The Washington Post 11 de OCTOBER de 2003
The Washington Post
Washington DC, USA
11/OCTOBER/2003
By Sarah Kaufman
Colker?s Troup Kills in ?4 Por 4?
?My Dancers?, confessed choreographer Deborah Colker after her company?s performance Thursday, ?sometimes, I think they want to kill me?.
The petite brazilian was talking about the last section of her fiery, magnificently danced ?4 Por 4?, in which the Eisenhower Theatre stage was thick with row upon row of porcelain vases. There was little empty floor space between them ? perhaps two or three feet surrounding each one. Think of dancing amid a set of bowling pins, and you?ll get the idea.
But still, the amazingly light-footed group of dancers managed to whirl, leap, roll, slide on their bellies and lift and toss one another in this crowded space without causing a single vessel to wobble.
And they kept whatever murderous thoughts they might have been thinking well under wraps.
In fact, they made it all look supremely easy, as if breezily picking their way through a field of crockery came as naturally as walking down the street.
Admittedly, by this point in the evening one had come to expect the serene delivery of the impossible from the Companhia de Dan?a Deborah Colker. Colker electrified audiences two years ago with ?Casa?, making her Washington debut with a work that placed her galvanic moves in the confines of a multilevel stage-filling structure. Architecture?s influence on movement was her focus then. With ?4 Por 4?, Colker wanted something different, she told the audience in a post-performance discussion that was almost as much fun as the performance. ?I wanted to do something not so clean, with painting and?a little more trash?. The result is a work that ranges from confined, encapsulated precision to a stage-filling storm, with roiling, churning, athletically charged dancing punctuated by moments of improbable delicacy.
The work is in five sections; the four of the title presumably refers to the number of Brazilian visual artists Colker enlisted to create the decors. In the first section, ?Corners?, Cildo Meireles contributed six two-sided structures: tall, narrow free-standing corners, each inhabited by a dancer. As a synthesized go-go with lush jazz undertones pounds from the speakers, the dancers climb, dangle, collapse and plaster themselves in ceaselessly inventive ways against, around and on top of their slender niches. Both women and men clamber up and down with a spidery lightness, though the muscle-power and pinpoint accuracy needed for their gymnastic feats is huge.
?Table? is quieter but no less intriguing. Here, a motorized metal gurney of sorts ? the work of sculptor Chelpa Ferro ? creeps across the stage at an infinitely slow pace, carrying a few casually arrayed dancers. The tabletop is actually a conveyor belt, allowing the dancers to stand still and move at the same time, giving static poses an agreeable sense of flow.
?Some People? must be element of trash that Colker was talking about. This section has a raucous, cartoon fell. Peppered throughout the backdrop, a crayon-colored painted by Victor Arruda, are big, bright sex organs. The dancers carry on like hormone-charged adolescents on hyperdrive. Nice hormone-charged adolescents, mind you ? there is a sense of unease in the painting, but the dancer?s play is innocent, puppyish curiosity. They poke their fingers in each other?s pants and sniff themselves like monkeys. This is the one glimpse at something looking like true human interaction that Colker gives us, albeit in an outsized way. And the message seems to be: Embrace and accept, even the unclean parts.
The second half of the program took a more refined turn. In ?Overture ? The Girls?, Colker performed Mozart?s Sonata in A (K.331) on an onstage grand piano while two of her female dancers demonstrated sturdy ballet technique. This sense of steely fragility carried over into ?Vases?, whose array of pottery was by Gringo Cardia. After images of the dancers moving in all types of atmospheres, and through unbearable clutter, the final vision was especially powerful: Dancer Karina Mendes, alone, on an empty stage. As she melted into backbends and rose up again like a fish flipping over and over in the water, one had a glimpse of total, triumphant freedom. The emotional content of ?4 Por 4?, was mostly ambiguous. The dancers often seem to constitute an assembly of disaffected loners. Embraces are quick and cold. Or could it be that the dancers are simply at peace, showing little feeling because everything?s okay in their heads and their little community is a model of brisk, healthy interaction? Colker?s work doesn?t probe too deeply beneath the surface. But what?s out there, on top, for all to see is a landscape of such vivid colors that one doesn?t need to dig for anything more.
