Lia Rodrigues Companhia de Danças (Rio de Janeiro)

Choreography: Lia Rodrigues, 70 min, 9 dancers

- A naked body smeared a bloody red, jerks inside a see-through plastic sack. Another one seems to be holding its entrails in its hands: Lia Rodrigues confronts us physically with these brutal realities. These are realities with which everyone is familiar through the media but still, or for that very reason, immediately represses and banishes to the realm of virtual reality. Inspired by Susan Sontag’s essay Regarding the Pain of Others (2003), Incarnat deals with the ambivalent pleasure experienced in watching war and violence. This work reaches the heights of physical intensity, for the nine dancers do not content themselves with mere portrayals. Instead, they abandon themselves completely to the conditions they present. Deliberate allusions to victim art expose the aesthetic voyeurism inherent in all observation of suffering - even it if is for “a good cause”.

Incarnat reaches its symbolic climax in the final scene. The body of one of the dancers is “engraved” by red lines reminiscent of indigenous tattoos. Seconds later, a body rises suddenly, destroying the drawing and turning it into a bloody red mess: the body becomes a manifesto: “Red on white, pain on the skin, a scream on the body.’ (Lia Rodrigues)

Lia Rodrigues, who commutes between Brazil and France, moves between different social classes. For her production of Incarnat, the founder of RioArte de Dança Festivals went into the Favelas of Rio de Janeiro with her dancers. There, they rehearsed in an open warehouse, surrounded by the “permanent state of war that prevails in the city”.

A coproduction of the House of World Cultures

An event within the framework of Focus Brasil IN TRANSIT 06 / Copa da Cultura – Brasil + Deutschland 2006