BEYOND THE COMMON PLACE

You should not miss VELOX, the show Companhia de Dan?a Deborah Colker is presenting at Carlos Gomes Theatre; the run continues through December 3. The work is a vigorous confirmation of dance beyond the obvious. It is a result of eight month intensive rehearsals sponsored by the city government through culture department. VELOX is co-sponsored by Petrobras - a Brazilian oil company. Theoretically, VELOX can state both the aesthetics, which springs from technique and discipline, and the beauty of human body ordinary movements; it also shows the possibilities of other physical practices such as sports and martial arts. VELOX is a joint word of volcano and velocity, and the show is a visceral tour de force, which bursts onto the stage as a babel of gestures and movements with a surprising and new aesthetic vigor. It is a five-piece show: MECHANICS (basic principles of weight, balance and geometry); QUOTIDIAN (repetitive gestures from ordinary contexts like drama or comedy acts); MOUNTAIN CLIMBING (search of perfect balance, the obsession of every dancer); MARTIAL ARTS (kung-fu movements) and SPORTS (impetuosity, team work and supporters’ cheering). The run continues from Thursday through Sunday.

THE SKY IS THE LIMIT

The aerial Mountain Climbing makes Velox a great show.

Deborah Colker is a phenomenon. First she launched her company when she presented her work with the so prestigious American groups Momix at Teatro Municipal nearly a year ago. Now her second work, Velox is an unforgettable event. The old theatre Carlos Gomes, at the dull Tiradentes square has changed its looks and brought back the good old times of glory - big audiences, sold out tickets and tickets scalpers at the vicinity of the box offices. A great success proving that when there is quality the public knows and shows up.

And quality does not go amiss in Velox. On stage the dancers are athletic, agile and tuned. They perform a vigorous and lively show, which is divided into five choreographies. The highlight is, by no means, Mountain Climbing. This part features a huge climbing wall (twenty-foot-high) where dancers swing, hang and spiral in an unbelievable speed. The daring movements are done with precision and synchronization. The audience gapes, feels tense and scared that something might go wrong. Mountain Climbing is one of the most inventive things that have come up recently - it’s a real show. Maybe that’s why the other parts of the dance seem less engaging, yet interesting. Deborah is extremely inventive. She has accurately studied the movements, however she should also seek a bit more to get a choreographic design. She does it better in sports, when she exploits the kinetic tour the force of athletes, extremely well structured - it’s another good moment of Velox.

We have nothing against explosion of movement through movement, but both in Mechanics as well as in Quotidian, mainly the latter, there should have more occupation of space and fewer interrupted movements (such as dance, sit, stand, dance). The whole piece is correct, clean and inventive like in Martial Arts, with Kung Fu movements. But Velox is more than that - there is the Mountain Climbing and for that, Deborah Colker, her troupe and her show deserve the best praise.

LEAVE YOUR PREJUDICE BEHIND

The present dance communication phenomenon is meant to youth of visual language era.

VELOX is a phenomenon of communication. The show, which was bound to fail, ended up as last season greatest show in Rio. One, who sees it, immediately knows why. Here are some tips to enjoy it.

Tip number one: leave at the foyer all the prejudice that identifies the young ones as intellectually handicapped. Even those who solely watch MTV and spend hours at CD ROMS and collect Spawn, Wildcats and Gen 13, have the right to enjoy themselves with something that only a live show can provide. VELOX offers this - it communicates with those who read through digital images or scenic art means. The acclaimed video games staccato, the kind of sequence after each event (anything effects something) and mainly the way to perform movement as a powerful weapon. VELOX nourishes through this. Those who take classes of physical fitness, enjoy or play any sports and like dancing, will be led into instantaneous empathy. These aspects of contemporary urban melting pot are in a continuous process.

