O Corpo + Sem Mim

"The excellence of the interpretation is matched by an expressive strength which reaches high points of beauty and emotion. An authentic feast of the senses."

- ABC

The accomplished Brazilian dance company, Grupo Corpo, returns to Madrid to present a programme of dance made up of two of its most celebrated works, O Corpo and Sem Mim. Grupo Corpo's dancers combine the technical demands of classical ballet with the freedom and dynamism of Brazil's popular dances, full of colour and rapid rhythms. In O Corpo, the choreographer Rodrigo Pederneiras, inspired by different ideas of the human body, looks to strike up an innovative dialogue with a combination of gestures, sounds and lighting which are marked out by the unique electronic music of Arnaldo Antunes. Impossible movements, aggressive gestures, arcing bodies, performers who dance extremely close to the floor...

It is the sea which gives live and movement to Sem Mim. The work is rocked and soothed by an extraordinary musical soundtrack, composed by Spanish Galician bagpipe player Carlos Núñez and Brazilian musician and composer, José Miguel Wisnik, based on the only works from the medieval Galician-Portuguese secular songbook which have survived to this day with their musical scores intact. It is the lyrics of these seven songs by Martín Codax which led Pederneiras to mark his score of Sem Mim with the interchange between calm and fury and the ebb and flow of the waves which is reproduced in the sinuous and abrupt movements of the dancers' torsos.

Paulo Pederneiras has constructed a stage set which, throughout the performance, metamorphoses into sea, mountains, clouds, boats, fishing nets and dawns. The final touch is that each dancer wears a finely-knit, tightly-fitting one-piece unitard dyed to match their skin colour on which the costume designer has applied inscriptions and textures based on ornaments from the Middle Ages. This creates the illusion that the stage is populated by naked men and women who are covered only by tattoos, one of the most venerable symbols of maritime imagination.

 

www.grupocorpo.com.br