Dancing is fierce

As a dance journalist, wanting to live in Brazil is a real dilemma. When we think of Brazil, we immediately picture the samba dancers at the Rio de Janeiro Carnival, and are inclined by extension to believe that everyone in the country has dance in their blood. Yet the major newspapers I work for, such as Folha de S.Paulo and O Globo (where I am considered more of a music editor), show as little an interest in dance in Brazil as they do in the rest of the world: For my colleagues, dance is the sporting translation, the interpretation of music that is considered dominant. And if it is a sport, my British customers, such as The Times UK, The Guardian and FourFourTwo, say it’s got to be done right.

Sport is a game with winners and losers. As a reporter, I report on the winners: how they won, whether it be with specific tactics, finesse, or sometimes just luck. The live reportage is full of excitement and apprehension. As soon as the game is decided, the analysis follows – and it differs only slightly from that which decides a dance evening. Even if the verdict is not legitimized by goals, the arguments count in both cases, as does the experience that the bodies create. So is there any difference between popular sports with their hierarchies (football first) and the art of dance?

Yes there is. In dance, these hierarchies are set up the other way around: The more popular a dance is (samba first), the less a journalistic judgment is required. Almost everywhere in the world, the motto is: ballet first. I would much rather be sent to a performance of “Swan Lake” to judge Tchaikovsky in relation to the physical interpretation of this music than to a pantomime that perhaps doesn’t need any music at all. It is even more difficult for the press when it comes to circus acrobatics, a genuinely popular art, or breakdancing and its athletic battles: Here, too, extremely popular dance forms stand in opposition to a predominantly white culture and its ultimately feudal hierarchy, which the Royal Ballet places far above plebeian hip-hop and acrobatics. The further art moves away from the people, the higher its price as a luxury good. The same applies to painting, music and literature. All the arts want nothing more than to distinguish themselves from the masses, but they can only do this if they play with elements that the masses like.

This is particularly true for Deborah Colker. For some, this choreographer from Rio de Janeiro is a great artist precisely because she mixes ballet with extremely athletic actions, with gymnastics wheels, parkour (long jumps from roof to roof), and martial arts. At the same time, the former professional youth volleyball player always takes her audience to regions where something very tangible is at stake: the struggle for survival, environmental destruction, unfulfilled desire…

Colker combines high and folk culture like no other, taking the best of both: from classical music, above all, the precision, the precise interplay of all elements of light, sound and movement and from folk, its skill, its power, its energy – everything it represents when you encounter it in person… in a very simple bar with wobbly chairs in the middle of Rio de Janeiro, where my story begins.