WRITTEN BY

DEBORAH

COLKER

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In 2021, talking to one of my great friends, Ana Luiza Marinho, I expressed my long-standing desire to choreograph Igor Stravinsky's "The Rite of Spring." Ana immediately became excited and said, "You can adapt the ballet to our culture, to our forest, to our exuberance." From then, we began imagining connections between the classical and the ancestral, between Russian peasants and our indigenous peoples, almost anthropophagy of the controversial Russian, Stravinsky. I wanted to dance a Brazil before colonization and exalt evolutionary pathways.

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The subject is current and urgent. Thinkers, evolutionists, indigenous peoples, and creation myths, diverse worldviews wildly inhabited my creative process. With two serpents in my mind and bamboos – symbols of tolerance and flexibility – intertwined with the dancers' bodies, I stitched earth, water, air, and fire. Like a child, I turned the bamboos into a boat, a house, a spear, ground, and sky. The performance goes from the emptiness and darkness to the grandmother who creates the world according to her thoughts, as I've learned from the indigenous peoples.

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I went in search of bacteria, herbivores, quadrupeds, hunting practices, and the compromise between our planet and the King Vulture who, as the owner of fire, hands it over to the people of the earth. The scene portraying this worldview myth of the Kuikuro is narrated by Takumã Kuikuro. Abraham is the character who is searching for his essence, disentangling himself from his own culture. Nilton Bonder created the African Eve who establishes the recognition of nudity and a changed body that transcends and leaves heaven.

 

The journey to the Xingu, during the Kuarup, living with the Kalapalo and Kuikuro, and the direct contact with their music, dances, fights, paintings, and history was essential for our "Rite". It was the beginning of precious encounters in the mindful company of João Elias. The profound knowledge of indigenous peoples of Angela Pappiani and her determination to encompass as many villages as possible helped us find indigenous music from different places, used by Alexandre Elias to weave the musical embroidery between the primitive and Stravinsky's classical instrumentation.

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"Rite" celebrates and consecrates human achievements. With it, we conclude this primitive, ancestral, and reflective trilogy preceded by "Dog Without Feathers" and "Cure."