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BRUNO BELTRÃO AND GRUPO DE RUA PREMIERE "H3" AT BRUSSELS' KUNSTENFESTIVAL DES ARTS
By
Jeroen Peeters
Expanding hip-hop
with yet another movement dialect has never been his interest. For that, he is
too critical of hip-hop's branding strategies, just as claiming a single
language is too narrow a space for developing complex thought. That we humans are
anyway all too keen on pursuing habits and patterns is one of the concerns that
underpins Bruno Beltrão's ironic deconstruction of hip-hop dances with his
Grupo de Rua. Recurring strategies in Beltrão's pieces are embracing
contradiction and exposing hip-hop's phraseology to other cultural languages,
not in the last instance that of the theatre. Still, the potentially rambunctious
energies of clashing languages were always tamed by captions and waterproof
dramaturgy – Jérôme Bel's mark on the work.
If the new
creation H3 lands in another place, perhaps this is why: it exchanges
dramaturgy for a choreographic approach and speaks beyond irony. For the first
time, Beltrão moves beyond the predominance of hip-hop lineages and focuses on
the exploration his Grupo de Rua's idiosyncratic languages. There is still
plenty of dribbling footwork and popping chests in H3, but the ambiguity,
richness and density of gesture makes one forget about hip-hop. The latter's
virtuoso but customary chatter gives way to doubt and the wayward mind of a major
artist that starts to find his own language. H3 has some flaws and lacks
in radical choices when it comes to music, but it is Beltrão's most complex and
compelling work to date.
Brimming gestures
The stage
is dimly lit, wrapping its edges in shadow, dark areas for the dancers to hide.
Very slowly, over the course of fifteen minutes or so, they will trickle one by
one into the lit area up front, joining the others seated there cross-legged. A
projected window glides along the walls while we hear persistent street noise:
as if we were in a dance studio somewhere in Rio de Janeiro. Seated close to
each other, two dancers make frenetic gestures along their bodies' contours,
gestures that waver between mapping absence and shielding off, marking the
sphere of interaction with the other. But then they change quickly into exploring
the other's proximity with abrupt moves, challenging each other's kinesphere.
Duets are H3's
main form: both a choreographic and a social frame imposed upon hip-hop's
figure of the macho solo performer showing off in a frontal setting. The
variety is large: teasing and shadow-boxing, patting and covering each other's
backs, some unison and counterpoint, but also wild interaction reminiscent of
krumping, throwing and trashing the other. Whether slow or fast, each gesture
is brimming with energy, exuding as often conflict as playfulness. The
movement's centrifugal quality exudes very different overtones: from reaching
toward the other, standing in the world, to getting rid of the violent forces
one is haunted by. The duet introduces an altogether different understanding of
identity, which departs from intersubjectivity. That the spatial setting initially
harks back to hip-hop helps to keep the other extreme in view.
Negotiating spaces
After a
while, the choreography is pulled into space, with the dancers juxtaposing and
mingling their duets into all kinds of permutations and configurations. The
stage is now fully lit, an electronic soundtrack accompanies the dance. Now we
are so to speak in a theatre, a space that requires negotiation as well. The
frontal space of the solo performer is extended to the theatre's vertical plane,
and then flipped down, underscored by the light design that marks a square on
the floor. A black mirroring floor, by the way, that is also present in the
screeching noises of sneakers, which also return as samples in the soundtrack.
Yet, all these dramaturgical elucidations are already evident in the
choreography itself, which plays with levels and negotiates the space's borders
in bodies spinning and whirling all over.
Again, it
is on the level of gesture and attitude that H3's many spaces show their
depth and meaning. Most prominent are the various moments in which the dancers
are running backward rapidly, one by one, in duets after being thrown into the
arena by four colleagues, or everyone together. Once more the dancers embrace
absence, this time including the endless space behind their backs, symbolizing
their own blind spots. Variations are throwing one's head in the neck and
remain wandering slowly: insecure as movement, powerful as a gesture of
exposure. Though H3 is often spectacular because of its highly energetic
flow, it doesn't seek to end on a high note. While the light has by then opened
up the horizon once again, flooding the space, the dancers break up their
phrases, ramble on a little. Before you can realize the choreography suddenly
falls apart, it is swallowed by a black-out. It is like running in advance of
oneself, blind into the unknown – understood as a deliberate and utmost
contemporary statement about vulnerability and subjectivation.
Dates and Links
www.grupoderua.com
22–24 May, Hebbel am Ufer Berlin (www.hebbel-am-ufer.de)
1 June, Festival International de las
artes de Castilla y Leon Salamanca (www.festivalcyl.com)
18–19 June, Grand Théâtre du
Luxembourg (www.theatres.lu)
(21.5.2008)
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