A Big Wheel From Brazil.

Big Wheel From Brazil

" I AM AN OLD WOMAN," Deborah Colker declares, "but also a little girl. I want to play with serious matters."

At the ripe age of 39, this exuberant Brazilian choreographer has rapidly become a major player in the cultural landscape of her native country. Companhia de Danca Deborah Colker was formed just seven years ago. To date, there are only five full-length dances in the repertory. Yet Colker has achieved what must be one of the more astonishingly high degrees of popularity in dance globally. In Brazil, her individual works have racked up audiences totalling 200,000, of all ages and all walks of life. And how many other choreographers can you think of who can boast of a nine-week run, as Colker's latest dance Casa enjoyed in her home town of Rio de Janeiro this past autumn?

Exactly. Precious few, making Colker both celebrity and cultural phenomenon in her own country. But why is the work of this small, blonde, blazingly confident woman of Russian-Jewish extraction so ballyhooed? And what is it that makes her tick?

Careening past glittering Copacabana Beach in her battle-fatigued Volkswagen, Colker casts a hand towards the nocturnal gallery of hookers, footballers, and tourists spread along the avenue after midnight. "You can see all of life here," she remarks. "It's not good. It's not bad. It's incredible!" It is precisely this kind of expansive observation and zest for living that Colker injects into her dances. Much like the choreographer herself, they are nothing if not products of the pleasure-culture from which they spring.

Think of them as pieces of sophisticated populist fusion, or smart art with heart. However you label them, they are as authentically Brazilian as their creator.

"My work is like Brazil," Colker agrees, "the mix of colors, the dynamics and rhythms, the happiness and possibility of a long way of discovery. It's a little history we have. Five hundred years. People think there are still monkeys in the streets, alligators, and Indians. OK, it's a Third World country. But it's an honor to me that my influence is this beautiful, creative, strange place, with its music, and the misery living alongside the rich."

Colker's diversity of inspirations is reflected in her personal history. Her late father was a violinist and conductor. She herself studied piano for twelve years. For six, she focused on psychology. For seven, she was an amateur volleyball player. Her professional dance training, begun at age seventeen, encompassed classical, jazz, and tap. "Until 1984," she says, "I only wanted to dance what my teachers and choreographer gave to me. But then I began to think, and do something myself." A vast amount of film and theater work followed, including devising movement for film director Werner Herzog's stage version of A Midsummer Night's Dream.

Colker also was a dance teacher both to professionals and nonprofessionals. Her description of that experience may help to explain how she acquired the common touch as an artist: "! loved when my students were architects, dancers, actors, and from the medical profession," she says. "It's very rich when you put all the people together from these different universes. It was important to get them to work with the stomach or breath, to think about health, to move with intelligence in their daily life."

In 1993 Colker and a few students created a short dance that was part of a showcase of new talent in Rio. Buoyed by its positive reception, she took the plunge and launched her company. A subsequent appearance at Rio's Teatro Municipal during the prestigious O Globo em Movimento festival, as the opening act of a double bill with Momix, garnered international interest. The show Colker presented, Vulcao, or Volcano, had been rehearsed in at least four locations. Two years later, thanks to generous (and continuing) support from the Brazilian state oil firm Petrobras, the company claimed permanent space in a former ironworks factory located in the Lapa docks district of central Rio and converted into a cultural center. Situated almost within spitting distance of Petrobras' international headquarters; it is permanent home to Colker's administration and production staff as well as a complete storage and rehearsal facility.

Colker's choreography marries multidisciplinary physical daring with high-concept design. Velox, from 1995, features a huge and colorful climbing wall studded with stepping treads from which the dancers swing, hang and spiral. Casa spotlights body architecture in the context of jungle-gym domesticity. The cunning set was directly drawn from Colker's own multi-level dwelling, while the movement material is derived from universally familiar activities like cooking and eating, sleeping, fighting, dressing and undressing, and having sex.

But it is Rota, from 1997, with which Colker's company is making its North American debut at New York's Joyce Theater February 15-20. The piece was triggered by a 1995 holiday in Disney World. "I couldn't believe it," Colker remembers. "The day I arrived I saw that all that I wanted to play with was there: movement, humor, diversion, inversion, speed. All the different ages and colors of the people. The adrenaline. I became like my children (a daughter, fifteen, and a son, twelve), with problems, sometimes because of the long lines to go on rides, and fighting, but also with a lot of pleasure."

Rota is cued to a channel-surfing soundtrack in which Mozart rubs shoulders with The Chemical Brothers, and Strauss is the flipside of Tangerine Dream. In the first act, an engaging ensemble of fifteen (including Colker) works, fights, plays, sleeps, and scratches its way through a breezy blend of classically pitched movement wittily overlaid with everyday gestures. Behaving like wiry, wired adolescents on a merry spree, this extrovert community breathes fresh kinetic air into the mechanics of daily existence.

The second half, dreamily paced and kaleidoscopically pretty, recasts them as Da Vinci-like astronauts who might have run off to join some celestial-infernal circus. The dominant image is of a tweenty-two-foot-high, one-and-a-half-ton wheel, framed by ladders and as reminiscent of the film 2001: A Space Odyssey as a midway amusement. While Colker can hardly claim to have invented the wheel, here she amply demonstrates just how inventive she can be with one. Her sexy, gravity-defying troupe scrambles round and spins upon the gigantic circular object with supple, seductive ease. By the time the performance reaches its giddy finale--the dancers having transformed themselves from happy, muscular hamsters into human carousel cars--the audience is spinning too.

