Deborah colker and her double challenge.
17/05/2009
Antonio Hohlfeldt
Deborah colker and her double challenge.
In the same week Deborah Colker premiered the show “Ovo”, in Montreal, for Cirque du Soleil, her Brazilian dance group got to Porto Alegre with her dance piece Cruel.
Divided in three movements and two acts, Cruel, in a certain manner, synthesizes what has been the effort and worries of the creator: develop new choreographic movements, considered many times regarded as impossible for the human bodies, by means of a technology that, used on behalf of the show, valorises even better it’s visualization.
Cruel, therefore, explores the first aspect in the first act (two movements) and in the second, dedicates itself to technology. Right at the beginning, we get astonished when noticing that the ballerinas get into the act in high hills, and they still get to dance! Furthermore, some of them appear in long evening dresses, once the scene is called O Baile (The Ball ), and the scene we have is exactly that, a ball dance of contrasts, where the outfits, characters, and music/choreography seem to construct/deconstruct insoluble tensions. The soundtrack derives from the collage of different music pieces, from the popular to the erudite, whilst the choreography seems to get delight from the act of paraphrasing movements that, for any other choreographer would have been taken “seriously”, but for Deborah Colker, they have been rescued right there on the stage simply to be deconstructed and, naturally given a new meaning to.
The group of dancers is perfect. Although there are, by the structure presented, two or three characters that stand out at the development of the choreography, we cannot truly say that there are soloists. That is so because they permanently take turns at their roles, and all of them act with absolute perfection and rhythmic accuracy.
In the second act, technology gets into the scene. Just like in a giant kaleidoscope, four huge glass screens, with open circles right in the middle, allow a continuous and fragmented multiplication of the images, a kind of scenic “trompe l’oeil” (fool the eye), which is both fascinating and challenging at the same time. There are moments actually that we just fail to distinguish if what we see are the dancers or their reflexes. Post-modernism and contemporary metaphoric fragmentation produces stupendous effects, so much variable, because they are seen in different ways by the public, according to where they sit. That is, one who is sitting at the front, in the middle, won’t have exactly the same perspective of someone who’s sitting at the back, at one of the sides of the theatre. It brings to life a kind of calligraphy that is no longer written on the bodies of the dancers, but right in the space, as if they literally floated for our delight, light yes, but still absolutely synchronized (as they get in and out of scene and their way through the kaleidoscope boxes, for instance, where a millimetric delay can jeopardize completely the projected movement and desired effect).
For all it’s worth, the public reaction was rapturous applauses. Gringo Cardia, who has followed Deborah for so many years, and has also been with her at Cirque de Soleil, made the art direction and set design. Bernas Ceppas is in charge of the musical direction and great part of the music tracks. He even composes and arranges some of the music pieces, especially in the second act. Theatrical direction is by Gilberto Gawronski, which becomes more and more important at Deborah Colker’s dance pieces, for the reason that it provides them with naturality and breaks the plain mechanics I have criticized in her previous works. Jacqueline Motta is the choreography assistant which is growing in importance all the time, in order to guarantee the continuity of their work, especially when Colker is absent. The lighting by Jorginho de Carvalho achieves real pretty effects, as it creates virtual spaces that may deepen or make shallower these same spaces.
At the end, what is really understandable is that, Deborah Colker’s team is getting more and more mature enough to act as a real group, a collective, a kind of art that requires, in fact, total collectivity.
