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Artist and researcher Tales Frey lives in Portugal and there he watch Pororoca, the most recent piece of Lia Rodrigues Companhia de Danças. He contributed with idança with a brief critique of the work of the Brazilian choreographer.

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If the curators of one of the world´s most important playhouses, Théâtre de la Ville de Paris, in Paris, consider Lia Rodrigues’ Pororoca to be in the same level as Pina Bausch’s Tanztheater Wuppertal de Pina Bausch or even Merce Cunningham Dance Company and able to be part of the venue’s program, the “invasion” of such intense presence couldn´t be different for Museu Serralves, an internationally renowned space located in Porto, Portugal that opened its doors for the company in April 2010.

Since the 70´s, Lia Rodrigues has been asserting her discourse through dance. She elaborated Pororoca along with the dancers of her current company (Lia Rodrigues Companhia de Danças), whose headquarters is located in the Maré slum, in Rio de Janeiro. It´s worth pointing out that the creative process took place through improvisations and that, according to the artist, “the encounter among the dancers weaves the piece”, which means the collective is a living organism in constant mutation and it evolves immeasurably.

Before the beginning of the show, Lia places herself in the middle of the stage, in the same level as the audience, to talk about they are about to watch.  Besides presenting the work developed by the artist and the group and the context in which they are inserted, the informal chat also indicates the value of the exchange that will take place next – even though this exchange is already happening –, because it brings light to how much the live arts (theater and dance) are special for being able to provide the encounter between the Brazilian artists of the company and the Portuguese audience.

Pororoca is the same as an encounter, just like the natural phenomenon that lends its name to the piece (Pororoca means tidal bore in Portuguese) and is caused by the encounter of the water of the river with the water of the ocean. This encounter between contrary streams is the result of a delicate balance of elements of nature and to use it as starting point for the elaboration of a show not only dialogues with the current time in which a series of natural phenomena arise, maybe in response to the actions of mankind, but also with the need for exchange, shock, the mixture that is getting more and more intense in a world that becomes more globalized each day. The same happens in art and Lia is aware of that when approaching issues of artistic diversity and merges performing arts with music.

The stage is empty until a group of dancers comes in , mixing colors, objects and illustrating with their bodies the invasion of an anthropophagous tidal bore. The heat of the colors, the diversity of skin tones, the sounds made by the dancers on stage, imitating animals, the oranges shared and devoured on stage with such eagerness, the sex, this whole miscellany gives the piece a Brazilian quality, filled with what makes Tropicalism and Modernism unique in a global scale and makes us so proud. The conceptual mess on stage reminds us of the streets of Rio de Janeiro in certain areas, filled with plastic bags, old clothes, forgotten objects, either disposed or lost, that pollutes the image of those environments.

There is no mechanical soundtrack, the sound comes from the endless and increasingly intense breathing of the bodies that meet once and again in an (un)balanced way. The absence of mechanical sound reinforces the encounter between observer and show, because as the calmness is established (almost never), the spectator’s cough, laughter, the high heels of the lady leaving the theater for not standing the show´s heat and latent sexuality, all those sounds are diluted in the bodies that collide in the space. John Cage would certainly be proud to see the repercussion of his music concept still being thought about in the 21^st century, regarding the silence in 4:33, in which he proved there is no absolute lack of sound and thus brought a reflection about the integration of those sounds. And if the music of noises produced in the first decade of the 20^thcentury by the futurists made Cage reach this conclusion, 4:33 is also still around in the first decade of this century, to be thought of not only in music, but in the arts in general and Pororoca is a proof of that.

Tales Frey is a director, art critic, performing artist and videoartist. He graduated in Performing Arts from the Rio de Janeiro Federal University (UFRJ) and holds a master’s degree in Artistic Studies – Art Theory and Critique from Porto University, in Portugal. He is the director of Cia. Excessos.