H3
Bruno Beltrão/Grupo de Rua
Dance Theater Workshop
New York, NY
February 22, 2010
by Leigh Witchel
copyright © 2010 by Leigh Witchel
What happens when you remove hip-hop culture from hip-hop dance? Bruno Beltrão’s Grupo de Rua (Portuguese for “Street Group”) does PoMo hip-hop; hip-hop steps, but interspersed with stillness and without music. It forces you to look at the form anew, and transformed.
Beltrão was born in 1979 in Niterói, a Brazilian city near Rio de Janeiro. He began to learn street dancing in 1993 and co-founded his company in 1996 (the other co-founder since branched off to do his own projects.) The group’s first appearances were more typical for hip-hop, performing in TV shows and competitions, but Beltrão went to university and the company turned from the street to the contemporary dance scene.
“H3” starts with Bruno Duarte and Danilo Pereira walking forward out of darkness wearing street clothing, baggy t-shirts and polo shirts. They look at each other and look at us. One of them moves, the other observes. The dancing begins. Wisely, there is a discreet soundtrack of street noises as if from outside; actual silence soon becomes the random, uncontrollable noises of the audience.
Nine young men dance in the performance (Beltrão isn’t in the cast), usually in twos and threes, doing the isolated moves of street dancing; knotting and unknotting their limbs, skittering on the ground like fiddler crabs. Almost any all male dance will have echoes of combat; this isn’t an exception. Sometimes the flailing looks like self-violence; other times two men race at each other as if in battle. The duets look like sparring practice – or another Brazilian dance/martial art, Capoeira.
The men touch in their duets, but the smallest touch, as when one young man touched another’s elbow with his finger is almost startling. Or one moment of dry comedy; at the end of one section, two men peck at each other like birds.
The work proceeds at a calm pace. The later sections are to music, at first only drums and later soft Brazilian jazz that gives rhythm to the movement, but a very unexpected one. In each section Beltrão develops a choreographic motif. For much of the performance; it’s running backwards, but done at a daredevil careen. Near the end, teams of two men launch a third out to race around the stage. One man operates a single light pole, slowly rotating it to light only portions of the stage, while the others skitter in and out of the darkness. The dance ends with a final backwards motion: The men, their backs to us, arch and walk towards us as the lights fade.
As pretentious as the post-modern cool of the performance could be, it’s blunted by the unpretentiousness of the dancers. They work with poker-faced aplomb and seemingly without expectation of applause – though they were rewarded with a gale of it at the end. It was like spying through a peephole on a sandlot with young athletes single-mindedly at practice.
And yet, when you give a popular art form a college education, you do so at the risk to its vitality. At the bows only Thiago Almeida smiled at first to acknowledge the applause and his own pleasure. The rest of the cast looked justifiably exhausted.
Beltrão wants to free hip-hop from sheer virtuosity, but part of that virtuosity is the natural, extroverted impulse of the performer to connect with the audience – something post-modern artists often refuse to do until they’re old and wise enough not to care what their colleagues think. With the refreshing clarity of “H3,” it would be exciting to see that integral aspect of performance reincorporated.
copyright © 2010 by Leigh Witchel
Pictured: Thiago Almeida, Filipi De Morais. Photo by Yi-Chun Wu
