The Globe and Mail 11 de FEBRUARY de 2000
The Globe and Mail
Toronto, Canada
11/FEBRUARY/2000
By Paula Citron - Especially to The Globe and Mail
RUN, DON’T WALK, TO SEE KINETIC TOUR DE FORCE FROM BRAZIL
If you want to cure your February blahs, run, don’t walk, to Premiere Dance Theatre to catch the Canadian premiere of Companhia de Dan?a Deborah Colker. While the Rio de Janeiro-based company does not perform the samba during the show, Colker’s unique blend of ballet, gymnastics, acrobatics and spatial dynamics captures the exuberance that is Brazil. The delighted audience at Tuesday night’s opening rewarded Colker and her cohorts with an instantaneous standing ovation and loud cheers and whistles.
It is significant that after Colker founded her company in Rio in 1994, its first performance was a joint program with the acclaimed American company Momix. What Colker shares with this legendary dance group is inventive choreography, imaginative use of design elements, brilliant choices of music, and a willingness to experiment with the outer limits of human physicality.
Her full-evening piece is called Rota, which, Colker explains in her notes, are lines, circles and maps. Her theme, in her own words, is the occupation and exploration of space. It is a journey that takes her dancers, and herself, on a grueling, death-defying, kinetic tour de force. In short, to be a Colker dancer means being absolutely fearless.
The first act of Rota takes place on a dance floor and against a backdrop that, to this techno-moronic eye, appear to contain a complex configuration of numbers, lines and arcs - schematics for an electrical grid, perhaps, or an engineer’s blueprints. Into this space come the dancers to play, and never has silliness been more entertaining.
Colker’s format is a layering basic ballet vocabulary with bizarre interlopers from the pedestrian world. Between the pirouettes and arabesques, the dancers slap themselves and each other, fall down, leapfrog over bodies and so forth, all necessitating split-second timing and astonishing control. One laconic young woman casually raises one leg and eats her toes, while balanced, without a tremor, on the other foot - and all this to Mozart, would you believe.
From this Allegro section, Colker moves to Ostinato and the pulsating, electronic music of Aphex Twin. Here her choreography binds the dancers into herd synchronization, but always there are breakouts echoing the fun movements of Allegro, Vigoroso - to the bluesy/jazzy music of Squarepusher and the Chemical Brothers - takes its images from sports, and showcases the breathtaking ability and physical prowess of the dancers.
The first-act finale, Presto, danced to Schubert and Baleina Mysticetus, pushes even more difficult buttons with body boat-rowing, and headstands on the stomachs of others. By the finale, we have seen one dancer walk on the entwined arms of her colleagues, while a young man has paraded in shows that are actually two company members. We’ve experienced unbelievable lifts and eye-defying jumps, yet the second act is yet to come.
When the curtain opens, the stage is now filled with iron constructions fashioned into ladders and a 1.5-tonne wheel. The music is a wonderful mix of Johann Strauss, Tangerine Dream, Funki Purcini, Pachelbel and a host of other popular, classical and jazz composers.
The Gravity section is all about defying that law as the dancers, in magnificent slow motion, attempt impossible gymnastic feats to create the sense of weightlessness. Needless to say, the Wheel section has the dancers scrambling up and down ladders and performing difficult manoeuvres on the monstrous wheel that is now centre stage. To give away the final image, however, would be grounds for murder, so all that can be said is that it is as surprising as spectacular.
This company is a keeper, and Colker can’t bring us another such utterly engaging show soon enough.