Tip number two: feel the show as a thermometer, identifying its "warmer" parts and finding out where Colker’s capacity as a choreographer is leading to. It’s a gratifying exercise when her talent is revealed, especially in the first sequence (the most perfect part of the work) and in Mountain Climbing. In the first part of Mechanics, there is just one structure grounded on a polished soundtrack (touches of Berna Cerppas, S?rgio Mekler, Kassin and Leandro Leal). The music is a mix and yields to an attempted musical composition, which is neither addition nor synthesis; it is just music.

The choreography tracks the music structure, it tempts to undo the concept as a reference, but it shortly gives place to an extra dimension. This is Colker’s common mistake.

Mountain Climbing brings back life into the show. As the dancers swing and hang vertically from a climbing wall, not on the ground, gravity defying as rhythm action is not possible. This compels the appearance of a new dynamics; the highest point is the lyric flavor, which punctuates, now and then, some of its movements.

Grinco Cardia’s set design provides a perfect space for VELOX; except for the sports court designed in the last part - SPORTS. Moving vertically such as wall climbing, poetically reveals the scene, but the obvious knocks down its symbolic power. Nine finely honed dancers are like precision machinery. They are extremely fit, especially Luciana Brites, Dani Amorin and Tatiana France.

For a newly born company like this is, (to date, there are only two full-length repertory) and based on her first work, the doubtful VOLCANO, we cannot deny. Yes Colker, you have grown up.

SCORING A REAL GOAL

Companhia de Dan?a Deborah Colker redresses emotion and the simplicity of sports in a modern way.

Contemporary dance shows in Brazil are often meetings of nerds around a stage. Those wearing ballet shoes bang their heads and the boot-wearing patrons clap their hands. It is infectious. The more the dancers bang their heads on the stage, the more claps are heard. They are all contemporary, you know how this is. You would think the Rio-based choreographer Deborah Colker would be all set to follow this depression-cult-dance. Surprisingly, she found her inspiration in the vigor and fun of sports, which triggered the movements of Velox, a show of her twelve-dancer troupe, which starts this week at Sergio Cardoso Theatre in S?o Paulo. For a three-week run in Brazil each performance has racked up audiences of nearly 1,000 per show, totaling 50,000 after 51 presentations. Yet Colker has achieved what must be one of the more astonishingly high degrees of popularity last summer in Rio de Janeiro.

"The formula is simple", she says. "Basketball games on TV have always fascinated me. The players when they play volleyball, soccer or basketball produce a fantastic choreography. It is arresting to the eyes". As dancers are like athletes, they train to meet perfection, to exceed themselves, to break their own records, Deborah decided to transform sports into dance and vice-versa. She choreographs teams to win - vibrantly mixing tension, attention, alternating fun and sadness and different kinds of sports in a frantic sequence of rhythms. The effect is perfect. The 20-foot-high wall climbing has a fantastic precision when her gravity defying troupe swing and hang on it. A fall seems imminent, the audience doesn’t breathe.

World Cup - it is so perfectly done that many times, part of the audience burst into patriotic cheer after the show as if it were a victory of our Brazilian soccer team. "Now I’m really proud to be Brazilian. You have the responsibility to show around the world what we are capable of", said Beatriz Segall, a well-known TV actress after the performance of VELOX in Rio de Janeiro. Companhia de Dan?a Deborah Colker will present VELOX at the French Dance Festival in Lyon in September. The event comprises apart from dance, theatre, literature, music and paintings having Brazil in the spotlight. The touring to France will lead to other performances in Europe such as Hamburg and Berlin.

To reach perfection, Colker trained exhaustively her dancers for eight months. "I was cruel. To play the athletes we had to have a multi-disciplinary physical daring which dancers are not so much used to", says Colker. The chiropractor Jos? Roberto Prado Junior had a full-time job to help the ones who got hurt. The dancers had daily six-hour rehearsal including classes of Kung fu, classic ballet and wall climbing on a 33-foot-high wall. "My justification was that I was able to do all I had demanded from the dancers, and it paid off." The company’s evolution from the first work Volcano and VELOX debut last October can be compared to the progress of our Brazilian soccer team at different World Cups - Italy and USA.

