Pretty, cruel, futuristic
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Uruguai
Date: 07/05/2009
Pretty, cruel, futuristic
All in love and in war is fair, that’s what they say. And although all sorts of dramatic situations have already been shown - from Greek tragedies to modern TV plots - there’s still room for original and artistic creation for this sort of narrative: the bonds between man and woman.
That’s because human relationships keep sometimes being cruel, therefore fascinating. At least that’s what Cruel seems to convey, the contemporary dance choreography presented by Brazilian Deborah Colker last weekend before a touched audience at a sold out Solís theater.
“What we see is not soap opera, is not theater. It’s dance”. Says Colker. And there was actually dance, with excellent technique and great precision, a synthetic, metaphoric and abstract script which versed basically about the life/death binomial, Eros/Thanatos: a creation and study polarity, recurrent in the arts and analysis of speeches of all kinds.
Colker has created thus a thorough dance piece, symbolic and concrete, a show that touched an audience happy with novices and experts. Mario Sagradini together with ballerinas and choreographers Graciela Figueroa and Andrea Arobba could be seen among other personalities of the cultural scenario.
If at the beginning it looked as though all we were to see was nothing else rather than mere classic ballet technique or the worn-out neoclassic expression enhanced by stunning, cheerful, lively clothing full of high hills, it didn’t take much waiting for Deborah to make a complete change of atmosphere and start an overwhelming change of setting, which included the usage of mobile structures and elements with reminiscences of kinetic art.
A large, low, mobile and rectangular table, and several mobile square mirrored walls, with central circles resembling “owl eyes” – from which bodies of dancers came out – changed the scene into a living installation of art in movement with cubist and futuristic adornment.
The mirrors repeated the multiple and simultaneous scenes, showing the frontage of the movements as well as the reverse, proving a wide range of magic and poetic voyeurism; thanks to these mirrors we were able to see what went on at the front as well as the back of the main scene.
Colker, renowned internationally, is today one of Cirque de Soleil’s choreographers. At the present piece show the influence of this aesthetic can be appreciated – which unites the circus environment to the virtuosity of dance with a certain “histrionic contortionism” – but the use of solos performed by a prototyped figure, male or female, that carried on a side act (a habitual resource of Cirque du Soleil) which serves to grab the attention and mobilize the public proving coherence among the proposed narrative fragments.
Cruel is also a collective construction which took almost a year and a half to be created, to which a text was added (a few loose words spoken by the dancers at first) and a story (abstract without a screenplay).
In 1984, the choreographer created her first work for theatre, directing the corporeal movement of “An irresistible adventure”, by Domingos de Oliveira. Now, at Cruel, the verbal argument has disappeared to be replaced by a striking arrangement of movements, intentions and feelings which come together and separate from this one. A unique creation, beautifully cruel, dynamic and surprising.
Melisa Machado
