Review of Encantado at the Festival TransAmériques | new reign

Brazilian Lia Rodrigues is back at the FTA for the first time since 2011 with Enchantedan exalted performance-piece carried by a swarm of colored fabrics calling for all sorts of metamorphoses.

Since 1990, Lia Rodrigues has brandished her art as a peaceful weapon to stimulate reflection on our world, from the favela where she established Lia Rodrigues Companhia de Danças, in Brazil. Her dance cannot be understood without this involvement in her community and this social will to break down the walls that enclose and divide us.

Word enchanted evokes an enchantment, a spell. And it is a spell woven with magic and wonder that the Brazilian choreographer casts on the audience with this hour-long creation carried by incessant movement. She thus gives birth to a new cosmogony and imposes a new reign, made possible by the transformative act of dance and which involves the manipulation of a ton of pieces of colored fabric, with variegated patterns, a veritable ocean of materials where s roll up 11 dancers with crazy and exalted energy.

Naked as worms, in complete silence, they first glide across the stage where a quilt of amalgamated fabrics stretches, a calm sea that will soon be stirred by the swell of crawling, undulating bodies, finally rising, draped in a thousand and one ways. They are both sculptural and grotesque, exaggerated facies in support. Here, a man with a turbaned head rubs his swollen belly, ready to give birth to a new world, his eyes bulging, while in the background, an animal with a drooping trunk, made up of two dancers camouflaged under blankets, walks slowly.

Then emerges, at first weakly, then increasingly loudly, the rhythmic music of the Guarani Mbya, an ancestral people of South America. Incantatory, repeated in an infinite loop, it is ideal for inducing trance. To the sound of his percussive notes and chanted songs, illusions come and go, the dancers become creatures drape themselves in a thousand faces, a thousand shapes, each advancing to the front of the stage to do his number, alone, in duo or trio, followed by one or more others, without this circular whirlwind ever stopping.

Their bodies, liberated, indifferent to the dictates of appearance, become standard-bearers of an alluring, outlet freedom. The gesture is instinctive, carried away: they jump, swarm, squat, throw arms and legs around them, without ever letting go of these tissues thanks to which they are constantly metamorphosing.

Used with ingenuity in a nameless shambles, the inexpensive pieces of fabric with multiple colors and patterns serve to install a new reign, that of a liberated, enchanted human force. They become ornaments, loincloths, headgear, dogs guarding the gates of Hell, playful-looking goddesses, birds whirling in the sky, then return to the ground in deformed masses, before being moved, thrown, reformed again. A celebration of the game and the imagination with a powerful breath, which amazes and surprises; a creative act that reuses material ad infinitum, in a world where disposable and obsolescence reign.

And that’s whatEnchanted invites us to do, in the end: rediscover this carefreeness linked to childhood, where we dress up, we hide in piles of fabric, we create ephemeral and magical universes with lightness and fun. Behind these gestures emerges the hope of another world, one where all our differences are sublimated in a colorful quilt, just waiting to be celebrated.

Enchanted

Factory CJune 7 and 8, 7 p.m.

7.5/10