Colker achieved another success. She trespassed the wall of pointy-heads who mistrusted her. She created a daring and fun show pleasing even the ones who are not so fond of dance. "The people who saw our show throughout Brazil are from all walks of life. They are sports lovers who wanted to see something different", says the 35-year old choreographer. "They call me modern but I don’t mind. I am in fact a contemporary person". After returning from Lyon, France, Colker will start working on her new show grounded in quotidian concerns. She will have an amusement park on stage. "I want to demonstrate a Ferris wheel, climb it up, walk on stage wings." She is on the right way.

RUNNING ON VERVE AND STYLE

Deborah Colker is one of dance’s great characters. A hyperactive former volleyball star, musician, psychology graduate and scion of Russian Jews living in Brazil, she fell in love with contemporary dance aged 18. Now she leads a group of beautiful people from diverse dance backgrounds whom she has moulded into an impassioned and energetic troupe of what ballet’s Derek Deane calls aesthetic athletes, for that is exactly what they are.

They made their London debut a year ago with a hit show called Rota, which contained a giant wheel as its centrepiece. This time, as part of the Barbican’s Brazil festival, the company from Rio de Janeiro brings Mix, which comprises excerpts from Colker’s first two works. Vulc?o, the first, is slight and could be viewed as her route map into her art. The parody of the catwalk falls flat, despite its wit, because fashion is so good at parodying itself. We feel we’ve seen it all before. The medley of duets is diverting as couples connect in leaps, vaults, dives and dizzying lifts, but their kinetic jinks are one-dimensional.

The second half is awesome. Colker gets into her stride with Velox, inspired by Leni Riefenstahl’s film Olympia. Indeed, there are hints of the 1936 Berlin Olympics with dancers in ritualised moves and militaristic formations. She draws a connection between sport and dance by creating a style that glorifies muscle control and then she presses these hyper-controlled bodies into flowing phrases. Colker is the queen of the fluent phrase. She examines the biomechanics of movement in a slow piece, set to a sonic boom, in which four dancers swim in space.

The ending is spectacular - and must be seen to be believed. Dancers climb the back wall with only rows of little grips for support. They turn mountaineering into art and art into mountaineering. They are as elegant as butterflies and as comfortable as chimps swinging on branches. They flip, balance and skitter with dash. Perhaps it is their nonchalant defiance of gravity that is so astounding.

BRAZILIAN THRILLS AS SPORT TURNS TO ART

WOW! Imagine a vast turquoise and orange wall. Men and women scamper up it and sideways along it faster than most of us can move on the floor itself. Imagine that there’s no gravity, and that humanity has become a new kind of fly on the wall.

Deborah Colker is the Brazilian choreographer who set London talking last year with her gigantic hamster-wheel at Sadler’s wells, which her acrobatic dancers treated exactly as if they were hamsters, with no body weight and no fear whatever.

Her return brings another whacking gimmick, and again she leaves one open-mouthed, at least with the Mountaineering finale to her piece (which overshadows everything that goes before).One has always imagined that top gymnasts could - if carefully reimagined - deliver something as graceful as this. But it is a thrill that could only be created in today’s era, with its obsession with sport and bodily fitness.

Colker, of Russian-Jewish blood, is a pale, blonde woman of 40, who played volleyball before taking to dance. This kind of sporty daring is what propels her imagination. Her 14 dancers are exceptional athletes and gymnasts, but more than that they are true performers.

Mix has seven sections in two parts, all derived from earlier pieces, and you can see from the over-cautious opening (a spry but slightly tedious gym drill) how Colker’s imagination needed to cut loose from the predictabilities of sport.

And then we suddenly see the lyrical imagination that is buried deep inside Colker. Passion is, choreographically, the best section of the whole work, an intense, pretty, funny celebration of how love can go wrong that seems to turn the world into a giant rumpled white bed, and the air into a medley of love songs. Pairs of lovers in white nightwear tumble and fight and embrace, emotions raging and entirely readable in their wonderfully acrobatic activities.

