Newsday 18 de FEBRUARY de 2000
Newsday
New York, USA
18/FEBRUARY/2000
By Sylviane Gold
COMPANHIA’S CREATIVE CHAOS
There are dark black lines going every which way on the stage and backdrop for "Rota", which opened Wednesday night at the Joyce Theater. But there should be even more lines this weekend - in the vicinity of the box office.
The clearly enraptured audience at the premiere of Brazil’s Companhia de Dan?a Deborah Colker just wouldn’t stop applauding this overtly theatrical, unabashedly entertaining and mysteriously beautiful work.
The set’s squiggly lines are based on the cutting guides printed on dress patterns; but they seem to map a chaotic terrain that couldn’t possibly exist. And when two dancers, in ankle-high booties and swirly skirts stiffened from beneath by rigid petticoats, bound onstage to the vibrant strains of a Mozart serenade, the contradictions begin to multiply.
Mixing Colker’s high-speed versions of standard ballet steps with ritualized gestures such as smoothing their hair, slapping their cheeks and pulling down on their chins to open their mouths, the dancers also seem to belong to a funhouse universe, constructing and deconstructing a dance at the very same time. As they are joined by the rest of the company, the movements become more mechanical, less flowing; and the music has gone from Mozart to Squarepusher and the Chemical Brothers. By the time the four sections of the fast-moving first act are over, the company’s amazing dancers have thrown themselves and each other into the floor and into the air and into your brain.
When they return for Act Two, that pounding energy has been transmuted into a slow-motion dream. The dancers who had darted and dashed now lift their legs and arms as if swimming through mercury. The dancers have changed into tights, and you can see the strain on every muscle as bodies push against each other at gravity-defying angles, as groups of dancers become movement machines, human tanks that push relentlessly forward against the eight of the world.
Then there’s the wheel. It shows up in the second half as if the wild blueprint of Act One has somehow materialized into orderly solid geometry: a giant blow-up of the familiar hamster-cage accessory, flanked by four metal ladders. (The sets for both acts are the brilliant work of Gringo Cardia; the first rate costumes are by Yam? Reis, and the extraordinary lighting is by Jorginho de Carvalho.)
As the dancers leap onto the wheel to set it in motion, sometimes alone, sometimes in groups, its hypnotic spinning is echoed by the hypnotic spinning of the dancers below. And the dazzling final image, of eight dancers hunched into fetal balls swinging from the wheel’s rungs as it turns and turns, has a poetry that resonates long into the night.
All dance, from "Swan Lake" to a Rockettes’ routine, is ultimately about gravity. But in "Rota", Deborah Colker has managed to give gravity and levity palpable form on stage. Go see it.
