The Daily Telegraph 20 de JULY de 2000
The Daily Telegraph
London, UK
20/JULY/2000
By Ismene Brown
BRAZILIAN THRILLS AS SPORT TURNS TO ART
WOW! Imagine a vast turquoise and orange wall. Men and women scamper up it and sideways along it faster than most of us can move on the floor itself. Imagine that there’s no gravity, and that humanity has become a new kind of fly on the wall.
Deborah Colker is the Brazilian choreographer who set London talking last year with her gigantic hamster-wheel at Sadler’s wells, which her acrobatic dancers treated exactly as if they were hamsters, with no body weight and no fear whatever.
Her return brings another whacking gimmick, and again she leaves one open-mouthed, at least with the Mountaineering finale to her piece (which overshadows everything that goes before).One has always imagined that top gymnasts could - if carefully reimagined - deliver something as graceful as this. But it is a thrill that could only be created in today’s era, with its obsession with sport and bodily fitness.
Colker, of Russian-Jewish blood, is a pale, blonde woman of 40, who played volleyball before taking to dance. This kind of sporty daring is what propels her imagination. Her 14 dancers are exceptional athletes and gymnasts, but more than that they are true performers.
Mix has seven sections in two parts, all derived from earlier pieces, and you can see from the over-cautious opening (a spry but slightly tedious gym drill) how Colker’s imagination needed to cut loose from the predictabilities of sport.
And then we suddenly see the lyrical imagination that is buried deep inside Colker. Passion is, choreographically, the best section of the whole work, an intense, pretty, funny celebration of how love can go wrong that seems to turn the world into a giant rumpled white bed, and the air into a medley of love songs. Pairs of lovers in white nightwear tumble and fight and embrace, emotions raging and entirely readable in their wonderfully acrobatic activities.
The great crooners of our time - from Barry White to Elvis Presley to Nina Simone to Maria Callas - get a few purple bars each, interrupting each other, as if every grand passion can be followed by another equally grand one. You smile and then sigh at the heartfelt romance of the end, with two girls alone and upside-down, legs and bottoms sticking upwards, ears pressed to the ground, as if listening for the departing footsteps of their lovers, while a vision of Mr. Right appears over their heads.
And then, after the interval, there is a more athletics-based routine building up to the stupendous finale on the wall. We see more of these strange, acrobatically invented balances and holds, eruptions of handstands, backflips, handsprings and turbo-charged press-ups that somehow carry just as much import as the jet?s and pirouettes of ballet.
Whether this is an artistic kind of sport or a sporty kind of art hardly seems to matter when you are entertained as this.
