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DANCE
Rio’s Slums to Jacob’s Pillow Companhia Urbana de Dança Reflects Brazil’s Complexities By MARINA HARSS
AUG. 9, 2014
As the protests surrounding the World Cup this summer underscored, Brazil is a complex country, blessed with gorgeous beaches and breathtaking landscapes, bursting with music, but also plagued by poverty and violence. Extremes of beauty and ugliness rub shoulders; they are intertwined in the national character. This tension is precisely what the choreographer Sonia Destri Lie, founder of the contemporary hip-hop troupe Companhia Urbana de Dança, strives to capture in her work. The company will appear at the Jacob’s Pillow Dance Festival in Becket, Mass., from Wednesday to Saturday. Back in the 1970s, when Ms. Destri was growing up in the comfortable Rio suburb of Bangu, she did not yet know this would be her life’s work. She studied ballet and contemporary dance and went on to perform with the Brazilian dance-theater choreographer Suzana Braga and to choreograph for television, movies and fashion. In the ’90s, when the jobs in Rio dried up, she decamped to Düsseldorf to teach. Just as she found herself in a creative slump, she was introduced to hip-hop by the American b-boy Marvin A. Smith, also based in Germany. In hip-hop, she recognized a language that offered the freedom she had been seeking. After a fire gutted her apartment, she returned to Rio in 1997 and began producing hip-
hop events. She was invited to choreograph Rio’s fashion week and the film “Maré, Nossa História de Amor,” a love story set in Rio’s streets. At casting calls, she was faced with row upon row of nonprofessional dancers, young men who danced in neighborhood crews or played in “funk” bands — the local derivation of hip-hop. Most came from the favelas (slums), with slender prospects in the racially and economically divided landscape of Rio. Where others saw statistics — “How many black kids die each month in Brazil?” she asked recently, via Skype from her apartment near Ipanema — she saw talent, potential and desire. “They were glasses waiting to be filled,” she said. At the suggestion of one of the dancers, Tiago Sousa, she began to think about forming a company. Ten years on, Mr. Sousa is still with her. Continue »
Through her European contacts, she was invited to take part in Biennale de Lyon, in 2006. With that goal in view, she hired nine dancers and choreographed the company’s first work, “Ziriguidum.” Many elements that would come to define her style were already in evidence: a strong but fluid structure; pared-down movement sequences that stress transitions rather than showstopping feats; and a dialogue among ensembles, introspective solos and passages of ambiguous partnering. “They dance as a group and listen for each other,” the American choreographer Doug Elkins said recently in a phone interview. Mr. Elkins’s company, also known for meticulously structured works that combine hip-hop, capoeira and other street styles, will be performing at Jacob’s Pillow the same week as Companhia Urbana. The music and soundscapes used by Ms. Destri tend to be spare, the mood forthright, never ingratiating. In 2010, the company debuted in New York, at the Fall for Dance festival. It performed “ID: Entidades,” described by Gia Kourlas in a review in The New York Times as a dreamlike dance in which “circles led to no destination in particular, and popping shoulder isolations began with sinewy power yet dissolved like dust.” The works are developed in collaboration with the dancers; together, they discuss ideas, tell stories and ask questions, then translate this muddle of thoughts into improvised sequences based on a common hip-hop language.
Because they are invested in the choreographic process, the dancers register powerfully as individuals. Ms. Destri has no interest in uniformity: “I don’t want to change them,” she said. Consciously broken down and thoughtfully arranged, the hip-hop steps acquire a kind of lyricism. “It’s more than art,” Raphael Russier, a member since 2005, said via Skype. “It’s meaning, respect, friendship.” Meanwhile, Ms. Destri and her dancers are constantly reminded of the stark realities of life in Brazil. Her dancers live in violent, difficult-to-reach neighborhoods like Piabetá and Morro dos Macacos. Several travel over two hours by bus and unofficial van service to rehearsals, which take place all over the downtown area. “At the beginning, I just wanted to be a dance company,” Ms. Destri said. “I was very naïve. I would get mad at the dancers: How could they always be so late?” Their experiences have become the source material for the dances. “I. You. We ... All black!," the latest, will receive its world premiere at Jacob’s Pillow. Originally titled “Nêgo,” it explores the multiple meanings of this word, a derivative of the Portuguese “negro,” or black. “Nêgo captures the sense of veiled racism that we have in Brazil,” Emilia Spitz, a Rio-born, London-based dance writer, said by email. “It’s not rare to see people refer to each other affectionately as ‘meu nêgo,’ but at the same time, it can be used as a derogatory term.” (Nervous that the title could be taken the wrong way, the festival suggested that Ms. Destri change it for the premiere here. It will go by “Nêgo” in Brazil.) One day in the studio, Ms. Destri explained, a dancer recounted the experience of getting lost in a middle-class Rio neighborhood and asking a white woman for directions. The woman took off running. “We looked at photos of protests, of the bodies of people killed by the police,” Ms. Destri said, “and we started dancing this, improvising.” The choreography contains images of fighting and running, chaos and physical restriction, even of protesters throwing Molotov cocktails. Despite all this, the choreography isn’t heavy-handed; one of Ms. Destri’s greatest virtues is subtlety. “From the beginning, I was struck by the sheer intelligence of the choreography,” Ella Baff, artistic director of Jacob’s Pillow, said recently in Manhattan. Companhia Urbana will also perform a more upbeat work, “Na Pista” (which translates as “The Dance Floor”).
For Ms. Destri, the stakes are high. In the words of Mr. Sousa, “We’re making a revolution with dance.” A version of this article appears in print on August 10, 2014, on Page AR9 of the New York edition with the headline: Rio’s Slums to Jacob’s Pillow.
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