Revista Veja SP - Dan 10 de APRIL de 1996
Revista Veja SP - Dan
S?o Paulo, Brazil
10/APRIL/1996
By Alfredo Ribeiro
SCORING A REAL GOAL
Companhia de Dan?a Deborah Colker redresses emotion and the simplicity of sports in a modern way.
Contemporary dance shows in Brazil are often meetings of nerds around a stage. Those wearing ballet shoes bang their heads and the boot-wearing patrons clap their hands. It is infectious. The more the dancers bang their heads on the stage, the more claps are heard. They are all contemporary, you know how this is. You would think the Rio-based choreographer Deborah Colker would be all set to follow this depression-cult-dance. Surprisingly, she found her inspiration in the vigor and fun of sports, which triggered the movements of Velox, a show of her twelve-dancer troupe, which starts this week at Sergio Cardoso Theatre in S?o Paulo. For a three-week run in Brazil each performance has racked up audiences of nearly 1,000 per show, totaling 50,000 after 51 presentations. Yet Colker has achieved what must be one of the more astonishingly high degrees of popularity last summer in Rio de Janeiro.
"The formula is simple", she says. "Basketball games on TV have always fascinated me. The players when they play volleyball, soccer or basketball produce a fantastic choreography. It is arresting to the eyes". As dancers are like athletes, they train to meet perfection, to exceed themselves, to break their own records, Deborah decided to transform sports into dance and vice-versa. She choreographs teams to win - vibrantly mixing tension, attention, alternating fun and sadness and different kinds of sports in a frantic sequence of rhythms. The effect is perfect. The 20-foot-high wall climbing has a fantastic precision when her gravity defying troupe swing and hang on it. A fall seems imminent, the audience doesn’t breathe.
World Cup - it is so perfectly done that many times, part of the audience burst into patriotic cheer after the show as if it were a victory of our Brazilian soccer team. "Now I’m really proud to be Brazilian. You have the responsibility to show around the world what we are capable of", said Beatriz Segall, a well-known TV actress after the performance of VELOX in Rio de Janeiro. Companhia de Dan?a Deborah Colker will present VELOX at the French Dance Festival in Lyon in September. The event comprises apart from dance, theatre, literature, music and paintings having Brazil in the spotlight. The touring to France will lead to other performances in Europe such as Hamburg and Berlin.
To reach perfection, Colker trained exhaustively her dancers for eight months. "I was cruel. To play the athletes we had to have a multi-disciplinary physical daring which dancers are not so much used to", says Colker. The chiropractor Jos? Roberto Prado Junior had a full-time job to help the ones who got hurt. The dancers had daily six-hour rehearsal including classes of Kung fu, classic ballet and wall climbing on a 33-foot-high wall. "My justification was that I was able to do all I had demanded from the dancers, and it paid off." The company’s evolution from the first work Volcano and VELOX debut last October can be compared to the progress of our Brazilian soccer team at different World Cups - Italy and USA.
Colker achieved another success. She trespassed the wall of pointy-heads who mistrusted her. She created a daring and fun show pleasing even the ones who are not so fond of dance. "The people who saw our show throughout Brazil are from all walks of life. They are sports lovers who wanted to see something different", says the 35-year old choreographer. "They call me modern but I don’t mind. I am in fact a contemporary person". After returning from Lyon, France, Colker will start working on her new show grounded in quotidian concerns. She will have an amusement park on stage. "I want to demonstrate a Ferris wheel, climb it up, walk on stage wings." She is on the right way.
