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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 second text, he makes a review of H3, by choreographer Bruno Beltrão with Grupo de Rua de Niterói. Presented in Villa-Lobos Theater on October 31 and November 1, H3 doesn’t allow hip-hop to be transformed in contemporary rhetoric only because it is performed on a traditional stage.

The idea that all choreographic discourses, whatever their origin may be – but above all those that come from other contexts -, widens the notion we have of contemporary dance, maybe that´s an advantage of what is regarded as democratic access to art. However, the work of Bruno Beltrão does not inscribe itself, in a simple way, in an idea of contemporary movement democratization that allows, as part of the broad discourse about dance, other choreographic discourses that don´t result from a formal and conceptually performing framing.

With H3, the Brazilian choreographer works the characteristics of hip-hop – understood not as individual expression but as a collective experience -, from a different paradigm, apparently rhizomatic. The sequences organized in large groups that are not necessarily thematic, but have close choreographic logics (one-on-one and collective games) allow a desire to widen the movement freedom within a formal and structured grid, without giving in to the specificity of that language and working a representation of the contemporary body, to correspond to a dramaturgically arbitrary movement, eminently individualistic and inhabiting urban and para-choreographic contexts, like hip-hop is.

Each performer establishes a movement sequence that, once executed, is amplified by another performer, in a dialectic game in permanentl ascension. Thus, this reorganization of movement as a dialogue space allows the logic of hip-hop to gain creative dramaturgic substance (daring even to ground it) and the allegedly democratic recipe of contemporary dance to regain a concrete risk margin.

Other aspects compete for the understanding of hip-hop as a gregarious dance. Specifically the light scheme and the usage of the scenic space. A first part performed at the up-stage, with the performers seeing fight rituals and chivalrous exhibition substituted by elegant competitive movement sequences that go beyond the gratuitous gesture. That is followed by another one, in half-light, in which lines that occupies the whole rear of the empty stage are drawn, amplifying each body’s potencies, now based on complementarity with other performers, forming unified bodies that share the same rigour and demand as any classic ballet cast. Fitted to each performer, tough in their expression and precise in the abrupt, dry and brief movements, the gestures go beyond the each one’s individual space, embracing a collective discourse, so contrary to the individualism and identification of contemporary creation.

This dramatization of hip-hop forces us to wonder if the choreographer wouldn´t be operating in the same principles used by the classic narratives, precisely for using allegedly free movements. Particularly because in this dramatization not only Bruno Beltrão becomes more distant from hip-hop, he also places it in a territory that explores new territoriality (or he widens the existing territory), even if it accessible. The submission of hip-hop to contemporary dramaturgic construction doesn´t happen at the expense of the hip-hop linguistic territory, but rather suggests the exploration of another representational notion of the contemporary body. Precisely one that survives the disciplinary rule and guarantees that those bodies can remain as ethereal as those of classic dancers.

The author travelled as a guest of Festival Panorama de Dança

An excerpt of H3 can be watched at the festival’s youtube channel

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Panorama 2008 – A gesture that is ours