Grooving in Brazil

Rio olympics

Brazilians know how to put on a good show on a shoestring — this is the country of Carnival, after all. The colourful and ecologically conscious Olympics opening ceremony in Rio de Janeiro went off without a hitch, and even more: It felt like a giant street party.
The filmmakers Fernando Meirelles, Andrucha Waddington and Daniela Thomas were in charge of the show. The dancing, and there was a lot of it, was the responsibility of the veteran Brazilian choreographer Deborah Colker.

Colker is a passionate mixer of forms. Her company, Companhia Dança Deborah Colker, combines death-defying feats on giant hamster wheels, vogueing, hip-hop, acrobatics and anything else that suits her eclectic sensibility. And she loves props: walls, vases, ropes, wheels. This was all evident in the show. And her experience working with Cirque du Soleil and with samba schools in Rio surely came in handy.

This is not someone easily intimidated by the complexities of a large spectacle with many moving parts. Even so, with 3,000 volunteers and 114 professional dancers under her direction, this was the biggest show of Colker’s career.

Here are edited excerpts of her interview:

Were you happy with how the show turned out?
It was the way I had expected, and everything worked. I’m relieved and happy and proud.

Was it difficult to manage so many elements: thousands of volunteers, large projections, musicians, props?
I am used to working with a huge system, like when I worked with Cirque du Soleil. Early on, I did five workshops and hired people in different styles and areas, which enriched the vocabulary a lot. I started planning a year and a half ago, and the first small workshops were about a year ago. Slowly, I built my team.

Brazil and Rio are famous for their variety of musical and dance styles. What did you want to show?
I wanted everything to blend together. Like here in Brazil, where everyone is surviving and sharing together. Samba, funk — a style specific to Rio, born in Rio — and passinho, which combines breakdance and hip-hop, and maracatu, from northern Brazil. I mixed all of this.

How much of the dancing reflected your own compositional style?
I brought things I know to represent Rio and Brazil, and some symbols that are part of my company, like the climbing wall and wheels. But I also found new ways to depict different cultures and people that have been building our country: indigenous, Asian, European, African.

It looked like the dancers had a little bit of freedom when they were dancing on those platforms at one end of the stadium.
I told them what I wanted, and worked with their experiences, but I wanted it to reflect their personalities. This is so important, because this is real street art.

In one section, you had parkour athletes running across an imaginary obstacle course of walls and platforms — actually projections — with a climbing wall at the other side. How did you come up with the idea?
Parkour is the athletics of the street. They reveal the city through acrobatics. This is where I brought in my wall that I have used in previous shows — a strong symbol, totally related to the idea of occupying the street and with the idea of sport.

There was a section dedicated to indigenous Brazilian culture, in which you used hanging ropes, which dancers wove together.
The indigenous people are usually shown with stereotypes of folklore. I didn’t do this. I took an organic approach. I went twice to a place called Parintins in the Amazonian jungle, close to Manaus, to lead rehearsals. The idea of the weaving of the elastics was inspired by the oca (thatch houses from Mato Grosso, a west-central state in the rain forest). We wanted to show Brazil before colonisation, something aesthetic, organic and huge.

At the end of the show, there was this great samba moment …
We had all 12 of Rio’s escola da samba (samba schools) — not the entire ensembles, but a selection from each. Of course, we couldn’t have everyone. We had to choose the best drummers and some special dancers.

What message were you and your collaborators trying to get across?
The most important thing is the possibility of mixing styles and ideas and aesthetics, dance and music and energy. We are a new country, with contemporary ideas, not just what foreigners think about Brazil: pretty women and football. Brazil is this and so many other things. It is an amazing place for contemporary dance and music and film and fashion and art.