At times, particularly in its second section, Rota suggests Pilobolus crossed with Elizabeth Streb. Colker claims never to have seen the latter's work. She regards her own dance as "motion in search of entertainment" and "sensation with intelligence." The piece carries lightly the charge of its own unpredictability, as if something might burst through the first act's magnified roadmap/dress pattern backdrop, or surrender in surprise to the gravity being challenged throughout Act Two. "The dance starts from the floor," she says, "then I come to the air, where there is a different density and breath. It's like astronauts: they live a completely different life, training for years to make only one trip to the moon. To win space, they have to understand gravity."

In this benign yet exalting theatrical event, Colker displays her mastery at making a sometimes laborious and heavy-handed art form fun again. "I want to honor classical music and the classical vocabulary of dance," she avows, "but join them with a contemporary language and make something relaxed. I know the past is very important. I respect that. But I don't want it to be my prison."

In Rota, Colker operates on multiple spatial and conceptual levels without ever teetering over the edge into no-man's-land abstractions. This is because, wisely, she keeps her dance, and herself, grounded in quotidian concerns. "When you do something on the wheel," she says, "it answers you. You have to understand Newton. But in my work I don't want to only talk about the philosophy of balance, physics, geometry, volume, and weight. I want to talk about the people on the street, TV, my dogs (she has four), my children. To be an artist is not to be removed. It is to be a mother, to eat, to drive a car, to go on the beach. If you are not a person, with a vision of the world in your head, you can't be a choreographer." Rote has the potential to put the world at her feet. Reviews in London were unanimously favorable. The company will return next summer with performances of 1996's Mix, a blend of Vulcao and Velox, at the Barbican Centre. As with the engagement of Rote at The Joyce, the prospect has Colker tingling with excitement. "I'm very ambitious," she says, "but not for money. I want my work to be seen."

Like her troupe, Colker possesses a big, bright personality. She seems to attack her livelihood and life with the spirit of a precocious, quick-witted child. "The men of my company say I am more man than them," she says, issuing a raucous laugh. Yet Colker is clearly proud. "I am very persevering," she says. Regardless of where the company performs, after each show she watches a videotape of that night's work. No wonder she calls herself an insomniac, and a perfectionist.

She is also a fighter. Colker remembers negotiating her first long-term contract with a presenter in Rio. "We all know," she says, adopting a mocking, orotund tone, "that dance is important. But I convinced the sponsors that dance is also good business." The director of the theater in which her company would perform suggested a two-week run. "I said, `No! I want to stay four weeks minimum, because I did eight months' rehearsals, and this is my city, and I WANT THIS!' Colker bangs her fist on a table. "And I won. We had the public." She considers this victory more significant than espousing slogans through her work. "It's a political action. The theaters in Rio began to give more dates for dance. This is good for dance here, and in all of Brazil. But," she adds sagely, "it's important not to sit on success."

"She knows no limits." That's how company member Carolina Wiehoff pegs her boss. Fellow dancer Fernanda Cavalcanti echoes her. "Usually in ballet it's eight counts," she says, "and then you start again. With Deborah it's eight, then maybe nineteen. We joke that we'll keep counting `til we get to a million, then we'll have a big party."

Securely salaried, Colker's dancers are as well-versed in contemporary and classical dance as they are in athletic movement. "I tell them all the time, `Please, don't show me technique! Keep it inside.' But with this discipline you can do anything. It doesn't put you in a box. It makes you free." She works them hard, but carefully. "I love my dancers. When you are in love, you have great moments and bad. You have to be patient. Sometimes I think, `Today I can't look at this dancer. She has to be alone.' And then a week later I see that she needs me now. I go and talk, and we work."

Risk, Colker admits, "is my passion. Sometimes someone in the company has a lot of fear. The first time one of the girls went on the wheel, she cried a lot. `Don't stop!' I said. `You have to go!' It was a great test for her. When she found she could do it, it was like she was born again with a force she didn't know she had. It's a constant trial, and a game. I need my dancers to come with me. I tell them, `You can't pay attention only when you have the ball."

Brazil is a huge country with a dance world marked by a great diversity of talent, and not a little division. In this context Colker's intentions have not always been understood, nor well received. "They accused me a lot," she says, "of not making dance. `It's not cultured. It's so easy. The wall is gymnastic, the wheel is not from reality.' And for a long time the critics want to label me. `Deborah came from Trisha Brown. No. Pina Bausch? Twyla Tharp? No, she is from Paul Taylor. No! From the sports world, then. No, because she uses dance. OK, from show business."

"I am Deborah," she continues, "a very particular person. Of course I have influences all the time. From plants, my dogs ... from you. I'm very attentive and informed, especially in the arts. My best friends are writers, directors of movies, painters, photographers. I love when something good can enter me and stay. But it's different when you study something a lot and have a reference. That is not my way. I never went to the United States or Europe to study dance. I didn't see a lot of videos."

Colker remains an ideal example of how intertwined person is with place. "My work is like Brazil," she says, "and Brazil is like me: never tired. At the same time, people here know how to sit and see the ocean and feel the wind. It's a very intelligent moment to understand such a simple thing. It's a genius, like Fred Astaire dancing. Yes, it's the same. I can't say more."