VISUAL ARTS -- DANCE

 

LETTER INTERLINES LEAD MARCIA MILHAZES' STAGE SETTING

 

"YOURS ALWAYS", an occupation laden with meanings by the Rio-born choreographer , continues its run until month's end in Rio de Janeiro.

 

By Helena Katz for "O Estado de São Paulo”

 

From the street, one can see Chico Cunha's immense picture on the side facade of the Oi Futuro building, located  in Rio de Janeiro's Flamengo district, and entirely t taken  by Marcia Milhazes' first occupation by her dance company.

 

Embracing, with their backs to us, Ana Amélia Vianna and Aline Arakaki, two dancers in the excellent trio comprising the cast, together with Elton Sacramento, invite us to follow them. Little by little, we will be able to identity that there begins  the deeply-coherent involvement which makes the occupation stand out.

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We are halted , prior to entering the building , by Ana Clara Miranda's 13 photos. These comprise an unusual space, a suspension gap made up of silence, a kind of silence which becomes the underlying note, to bind the various actions making up this work. Our breathing becomes restrained when we discover that the light and dark tones which weave what had already become silent musicality in Chico Cunha's drawing as light and shadow at that Agora -- that assembly place -- installed by the photos . Photos?  Or are they instants which depict gestures in a still-larval stage ? Angles, planes, surfaces and lines compounding volumes silent of displacements. Our gazes touch them, searching for agreements to

enter their materiality, which frames the portion, the piece, the part, without requiring metonymies.  Ana Clara's photos open chasms, whisper the dizziness, the vertigo involved in the trio's dance, on the fourth level of the building.

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But, prior to that, at the lobby, each dancer shows, on monitor screens, how the body may seek not to step away from the movement. Facing them , a panel by Beatriz Milhazes assigns space to furniture color, in a kind of physicality of that space, so overloaded with discrete architectural information (glass, metal, plastic, cement, etc.)

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On going up, one discovers that, that which had been announced on the small  ground floor monitors is made giant on Gustavo Gelmini's video's parts of movements. Silence is rarefied, and  restored at the next stop, where performances occur, such as those in palace anterooms, for the sumptuousness of what is offered a few steps above.

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On level 4, the textures leaping out of Beatriz Milhazes' colors echo the musicality of what had been binding the lobby's picure to the photos, to the performances. They make the walls resonate like the music which provides another volume to the ambience , by music director Eduardo Antonello's masterly touch; he also plays the clavichord and the viola da gamba, together with Pedro Hassel (viola da gamba, medieval viola, and wind instruments), and Roger Lagr (Baroque viola).

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The trio's musicality is woven into circumvolutions akin to those which have enthralled us up to that very moment.  And when the dancers' trio starts to build up, with their gestures, a space made tridimensional by Glauce Milhazes' concept of light, we are drawn by the voluptuosness of the seemingly-infinite spirals, by the arabesques spreading in all directions, by incessant dilations of intensity of what has been minute and detailed, and which then blows up in silence.

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Ana Amelia's, Aline's, and Elton's gestures dialogue with, continue, confront, welcome, gaze, and stand away from one another in lines moving into and out of themselves. The three interpreters' dazziling competence is inebriating. Turns, swirls, and sways are organized into ever-flowing ellipses. Viciousness and levity at the same time. Distance stretches and contracts until it becomes closeness. The opposite becomes complementary, in a bubbling frenzy.

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This Baroque adventure, led by Marcia Milhazes' refined and elegant talent, stemming forth from her permanent interest on the intimacy of letters is called 'Yours Always', with the detail of a comma reproducing the end of a missive.

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Perception is the main guest, forever challenged in this banquet of sagacity, which may be cherished until month's end.