The great crooners of our time - from Barry White to Elvis Presley to Nina Simone to Maria Callas - get a few purple bars each, interrupting each other, as if every grand passion can be followed by another equally grand one. You smile and then sigh at the heartfelt romance of the end, with two girls alone and upside-down, legs and bottoms sticking upwards, ears pressed to the ground, as if listening for the departing footsteps of their lovers, while a vision of Mr. Right appears over their heads.

And then, after the interval, there is a more athletics-based routine building up to the stupendous finale on the wall. We see more of these strange, acrobatically invented balances and holds, eruptions of handstands, backflips, handsprings and turbo-charged press-ups that somehow carry just as much import as the jet?s and pirouettes of ballet.

Whether this is an artistic kind of sport or a sporty kind of art hardly seems to matter when you are entertained as this.

STRONG ARM TACTICS

DANCE: Deborah Colker’s MIX of hyper-gymnastics at the Barbican ultimately offers more brawn than brain, says Donald Hutera

Hugely popular in her own country, Brazilian choreographer Deborah Colker’s eponymous troupe wowed London audiences last year with Rota. This engaging entertainment culminated with the dancers spinning like happy, handsome hamsters on a giant wheel.

Now they have returned to the UK in an earlier chunk of motion spectacle ? la Colker. Premiered in 1996, Mix plays at the Barbican Centre until tomorrow, as part of both the BITE.00 season and the Brasil:Brazil festival. It combines excerpts from two earlier Colker dances, Vulc?o and Velox.

The evening is divided into section with iconic titles such as Machines, Fashion Show and Passion. Initially dancers in white breastplates crawl and stride through precise group formations. A unit of women briefly cup their bosoms, then lay their faces in their hands. But the actions are mechanical, not emotional. A man (Rico Ozon) backflips with circular ease. Another (mischievous Jefferson Antonio, a stand-out in a muscularly attractive, highly skilled ensemble) goes robotic. The overriding tone is one of gymnastics, almost gladiatorial grace held in check.

The succeeding fashion show episode is doused with irony. Imagine a catwalk placed in Alice in Wonderland’s attic. Surrounded by three oversized chairs, a handful of dancers in black, hooped petticoats and flesh-baring, cross-hatched trousers pose and preen. Modish ennui and a come-hither sexuality play off hyper-gesticulations and fast-foot shuffles, skips or swaying hips. The effect is funny ha-ha and peculiar.

Next, the soundtrack switches from electronic samba to a channel-surfing medley of pop hits by the likes of Stevie Wonder, Donna Summer and Lou Reed. The stage is soaked in amber and ruby hues. The backdrop is an epic mussed sheet. Below it, couples rush in eddying runs, walk and jump on each other, tumble in and out of lifts and dizzying spins. Colker herself is carries onstage draped over Antonio’s shoulders, like a caveman’s pelt. But the women, steely strong in their flowing slips, dish out as good as they get.

Colker knowingly activates clich?s. Her pointedly OTT vision of heterosexual division and desire carries a clever charge. It’s not a battle-of-the-sexes argumentation. Haven’t most of us fools been dazed by a quick, hot kiss, or knocked sideways by tidal waves of feeling?

In part two, Colker further explores what she calls "the geometry and physics of movement". There is stillness and speed, careful balances, and an excess of good-humoured, everyday gesture peppered with frustration. The culmination is Mountaineering, in which the supremely agile cast scrambles and swings up, down and across a vast wall studded with grips.

Vividly imagistic, Mix contains no hidden corners or depths. Its identity is in its piecemeal juxtapositions. Colker packs in so much information that we notice more the odd moment when activity is reduced to basics. The performance is neither as whole, nor as wholly likeable, as Rota, nor does it elevate us to the same giddying heights.

Yet as a seedbed for later, more cohesive productions, Mix is plainly brainy beneath its shiny surfaces.

