Revista Bravo 01 de JUNE de 2000
Revista Bravo
S?o Paulo, Brazil
01/JUNE/2000
By Ana Francisca Ponzio and Regina Porto
THE EXPANSION OF IMAGE AND SOUND
Dance, architecture and musical mobiles interact in Deborah Colker?s Casa, whose choreography plays with perception and tags along Bauhaus.
Deborah Colker moves ahead with her new creation, Casa, which is her fourth full-length dance in a short five-year-old career. Its debut in S?o Paulo was in April and it will have a second run in September in Rio de Janeiro. It is another phase of a promising career. Like other prestigious contemporary choreographers, Colker makes use of everyday gestures without compromising or arousing conceptual questions or intellectual theories, and there is no crime in that. Likewise, Twyla Tharp walked away from the postmodern boom of the 60?s to bring up a style bound up with pop culture, sports and show business as well.
In Casa?s inventive process, Colker started out from basic human drives, the need to create proper spaces to live. "Even the homeless lay out their territories in the streets", she says. It was also inspired by Colker?s visit to Bauhaus Museum in Weimar. With these elements, she added to her dance Gringo Cardia?s set design, stirring a dialogue between dance and architecture: gears drive space and gestures, they are ordinary and interchangeable matters.
The whole framework of movement rubs shoulders with the sound architecture which dresses up Casa. The musical pillar of each scene’s structure is a vigorous, rhythmic beat. Seemingly pop, the soundtrack is a maze. Musical and sound mobiles are set, superimposed, juxtaposed, completely independent. The company dances this intricate of parallel sounds. The whole sound design has a rhythm, not only the first plan of the music.
The dancers are kinetic bodies concerned with the occupation of space and sound, which requires wittiness and creativity. The emptiness of the set and the lack of a plot and real characters in Colker?s Casa make it a neutral space, nearly aseptic, harboring movement investigation and its interaction with environment. The whole affair is brilliantly carried along a continuous and vigorous rhythm, not incurring into a climax.
The music is not the summit itself, even when using samples or incidental themes (Brian Eno, Kraftwerk, Beach Boys, Morriconi, Mendelssohn, ?). Berna Ceppas and Kassin?s sound track (Colker?s constant partners) tunes into the modern acoustical art trends. Some new concepts of sonority, such as rhythmic basis filled randomly with sounds and concrete music, electro-acoustical counter-pointing snapshots and resounding landscapes, abstraction suggested by sound design and audio-collage, are exhaustively explored in every detail by her choreography?s virtuosity. And, as suitable music, they facilitate the perception and they devoid listeners from oddness.
A multidimensional entropy, Casa jokes with perception. Music, dance and architecture do not make it a multimedia show (collective actions), on the contrary, they are a symbiosis of languages. The everyday gestures here represented in the house are the driving string that leads to a game of plasticity with mathematical precision. It is a continuous audiovisual dance. The structure that gobbles and expels images has an eye-catching effect; the spatial sound track adds new, extra and imaginary "acoustic visions".
Purposefully or not, the set structure of Casa repeats Bauhaus, where the technical rigor was the most important rule. "Theater is a concentrated orchestration of sounds, lights, spaces, shapes and movements", said Oskar Schelemmer, one of the masters of this German school.
