The Louvre hosted the first incarnation of Volmir Cordeiro’s creation “Rua”[Street] in 2016, the Brazilian dancer and choreographer’s new exploration of the poetic capabilities of a body in museum space, in major tension with Bertolt Brecht’s poetry on the war (“The ABC of war” of 1954). The body remains the same, it being immense, apparently disconnected, potent yet fragile, eloquent in the expression of words and in the relation it creates with the landscape both urban and human that interlinks with a dance in permanent metamorphosis in-between states coupled with violence, pain, celebration, resistance or vulgarity.
In “Rua”, Volmir manifests in the different bodies and faces the street might contain. The space which is drifted and crossed by the dancer’s redesigning by movement converts in an open abstraction, as the performer condenses in his body the diverse characters of the urban fauna, the ones most marginalized. A choreographic answer to the reading of the war poems of Bertolt Brecht, “Rua” instills a dance of thought and body, densifying the space, inhabiting a thousand ghosts. The dance, accompanied by Washington Timbó’s drums, explores the tension and alternating between the war, the devouring and devoured bodies and festive choreographies.
After that original apparition, in the Louvre Museum, Volmir now presents solo “Rua” in two different contexts: in an archeological museum (Dom Diogo de Sousa Museum, in Braga) and in an heritage public space (Monument to the Discoveries, in Lisbon), them being sites that emanate symbolic qualities of high precision that filter our reading of this dance piece.
