The choreographies that followed in the early part of the third phase explored nonlinear narrative forms. Rodrigo Pederneiras has stated that those pieces have no narrative thread or meaning, but after seeing several of them, I dis- agree. From my vantage point, I suggest that a number of the pieces underscore the stresses of industrialization on the body and invite one to think about ex- periences of alienation in the modern world.
For example, when I saw Sete ou oito peças para um ballet, I thought about the ritual aspect of the theater. The moment of the performance felt, simulta- neously, like a primitive ritual and a modern spectacle. In other words, I inter- preted the performance as a ritual. It was repeatable but not reproducible. The lights that ›ooded the stage and the conspiratorial feeling of the audience awaiting a magical moment when the lights dimmed and the focus directed at another world—the lit stage, the rehearsed, and live motion—recalled, for me, a speci‹c ritual gathering centered around an exhilarating experience of spiri- tual and intellectual communion. Randy Martin has noted, “The audience is not only part of the event’s reason for being but also its means of becoming, which momentarily embodies the communicative idea of performance.”23He argues, however, that “movement’s ‘object’ is movement’s purpose—its agency, if you prefer—but also its materiality as culture, its crystallization as experi- enced event.”24The contrast that Martin points to as the communicative idea of the performance and the crystallization of experienced event are what I inter- pret as performance as ritual.
When I viewed Sete o oito peças, I allowed myself to be transported to an- other world of illusion. The music was at once familiar and discomforting. It felt explicitly mechanical in many parts; but the dancers sometimes countered this when their movements became ripples reminiscent of movement in water. The elements were recalled throuth the choreography: water, ‹re, earth, and air. The dancers moved between patterns of unison, syncopation, repetition, and abruptness. As viewer, I was mesmerized by the action on the stage. The stage exuded energy as if it were molecular movement for the human eye.
Part of the stage was occupied by a large group of dancers, a crowd scene. In contrast, a solitary dancer in pro‹le in a corner kept pace with the heartbeat in the music with nonstop sharp relevés25with bent knees and sudden consis- tent contractions of the lower body. The “crowd” moved as a unit toward something. Could they be people in a subway or an airport? Could they be a colony of worker bees or ants? The steady movement was contrasted by the consistent tick—the quick, jerking plié and jeté—of a solitary dancer down- stage on the right. I interpreted this dancer as a clock marking time. The music faded and a new sequence was introduced, an adagio of disconnected bodies. No one looked at the other. Even though they were performing the same steps, they were expressly not interacting. The looks on their faces emphasized bore- dom and isolation. Then, a new movement was introduced to the stage. The entire company was on, and the choreography emulated industrial mechaniza- tion with movements that reminded me of clocks, pegs, and other mechanical instruments.
My interpretation of what was going on was inspired by the forceful repeti- tion of dance steps. The bodies seemed to have become objects; the objects be- came machines; interjections of hip thrusts reminded me that there existed, nonetheless, suppleness implying human presence. This continued for long enough to drive a main thought: life is alienating, and comfort is found only in repetition, because it marks a degree of familiarity. However, after a while, the repetition also begins to feel alienating and frantic. I wondered how much longer the dancers could sustain such a relentless pace, paralleling mechanical movement but exhausting human capacities.
The insistent repetition and rhythm culminated in an abrupt halt. After all that noise and movement, silence suddenly pervaded the space. The only sound heard from the dancers was their heavy breathing from such athleticism. The au- dience’s own respiration had been affected by this demonstration. The breathing was replaced by an enthusiastic explosion, the audience’s burst of applause. The frenetic movement—normal for a machine, but too harsh for human bodies— had ‹nally ‹nished. The curtains came down and the ritual/spectacle came to an end. I thought about how the dif‹culties of life could be alleviated by a few breathtaking encounters with illusion. With these kinds of choreographies, Grupo Corpo became an international commodity, serving up spectacle of hu- man possibility through technique and choreography. The story that came to mind with this supposedly nonnarrative performance focused on how people have been isolated by industrialization and its failed attempts at modernization. The performance of Sete o oito peças could have two meanings. On the one hand, it could point to human alienation. On the other hand, it could underscore the company’s own separation from Brazil’s many local realities.
I would like to meditate on this theoretically. For example, in The Society of the Spectacle, Guy Debord posits,
The whole life of those societies in which modern conditions of production prevail presents itself as an immense accumulation of spectacles. The spectacle appears at once as society itself, as a part of society and as a means of uni‹cation. As a part of society, it is that sector where all attention, all con- sciousness, converges. Being isolated—and precisely for that reason—this sec- tor is the locus of illusion and false consciousness; the unity it imposes is merely the of‹cial language of generalized separation.26
“Spectacular society” is alienated from its origins. People are severed from the realities of everyday life. All that is left is a consumer society jonesing for the next spectacle and never satis‹ed; thus, Grupo Corpo courts the risk of becom-
ing a spectacular representation emptied of the speci‹cities of the history that have shaped it. But this does not happen. The troupe’s position is double: it serves as a testimony of the modern aesthetic, both representing Brazil on an international level and af‹rming the possibilities of modern dance on a re- gional level. As a spectacle, the company might seem to be an alienated image in a world hungry for the new and the exotic, reproduced by pictures and ad- vertising sound bites. This, however, points to the trajectory of success in Latin America. By becoming an object of international consumption, the group also becomes a local example of possibility through discipline, global dance lan- guages, and international artistic engagements.