The Sunday Times 23 de JULY de 2000
The Sunday Times
London, UK
23/JULY/2000
By Nadine Meisner
A GRIPPING PERFORMANCE
If parts of Deborah Colker’s show for the Barbican’s Brazil season lack drama, you will forgive all when you see her amazing finale, says Nadine Meisner
Mix is the title of Deborah Colker’s piece at the Barbican Theatre for the centre’s Brasil: Brazil festival, and mix is the defining word for this 39-year-old Brazilian choreographer’s CV. Classical pianist, psychology student, dancer, member of the Rio volleyball team: she has been all of these. You wouldn’t guess if from her choreography - apart from the volleyball, because athleticism is the most evident characteristic of Mix. And just as in her last, less impressive piece in London, Rota, when the best part was the finale, so the absolute gobsmacker in Mix came with the closing section, Mountaineering. Its choreography is exactly that: a "vertical dance" on a vertiginous wall studded with tiny projections as handgrips and foot supports.
"Vertical dance" is not new, but never has it been accomplished with such spectacular bravura. The dancers, who include Colker, not only have to be acrophobia-free, but as devilishly fit as acrobats. They swarm over the wall, unhindered by the normal relationship between human anatomy and gravity. When they hop with splayed limbs from one set of projections to another, they might be water insects on the surface of a garden pond. When they freeze in a line of flattened arabesques, the might be a wallpaper motif. When they congregate in a pleasing symmetry, they could be butterflies pinned in a lepidopterist’s display case. And when a man high up performs a handstand at right angles to the wall, you cross your fingers and close your eyes.
Colker exploits the men’s muscularity with impossible feats, while the women get to shine with flexible shape-making. In the earlier Passion section, gender differences are less marked, even allowing a woman to lift a man sometimes. A medley of love songs, from the Gainsbourg-Birkin Je t’aime to the Rolling Stones’ Angie, serves as a commentary to 23 duets, their holds and supports slotting into each other like angular jigsaw pieces. A woman is whirled round ecstatically by a man until he abruptly knocks her away and goes on to push other women about. A man and a woman reach out to each other desperately, blocked by their partners. Colker is extraordinarily inventive in creating moves where tenderness flips into anger, desire into rejection.
The other contrasting sections are not all as successful, although Fashion Show is strikingly designed, with school-of-Gaultier caged-crinolines. Gigantic chairs make the dancers look like Alice after swigs of Drink Me, and the choreography has echoes of hip-hop and clubland, attractively set to the catchy syncopations of Brazilian percussion music. But the preceding Machines concentrates on robotic jerk and crunch repetitions as tedious as an aerobics class: while the show’s second half, on the theme of sport, feels overstretched until we see Mountaineering.
Pop culture, contemporary dance, sport: all this is funnelled into the Colker composition process, which favours flamboyant legibility and accessibility. And what articulate tools the dancers’ bodies are, expressing everything vividly through graphic movement, including humour, like the man with a neck so independently supple, it’s in danger of sliding off his torso.
Mix, though, seems disparately episodic, lacking an overarching point. Part of the blame rests with its genesis, whereby extracts from Colker’s first two works - Vulc?o (Volcano, 1994) and Velox (1995) - were combined for its premiere in 1996 at the Lyons Biennale. Colker’s latest piece, Casa (House), apparently features another ambitious stage set, a multilevel construction in which the dancers enact the drama of domestic life. It sounds more cohesive and very alluring.
