats are shrouded in black refuse sacks, so that they look like a congregation of body bags. And the music is a saturated, murky collage of layered sounds that seems to contain more than it reveals. The result is an almost Lynchian sense of inexplicable foreboding.

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While in Rio I also managed to catch a few performances alongside the Dança Brasil festival. De Cor is a quiet, captivating autobiographical solo by Denise Stutz, part danced, part spoken, in which she recounts her own dance history from child to woman. At one point she asks the audience to pick cards from her deck. We read out the instructions written on them as Stutz tries to keep up. It’s as if the audience is shuffling a fortune-teller’s pack and dealing her random futures.

While Stutz aims for personal history, Mildred Mildred by Dupla de Dança Ikswalsinats goes for ironic distance. Odd-couple Frederico Paredes and Gustavo Ciríaco (Paredes a diminutive Tom Thumb to Ciríaco’s beanstalk giant) named their company as ‘Stanislawski’ spelled backwards, and Mildred Mildred certainly shows the opposite of The Method. Rather than working on psychological motivation, the piece unhinges signs from their referents and actions from their aims. Inspired to some degree by the surrealist paintings of René Magritte, Mildred Mildred makes much play with frames and labels: Paredes, Ciríaco and Luciana Froes dance with placards inscribed with their own names, posing inside picture frames as if for self-portraits, and arbitrarily matching moves to spoken words. It’s deadpan, self-referential, sometimes dry and sometimes comic.

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Of all the pieces I saw, the most tantalising were two incomplete works-in-progress. Paulo Caldas’s Coreografismos for Staccato Dance Company, features an extended central duet which sees Maria Alice Poppe perpetually spiralling around Caldas. The two are constantly hand in hand but often at arm’s length, like a twisting double helix, or a gyroscope that tilts and pauses as it spins. It’s almost like a ballroom dance that’s been wound up tight and then spun out into a vortex – less a courtly coupling than a dangerous liaison. By complete coincidence, Márcia Milhazes’ Tempo de Verão also contains a long central duet in which a man and a woman stay in constant hand contact – but the effect is utterly different. The piece begins with a woman being kissed, in a tableau that could have been lifted from a Klimt painting. The kiss tears her in two: one figure (Ana Vianna) is transported, the other (Pim Boonprakob) stumbles, loses balance, falls apart. It is Boonprakob who dances the duet with the man (Al Crispinn). Her part is dramatically reticent but physically articulate, full of detailed flicks and twitches, with convoluted lifts that switch direction in mid-flow. It suggests her interior world: complex currents coursing within her body but never breaking out into simple surface display. Crispinn is always solicitous, the touch of his hand tender, but Boonprakob’s private complexities remain unfathomable to him. This duet is rich with nuance, and quietly heart-stopping. These two pieces would make a fascinating foil for each other; they almost seem to go hand in hand.

Other than this one coincidental similarity, were there any general traits characterising the dance on show? Certainly not in style or subject: even the common theme of ‘space’ in the Dança Brasil festival was a rather slender thread to link pieces that ranged from the populist to the arthouse, the formal to the theatrical. But perhaps in terms of mentality: dancers and choreographers seemed readier to talk in much more conceptual terms than I was used to in the more pragmatically-inclined UK. Audiences too seemed more articulate and willing to engage with abstract ideas in post-performance discussions – oh, apart from that wag who pointed out that in Brazilian slang, velcro has overtones of lesbian sex.

Next year’s festival will take the theme of ‘crossing paths’ – of different cultures, media or aesthetics – and Brum is already planning a possible publication to mark the festival’s tenth anniversary in 2006. Meanwhile, next year’s ‘Year of Brazil’ cultural festival in France, which includes visits by several dance companies, will be a relatively rare opportunity for Europeans to see Brazilian contemporary dance, and an equally welcome chance for the visitors to show that there’s much more to dance in Brazil than samba and capoeira.