YOU’RE MY WONDERWALL

Deborah Colker’s dancers need a head for heights, says Keith Watson

Asked to name her six favourite dancers, Brazilian choreographer Deborah Colker came up with a list that includes Pel?, Michael Jackson and Bruce Lee. On the strength of Mix, the latest show she has brought to London, it’s a little surprising that Chris Bonnington didn’t make it in there somewhere.

Colker clearly has no hang-up about heights. Last time, in Rota, she had her dancers spinning around like high-fashion hamsters on a giant wheel. Now there’s Mix, an eclectic medley of earlier works at the Barbican this week, that climaxes with the cast scampering with the sure-footedness of mountain goats up and down a vertical wall. Vertigo is not a concept Colker is familiar with.

It’s exhilarating, breath-taking stuff, the kind of adrenaline rush that you associate with the moments when the line between sport (ok, maybe not British sport) and art disappears and you’re left with a moment of sheer physical beauty. That’s the kind of dream moment Colker is forever chasing in her dance. And when her performers are nimbly bounding and twisting across the cliff face, their silhouettes picked out against a giant orange sun, she comes mighty close. Combining the daring of high-divers with the muscular symmetry of gymnasts, Colker’s team is up there in Olympic class, going all out for gold. You half expect judges to flash up scores by way of a finale.

All these sporting references are no accident. Colker, a psychology graduate, divided her youth in Rio between volleyball (she made the city team, and Brazil are major players in the game) and ballet before turning to contemporary dance at the age of 18. The ideal of aesthetic athleticism, as embodied in her dancers, is the moving force that steers her work.

It’s most evident in the floor-bound sections taken from Velox, her second work for her company and one directly inspired by the dynamics of sport. The primping and preening of athletes (when you’re that good, narcissism is par for the course) is worked into a calisthenic routine that comes on like the most stylish aerobics class you’ve ever seen.

With the astute eye of an anatomist, Colker takes delight in deconstructing the mechanics of human physical action to get to the root of how we do the things we do. There are echoes of the pioneering photographic studies of Eadweard Muybridge (the jockstrap replaced by 21st-century fashion sports gear) but this is no academic exercise, for uppermost on Colker’s agenda is a keen awareness of the need to entertain.

Nowhere is that more evident than in Passion, a beguilingly bizarre tribute to the love duet that proves Colker is no one-trick pony. Set to an eccentric compilation tape, we skitter nervously from song to song ( a few bars of Donna Summer’s Love To Love You Babe segues into a snatch of Michael Jackson’s Ben; work that one out), occasionally relaxing enough to let a memory play out in full. The effect is like a fantasy jukebox, the stage and dancers bathed in misty yellow afterglow as the action recalls every stage of the love game, from the pre-match warm-up to the final climactic score, taking in all the nervous fumbling and tackling that goes on in between. Except only in dreams would we be that flexible and sure-footed.

A GRIPPING PERFORMANCE

If parts of Deborah Colker’s show for the Barbican’s Brazil season lack drama, you will forgive all when you see her amazing finale, says Nadine Meisner

Mix is the title of Deborah Colker’s piece at the Barbican Theatre for the centre’s Brasil: Brazil festival, and mix is the defining word for this 39-year-old Brazilian choreographer’s CV. Classical pianist, psychology student, dancer, member of the Rio volleyball team: she has been all of these. You wouldn’t guess if from her choreography - apart from the volleyball, because athleticism is the most evident characteristic of Mix. And just as in her last, less impressive piece in London, Rota, when the best part was the finale, so the absolute gobsmacker in Mix came with the closing section, Mountaineering. Its choreography is exactly that: a "vertical dance" on a vertiginous wall studded with tiny projections as handgrips and foot supports.

