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In Rio de Janeiro as a guest of Panorama de Dança, idança columnist Tiago Bartolomeu Costa will keep our readers informed about all that is happening in the festival. In his first article, he writes a critique of Umwelt, by Cie. Maguy Marin, presented in the opening night of the festival. Created in 2005, the piece by French choreographer Maguy Marin opened the 17th edition of Festival Panorama de Dança, raising the standards and promoting the displacement of daily actions from the stage to the audience.

Umwelt does not lose itself in rhetoric debates about the dramaturgical fallibility of daily gestures. The formality of its structures owes very little to everyday arbitrariness, even if all the actions are familiar to us.
The choreography obeys to another representation logic of daily gestures, in which the stage is not an exposition (or extension) territory of reality, but rather metaphorizes about it, enclosing in itself a whole set of actions we recognize as close to us but do not obey a determined territory. Thus, in the varied and very brief actions the nine performers carry out, Umwelt (which means environment) builds a dramaturgy that seems to be closed in an unusual sequencing of gestures, making us watch not a duplication of recognizable gestures, but rather the creation of a fictional territory that manages, with wise dexterity, the relationship between the duration of the performance and the time described in it.

There is such graveness in those movements and such consciousness of their fleetingness (enhanced by the interruptions provoked by the dancers that come to the front of the mirrored acrylic plate structures and stare at the audience) that each sequence seems to gain an identity of their own, which rescues the movements from the anonymous collective mass. In this way, watching gestures of others on stage is the only everyday gesture during the whole choreography. Precisely because it’s the only gesture that is not premeditated.

It is in this dramaturgic coming-and-going that Maguy Marin draws, in a constant choreographic leveling, actions so unlike each other like drinking water and throwing a bucket with bricks remains onto the stage, changing clothes, eating fruit, carrying pieces of meat or rocking babies. This circular and continuous universe suggests a detachment, on the part of the dancers, of their actions (in the fact that we never know the consequence of their acts because what is presented lasts very briefly), at the same time a rare freedom that plays with time is allowed, not only the performance time, but also real time.

When we see exhausted soldiers drinking water, or men eating bread crumbs left by others, women being chased or exhibiting themselves, people behaving like animals tearing the skin of dogs, rabbits and roosters, we can understand that Maguy Marin is not interested in simply opposing kindness to outrage.

To the violence of those gestures, underlining evident unbalances, to the conscious amorality and to the cumulative exposition of trivial actions, she adds a very humble, but not an uncompromised desire to draw a map of the world, close and recognizable and at the same time distant and abstract, where the bodies of the dancers gain weight and substance consonant to the lines we weave ourselves according to what better answers our worries and momentary interests.

The author traveled as a guest of Panorama de Dança

An excerpt of Umwelt can be watched in the festival’s channel on youtube