The São Paulo City Ballet, the most important dance company of the Brazilian metropolis, acclaimed both by critics and the audiences of all the great theatres where it has performed, arrives at the LAC with an extraordinary programme featuring the work of three choreographers who are very different from each other.
The evening opens with the Spaniard Cayetano Soto, who describes his piece - featuring the music of Ezio Bosso – as follows: "For me Adastra is a philosophy of life, a moment of reflection, a path to reach the star that each of us carries within us, or rather the energy we need to reach our lucky star. Our journey requires a personal struggle to become what we has always dreamed of, which is a chimeric idea, because reaching the stars is not possible in our real world. There is merit in reaching the centre of Adastra, for the more adversities we have to overcome, the more experience we gain in our short lives."
The second work takes as its starting point a series of questions: What is the ideal of a perfect world? What would a ritualized life be like? Is a world possible where life can be celebrated through dance and music? How can we dance the symbols of life in a possible post-pandemic world? Transe [Trance] by the Brazilian Clébio Oliveira is an endless party, a utopia seen through the metaphor of an invented fairy tale. A futuristic ritual of collective ecstasy; a sensory immersion closer to the world of the senses than to that of reason.
The programme closes with Fôlego [Breathing], a choreography in which Rafaela Sahyoun focuses on the urgency of literally creating pulsations. The electricity in the bodies emerges from the new changes in existential space, from the resistance of the dark times, and from the collective action of transformation. Breathing is contagious and involves negotiation of desires and assimilation. An interpersonal event that approaches and distances, reverberates, transforms, falters, decays, and regenerates. Constant attempts to make narratives coexist. Are there possible futures? In this propulsive dramaturgy, Fôlego evokes the eroticism of simply being alive.