"Vertical dance" is not new, but never has it been accomplished with such spectacular bravura. The dancers, who include Colker, not only have to be acrophobia-free, but as devilishly fit as acrobats. They swarm over the wall, unhindered by the normal relationship between human anatomy and gravity. When they hop with splayed limbs from one set of projections to another, they might be water insects on the surface of a garden pond. When they freeze in a line of flattened arabesques, the might be a wallpaper motif. When they congregate in a pleasing symmetry, they could be butterflies pinned in a lepidopterist’s display case. And when a man high up performs a handstand at right angles to the wall, you cross your fingers and close your eyes.

Colker exploits the men’s muscularity with impossible feats, while the women get to shine with flexible shape-making. In the earlier Passion section, gender differences are less marked, even allowing a woman to lift a man sometimes. A medley of love songs, from the Gainsbourg-Birkin Je t’aime to the Rolling Stones’ Angie, serves as a commentary to 23 duets, their holds and supports slotting into each other like angular jigsaw pieces. A woman is whirled round ecstatically by a man until he abruptly knocks her away and goes on to push other women about. A man and a woman reach out to each other desperately, blocked by their partners. Colker is extraordinarily inventive in creating moves where tenderness flips into anger, desire into rejection.

The other contrasting sections are not all as successful, although Fashion Show is strikingly designed, with school-of-Gaultier caged-crinolines. Gigantic chairs make the dancers look like Alice after swigs of Drink Me, and the choreography has echoes of hip-hop and clubland, attractively set to the catchy syncopations of Brazilian percussion music. But the preceding Machines concentrates on robotic jerk and crunch repetitions as tedious as an aerobics class: while the show’s second half, on the theme of sport, feels overstretched until we see Mountaineering.

Pop culture, contemporary dance, sport: all this is funnelled into the Colker composition process, which favours flamboyant legibility and accessibility. And what articulate tools the dancers’ bodies are, expressing everything vividly through graphic movement, including humour, like the man with a neck so independently supple, it’s in danger of sliding off his torso.

Mix, though, seems disparately episodic, lacking an overarching point. Part of the blame rests with its genesis, whereby extracts from Colker’s first two works - Vulc?o (Volcano, 1994) and Velox (1995) - were combined for its premiere in 1996 at the Lyons Biennale. Colker’s latest piece, Casa (House), apparently features another ambitious stage set, a multilevel construction in which the dancers enact the drama of domestic life. It sounds more cohesive and very alluring.

‘ROTA’ EXPLORES THE RELATION ART-SCIENCE

After the mountain climbing wall, Deborah Colker puts on the stage a Ferris wheel.

Rio - The names of her two shows - Volcano and Velox - serve to define her. The swift Deborah Colker is really a volcano. Suffice to say she is in her third stage production with Rota, which opened Saturday in Curitiba at the Gua?ra Theatre.

After the mountain climbing wall shown in Velox, she now puts a Ferris wheel on the stage. After speed, she has made the physics of movement her subject. ‘The work has two parts: in the first, the choreographer, the occupation of space; and , in the second, I explore the levels’ says the outstanding phenomenon in the history of communication through dance, on the Brazilian stage. Velox, for example, was seen by more than 100 thousand people.

But the most impressive news brought by Rota, and which will be a surprise for those who saw the two previous shows, is quite another. Deborah Colker has discovered in ballet the technique to work the bodies of her dancers and the aesthetics of her choreography. And more: she is using classical music. Whoever had the opportunity of seeing her dancers at work know that they work hard. With different shapes, they succeed in showing that they are involved in a process of attaining a common language, a precious thing indeed, for they are a young enterprise.

The Deborah Colker Dance Company is sponsored by Petrobr?s Distribuidora. ‘Thanks to Petrobr?s, we can guarantee labour rights to all our dancers, such as a health plan, and box office participation’, informs the company’s producer, Jo?o Elias.

The highest merit in this was that the Ferris wheel was not just a visual effect. It is there as an exploratory instrument and it is wonderful what happens in it. The final scene, with the encrusted bodies resembling barnacles is simply genial. It is poetic.(H.K.) "