Rio’s Slums to Jacob’s Pillow
Rio’s Slums to Jacob’s Pillow
Companhia Urbana de Dança Reflects Brazil’s Complexities
By MARINA HARSSAUG. 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.
More:
http://www.nytimes.com/2014/08/10/arts/dance/companhia-urbana-de-danca-reflects-brazils-complexities.html?partner=rss&emc=rss&_r=0
= new reply since forum marked as read
