Of Brazil and its theatrical contemporary dance, if we exclude the famous Grupo Corpo of the Pederneiras family, which takes its elastic, sunny, snappy style around the world, from Spoleto to TorinoDanza to the Maison de la Danse in Lyon, with a carioca vein in the cheerful colour of its costumes and scenes, there is still much to discover, or rather almost everything. No one is unaware of the liveliness of the samba, the power of the black roots in the tropical rhythm of all the popular dances that inhabit Brazil and its festivals, but much less well known is the panorama of ballet, which boasts a star like Cecilia Kerche, and of modern dance, which is also very present in the reality of a country that is almost a continent. What, if any, is the cultural identity of Brazilian dance, in a territory no less melting pot than that of the United States, where an African heart beats, a Latin soul and a languid spirit, where the Portuguese fado soars? Oriente Occidente has chosen to broaden the horizon of knowledge of this enormous country and its choreographers with a special section of the festival. If Guiherme Botehlo is a Brazilian from Europe, Carlota Portella, also Brazilian, working in Rio de Janeiro, has chosen to work in her homeland with her own Vacilou Dançou Company. This did not prevent her from receiving in Europe, last year at the Rencontres Chorégraphiques Internationales in Bagnolet, the cradle of all that is new in dance for more than twenty years, an important award: the Bonnie Bird Choreography Fund of the Laban Centre in London, which invited her to create a new piece for the Transitions Dance Company. But how did Carlota arrive at this milestone? She started off with classical and jazz training in Brazil, studied for a year at the Academie Internationale de Danse de Paris, and then returned to Rio, working hard as a dancer and teacher, improving herself in the meantime in Paris, London and New York, until in 1981 she founded her own company, Vacilou Dançou, which also intrigued the programmers of the Old Continent. In 1998, in fact, the group was invited for a tour in various German cities, before arriving in Bagnolet with the same title now on stage in Rovereto, 'Grito/Diga-me que oras são, para saber que existo'. Set to music ranging from the spirituality of Arvo Pärt to Piazzolla's tango, "Grito", subtitled "flower of obsession", is a piece in four movements in which the characters of Nelson Rodrigues' seventeen plays intersect around four main themes. Rodrigues, who liked to say of his texts: they are a meditation on love and death. Rodrigues, a journalist and 'creator of modern tragedy' in Brazil, from the 1940s until 1981, the year of his death, when his works finally achieved the great success denied him during his lifetime, played a leading role in the source of the Brazilian literary avant-garde, expressionistic-psychoanalytic, with characters and stories that were against the tide, anti-taboo and steeped in black humour, which he then transferred to the screen as well, earning himself the accusation of selling out art to the motives of commerce. Every Rhodesian play has a tragic conclusion: violence, exhaustion, crime, accidents. The loneliness of a woman who loves a man who is also loved by another - a recurring Rodriguesian subject - is narrated/discounted, in Carlota Portella's interpretation, according to the point of view of each of the three, that of Alaide in "Vestido de Noiva", the playwright's most significant title, where under the family's fine paint are hidden tares and mortal sins such as incest, that of Aurora in "Os sete Gatinhos", that of Peixoto in "Bonitinha mas Ordinaria". Rodrigues applies all his intuition to the female heart, painting oppressed, passive, cold, erotic women, prostitutes or victims, who also project their frustration onto men, returning over and over again to the founding material of his work. A procedure also adopted by Carlota Portella so that her dance theatre, plastic, vital, energetic, supportive in its group structures, "can at least let us know what time it is".
"Grito" shows, in four sections, some of the main themes that insistently come together in the relationships between the different characters in the seventeen plays by Nelson Rodrigues, nicknamed "Flor de Osessão", as his friends called him and as he called himself: the tragic ending, the love of two women for one man, female frustration and a morbid loneliness (or perhaps a lonely morbidity?).
Carlota Portella
