The Guardian 03 de MAY de 1999
The Guardian
London, UK
03/MAY/1999
By Judith Mackrell
HEAVENLY HARMONIES
Brazil may trade in the hot exoticism of swaying carnival dancers, but it also boasts a long line of classical ballet, some serious modern dance - and Deborah Colker, whose bright and sunny Rota is at one level extremely fashionable brew of international trends in postmodern dance.
During the first half of Rota, Colker’s 13 dancers whip their good looking and very disciplined bodies through a series of ballet manoeuvres which are cutely spliced with everyday gestures and gags. This is a device employed by choreographers from Boston to Berlin, but Colker does it with a distinctive, cheerful mischief. She has one dancer lift up her foot in preparation for a sweeping rond de jambe, then pause and stuff her toes into her mouth instead. She combines a razzle of entrechats with the dancers ruefully rumpling their hair with their hands. She allows two women to coil elegantly around a man’s feet, the sends him stomping off with them still attached like monstrous Vivienne Westwood shoes.
Into the mix Colker also throws some Eurocrash combat rolls, an outburst of shouting and some gymnastic body sculpture, all of which are flawlessly executed amidst arresting lighting and glamorous costumes. Disappointingly, though, it doesn’t take long for Colker’s predictable four square musicality to dull the impact. Even though her score surfs energetically through Mozart, the Chemical Brothers, Tangerine Dream and more, the pulse of her dance rarely changes and the choreographic wit starts to seem leaden. If Rota ended after its first half we’d leave thinking, "nice but we’ve seen all this before’.
After the interval, though, our polite smiles turn to gasps. For the second half of Rota is dominated by a pair of vertiginous ladders and a huge spinning ferris wheel, upon which the dancers romp with the nonchalant grace of circus artists - and without a safety net. At first they scamper around the set like elegant hamsters but the pressure builds as they hover in apparently death defying balances, leap off the wheel from preposterously great heights, or brace their feet or hands on its rungs so that they float in space as dreamily as astronauts. Even a fragment of the corny Pachelbel canon sounds like the music of the spheres when it accompanies dancers rotating in such heavenly harmony. Colekr’s final catherine wheel effect of eight bodies somersaulting around the rungs of the wheel is as jaw dropping as the most expensive firework display. When the curtain falls, the audience’s cheering isn’t just a tribute t the dancers’ extraordinary prowess, It’s the sound of 1,000 people daring to breathe again.
