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Lia Rodrigues Companhia de Danças recebe financiamento da Petrobrás através da Lei  Rouanet, dentro do programa Petrobrás Cultural 2007 de  “Manutenção – por 2 anos – de Grupos e Companhias de Teatro e Dança”. A Fundação Prince Claus é parceira no  projeto de workshops e aulas a ser desenvolvido no Centro de Artes da Maré, Nova Holanda.

This article was originally published at Público newspaper.

Lia Rodrigues always wakes up around 6am. Soon after, she is already sitting by her computer, planning the long day ahead. She must review contracts, check if the construction material arrived, talk to the electrician, negotiate with the contractor, find the best tile prices, schedule meeting with investors, assemble scaffolds and gather the team.

Lia Rodrigues is a choreographer, she lives in Rio de Janeiro and the place where the constructions material is supposed to arrive is a degraded 1200 square meter warehouse, which used to be a scaffold factory and is located at the end of an unpaved street in one of the largest slums in Rio de Janeiro, Maré.

It is her new challenge, after creating Festival Panorama and directing it for fourteen years – currently it is directed by Nayse Lopez and Eduardo Bonito – and being ahead of her own company for nineteen years, working with a total of twenty three members, including monthly paid managers and dancers. “It´s hard work” she confesses, “but I´m super optimistic”, she says, running over ideas with contagious speech strength.

Last November, Lia guided a small group of festival programmers through her new challenge, the establishment of a new cultural center in the middle of a slum composed of sixteen communities where 144.000 people live, in overlapped housesd stretched over twenty kilometers, from Antônio Carlos Jobim airport to the north zone of Rio de Janeiro.

Throughout the journey, amidst stories of accomplishments she inserted some precautions we should keep in mind. And though the achievements were many – mainly regarding the integration with the community -, it was the rules that grabbed our attention. Not to use a seatbelt because “when you take it off, it looks like you´re pulling a gun out”, leave the lights on inside the car, “so they can see you”, not to stare too long at someone or something. They are the drug dealers and gangsters that control Maré. They are divided in three gangs: Comando Vermelho, Amigos dos Amigos and Terceiro Comando. The area where Lia is developing the project, called Nova Holanda, is controlled by Comando Vermelho and houses 22.000 inhabitants.

“The idea that favela is only violence is a City of God thing”, says the choreographer, referring to Fernando Meirelles film, a global scaled success that turned violence into pop fetish. “Ignorance is what’s scary. The drug dealers are one percent of the slums”. But they are a small percentage at the forefront of the slum’s image abroad and that is hard to fight. “The strength they have comes from the corrupt police, who make deals with the gangsters for drugs”. What we see in films like City of God and Elite Squad, another film that delighted humanists entitled by the rhetoric and bureaucratic European diplomacy, we also see in the slum. There are fireworks when a new shipment of drugs and guns arrives (although we are told it has become such a recurring habit that “now anything is an excuse for rockets”). There are children carrying guns as natural extensions of their bodies. There are shady businesses carried out in the darkness of spaces under staircases.

But there are also schools and places offering free internet, hairdressers, restaurants and cell phone stores with more or less legal unlocking schemes, just like any street in any city. And there are billboards, many billboards with political promises that keep being postponed. “The government doesn’t do anything. It is abandoned. The government is not here for the people and they feel abandoned. The city feels abandoned. But this is a district with a completely normal life. A neighborhood with all the difficulties of a poor neighborhood”, says Lia, who established her dance company in the slum, in the Timbau discrict.

At the end of 2007, with the internal division of the structure that hosted the company, she moved to Nova Holanda, becoming part of REDES, a non-governmental organization dedicated actions in many areas – environment, educations, community participations, fighting violence – later developed through many projects. One of them is the presence of Lia Rodrigues dance company, working in a close relationship with a school directed by dancer and choreographer Silvia Soter.

The choreographer has so much confidence in the people of the slum she leaves her car unlocked, with her computer inside, as she runs into the headquarters of the association named after the community, the building stands out from other buildings at the also unpaved Sargento Silva Nunes Street because it doesn´t seem about to collapse at any time. “I feel safer here than in the streets of Rio, where they come up with guns and rob you for anything”. She wants to introduce us to people, those who study Chemistry and Portuguese, Math and History, preparing for college exams. “Tomorrow there will be a soccer match in Maracanã (Fluminense – Vasco da Gama), but they only go out after they learn everything”, says Edson Dinis, project manager and another enthusiast. He is the who takes us through the hallways of the three story building, he shows us the classrooms for different education levels and the studios where the dancers of Lia’s company rehearse and teach, where there is a lack of linoleum but not of interested people, ranging from 9 to 64 years old. And the two of them, Lia and Edson, guide us through the streets that have names, but many times that is the only thing that allows them to be called streets.

