Dance: Space Invaders
Brazz Dance Plays with Territory in New Work Cordel
By Celeste Fraser Delgado, artburstmiami.com
Dancer Anasthasia Grand-Pierre flips her partner, Ilana Reynolds, then holds her with her head hanging upside down. So choreographer Augusto Soledade sets in motion a series of games where dancers flip, spin, and roll, turning the world upside down, right side up, then upside down again.
A program note announced that “Cordel,” a new work for Soledade’s Brazz Dance Theater, brings three unlikely artforms together: hip-hop, tango, and a literary game from Soledade’s native Brazil that gives the piece its name. Cordel is a popular style of poetry, where poets hang their work on strings for potential buyers to peruse. Before the performance began, several brightly colored cordels hung by clothespins on racks at the front of the stage. There was an incomplete cordel in each program, and audience members were invited to complete the blanks in a poem and add their cordels to the rest.
From the first, Soledade was eager to involve the audience as collaborators. Later, during a break in the performance, he solicited eight audience members to sit on chairs at the back of the stage and watch one section of the dance from there. So the relationship between the audience and the performances was inverted too.
By that time, the racks had been rolled away and the cordels remained a part of the program only as an abstract structure for the movement. As lines in a poem are repeated, each movement sequence that was introduced was repeated some time later by other dancers in other configurations. I found myself watching for the return of favorite gestures, like a gentle head butt that preceded a slide to the floor or a soft kick between the shoulder blades that sent a fellow dancer flying.
The traces of tango and hip hop were only slightly more apparent. The tango is conventionally danced upright with the partners in a close embrace. Here the partners were more often loosely connected, with a hand (or foot) against a hip or a forearm grazing shoulders. Tango dancers step in and out of each other’s space, where they are frequently blocked by their partners foot or hand, a dynamic that Soledade amplified as dancers slid and roll into each other space, blocking each other’s progress with feet, hands, arms, hips, pelvis bellies, whathaveyou.
Similarly, hip hop, which in street style involves “battles” between dancers who fight for space at the center of a circle of spectators, was represented here by softer, more elongated versions of break dance moves like head spins and the back spins (called flares) and smoother variations on the articulation of limbs (fingers-wrist-elbow-shoulder and so on) known as popping and locking. To highlight both the similarity and difference, Soledade included a hip hop dancer as a guest of the company in the final section of the piece. In the final show on Sunday, Andre Mujica popped and locked while Brazz dancer Willie Brown echoed, stretched and softened his moves. The two men circled each other, their shoulders touching, in a gesture of carving out territory reminiscent of the earliest days of tango when it was a dance between men.
“Cordel”’s sources in other forms of dance and poetry may not be obvious, but the urge to carve out a little space for oneself while keeping a connection with another is always clear. “Cordel” brings the energy and camaraderie of popular dance to the concert stage.
