FESTIVAL UNEARTHS WEALTH OF BRAZILIAN DANCE.

FESTIVAL UNEARTHS WEALTH OF BRAZILIAN DANCE FESTIVAL DE DANCA DO RIO DE JANEIRO TAPIAS TEATRO ODYLO COSTA FILHO - UERJ RIO DE JANEIRO, BRAZIL NOVEMBER 7-22, 1999

The Brazilian dance scene is hugely unexplored terrain, populated by artists hungry to be seen by the rest of the world. It is also something of a political-aesthetic minefield, I found at the two-week-long, twelfth edition of this overwhelming, yet plainly only surface-scratching, festival. There's a bounty of work being produced in a spirit that seems reasonably cooperative one moment, keenly competitive the next.

Director Giselle Tapias harbors strong ambitions to raise both the event's level of professionalism and its international profile, hence the presence of a small army of journalists, presenters, and programmers, many from Europe. This kind of exposure and dialogue, she feels, can only benefit her native country's dancers and dance-makers.

There were many strings to the festival's bow: vital critical debates, dance workshops, lengthy competitions among amateur groups and emerging independent artists, presentations by a handful of national and international companies, and the first-ever Brazilian platform of the Rencontres Choreographiques Internationales de Seine-Saint-Denis (a biennial choreographic competition centered in the Parisian suburb of Bagnolet). Most of the activities occurred in an expansive campus theater, inconveniently located away from Rio's more central areas. Attendance by the public was, at times, disappointingly sparse. Too, festival organization was sometimes slack, as if Tapias and her small staff had bitten off more than could be easily chewed. But at least they had the gumption to put it on.

There were typical failures in the festival roster: self-indulgences that should have stayed in the studio, trash sans irony, or works of tedious facility. And a temporary ban on the use of tango and Michael Nyman music would be welcome. But clearly a mass of dance talent awaits discovery in Brazil.

For all its complexity, Brazil is fundamentally a pleasure culture. Several dances warmly bucked any tendency toward sober pretension by marrying movement to the national art of music. In Mario Nascimento's Arere, the dancers of Bale de Rio Preto executed capoeira-style flings and rolls with rhythmic abandonment and a satisfying, uncomplicated directness. A similarly sensual spontaneity pulsated beneath the hides of the men and women of Cia de Dancas, seen in excerpts from Claudia de Souza's Pares. Mixing urban and regional styles, they turned couple dancing into an act of gymnastic carnal romance.

What with a gorilla suit, scarf dancing, and colored lights in its bag of acceptably cheap tricks, Luis De Abreu's KIT-1999 was knowing, audience-participation nonsense for a crowd eager for a little easy razzle-dazzle.

Even fresher was the trio of works issuing from Nova Danca. Confidently committed to their calling, the artists in this engaging, low-budget company run their own studio space in Sao Paulo. One collective assignment was to study the movement patterns characterizing their city's neighborhoods.

Doubtless, this research informed Adriana Grechi's BOOTSTRAPSAOPAULO!, a piece notable for its unforced humor and unexpected poignancy. Here our common urban environment was treated as a playground for interrelated events and people. Ares do Rio, from the troupe's improvisational arm Cia Nova Danca 4, exuded a softly inquiring, deceptively aimless air that likewise suggested a wider world beyond the confines of the auditorium. Company member Cristian Duarte possesses a charming, alert sense of mischief. This magnetic mover wears his considerable physical skill remarkably lightly. In the solo Pressa, Duarte is a benign crazy in clay-caked trousers, listening to channel-hopping radio while imprisoned behind stagewide netting. Often abruptly executed, the shapes of his physical language were still gratifyingly clear and clean. The piece's underlying balance of pathos and whimsy worked beautifully.

Conceptual efforts ranged from the intellectually serious to the brightly comic. Paulo Caldas's Falso Movimento, for his company Staccato, was a stringent juxtaposition of two simultaneous solos set against a wall divided in two. The piece's bearings cleverly altered, so that what was wall for one became floor for the other, and vice-versa. Another duet, Cem Aguas by Dupla de Danca Ikswalsinats, found company dancer-choreographers Federico Paredes and Gustavo Ciriaco using simple, single words to chart the paths of rhythmical intersection between their contrasting tall/small guy body sizes. Their clean, deadpan minimalism was sharp and funny.

Mah Cia de Danca's Percurso merits special mention. Based in the small city of Campina Grande, young company founders Romero Motta and Admilson Maia claim to have racked up twenty-three prizes in four years of making work. Their dancing in this well-crafted duet about atavism and evolution was brilliantly animalistic and acutely mutually attuned.

The bulk of the festival was Brazilian dance. Still, a few continental companies flew in. France's l'Esquisse appeared in artistic director Regis Obadia's Passion. This ceremonial abstraction of Sophocles's tragedy, Antigone, used high-beam flashlights, whipcord microphones, sporadic speech, a boy soprano, and swift, space-eating dramatic movement. Strikingly assembled, but after a single viewing I'm not entirely sure what the sound and fury signified.

Companhia Portuguesa de Bailados Contemporaneos featured a charged-up, fourteen-strong ensemble in a trio of mostly heavy-handed works, two from artistic director Vasco Wellenkamp and the other--a kind of bad-day-at-the-gym piece--by Rami Levi.

All were enthusiastically received. Or maybe it was just, rightly, the dancing.