This area in the center of the district is less of maze but it is still possible to notice the improvisation upon which the lives of these people are based. The space between the houses is covered in both sides by telephone and television cables, some of the rooftops are still made of zinc and hold huge tv antennas, the bricks on the walls are still showing and not all of them have windows. But none of this prevents us from being received with big smiles everywhere. Lia talks about the pastries prepared by “Galega” as the best ones she has “ever” tasted. And if we are thirsty “Zito’s bar has the best draft beer in town”. In the fruit and vegetables market, strong colors and the intense smell of fruit inebriate us. And the sounds of the preparation for a night of samba can be heard all around as everybody is already getting ready for Carnaval. We hear the tunes of “Eu sou mais do que um vencedor”, the song they will sing at the Carnaval parade. “To win”, says “Galega”.

Lia is more than a winner. “I fight to keep up”, she says. She likes fighting, resistance and difficulties. In the warehouse, where the roof has partially collapsed, the floor is covered with pigeon feces and the smell of cat urine makes the air hard to breathe. But all everybody is talking about is investments and dialogue. “There ate issues that matter to me as a choreographer and as a citizen of the city of Rio de Janeiro and that´s what I bring here, that´s the investment I make, because I get a lot back. It´s crazy, but it´s so nice. Out of all the instability in the world, I fight to have this encounter. It´s my political vision of the world”.

The encounter she talks about will soon translate into the cultural center she wants to see emerge from this insalubrious warehouse. She guarantees it´s not a social project, but a project of “contemporary art, creation, to open the doors for this reality. We don´t all speak the same language, but we are all capable of looking at the same things and relating to them”. And, unlike many other integration projects, Lia Rodrigues Company not only resides in Maré. They are part of the life of this huge community and they contribute to the reformulation of the biased and limited speeches regarding slums and social work. “People are people and instability is part of the process”, she says. “It´s hard work”, she keeps insisting and includes “it´s a permanent conquest of the audience, who has no contact with art”. And nothing is assured.

Since she has been in the Nova Holanda ommunity, she is still not sure if there is any audience regularity or not, but part of the deal includes a premiere of Lia’s pieces in the slum. It´s not only a way to show gratitude for the support they received, but also a possibility of getting closer. “There are people who have never watched anything but who have the exact same doubts as the people who attend the Théâtre de la Ville (in Paris, for which she is preparing a new piece to premiere in November). I like to promote this encounter between what is done here and what is done there”. That is why she calls her cultural center – which, as she stressed many times, she is actually doing for the community –, a “in-between-spaces”.

“My company is not only a creating company, but also a training one”. Her dancer’s classes include not only dance, “they also include dance. We debate, talk, learn, exchange ideas about religion, philosophy and occasionally we dance”, she explains. That´s why when she goes to the junk shop to rent a scaffold and says she doesn´t have any money the answer is always “we can work it out, miss Lia”. People feel the project belongs to them and the differences in definitions of contemporary art and culture fade when a project is everybody’s responsibility. “In the work of creating a space there is a concrete aspect. It´s total reality”. Which time only apparently helps to soften.

After five years, Lia doesn´t think things have become easier, nor does she think the effort has a direct effect upon her pieces, which are rough and coarse, but have also unparalleled suffocating poetry. But she also finds some similarity in the time things take to be carried out. “Time is luxury, it´s a very precious thing and artists are always in a hurry to present things, because there´s never any money, because the pressure of the market forces them to produce something new. And I resist. I don´t know what that brings to my creations, nor do I know what does, but I know what it brings to my daily life: my obligations are practical. That´s why time is important”.

That´s why tomorrow at six in the morning, Lia Rodrigues will again get up and find the best way to make sure she is not overcome by the images of violence, by the pressure of producers, by the suspicion of the inhabitants of Maré, by the inherent difficulties of construction and by the natural and expected weariness. Tomorrow, at six in the morning Lia will be one day closer to opening not only a cultural center, but also a new meaning for the word slum.

The author traveled as a guest of Festival Panorama. Companhia Lia Rodrigues has the bi-annual sponsorship of Petrobras and the support of Prince Claus Fund for the cultural center project.