“Sem um tu não pode haver um eu” (“With no you, no I”) so begins Ingmar Bergman’s autobiography “The Magic Lantern”, the same filmmaker whose work has inspired this solo both created and danced by Paulo Ribeiro. “Bergman crosses my path at a time when I consider we must look into our happiness, regardless of its shape. Even though we are being drowned in numbers and realities that do not belong to us, humanity must persist.” the choreographer, now returning to stage after “JIM”, remarks. In this piece, to the tune of Robert Wyatt’s “Insensitive”, there is the dance of a heart that is all raw, all flesh. A me that wants to conjugate the second person singular, like who says “I am you, also you”, rather than “I am yours”. There is more surrender than possession. Among slow and clean gestures, shaky, crumbling steps and seismic movement, Paulo Ribeiro draws a map of affection. The choreographer transforms into a seismograph that measures quakes of emotion. In this piece there is love, hatred, solitude, anxiety, marital dilemmas, interior struggle, collapsing, hands and hands. And there is turmoil. A body, that in all its vitality plays chess with death. Finally, an illuminating catharsis. The cry that breaks out, like the dew at daybreak.
choreography and interpretation
PAULO RIBEIRO
music
ROBERT WYATT / CUCKOOLAND: INSENSITIVE FRANZ KOGLEMANN / O MOON MY PIN-UP: THIRD MOVEMENT, DISTINCTIONS – IX BACH / CELLO SUITES : CELLO SUITE #5 IN C MINOR, BWV 1011 – PRÉLUDE E COURANTE MAGNUS LINDBERG / ICTUS CLARINET QUINTET: RELATED ROCKS
costumes
JOSÉ ANTÓNIO TENENTE
light design
NUNO MEIRA
coproduction
CENTRO CULTURAL DE BELÉM, A OFICINA - CENTRO CULTURAL VILA FLOR, TEATRO NACIONAL SÃO JOÃO
SUDDENLY, IN LAST SUMMER
Luísa Roubaud*
Between the readings that always await the summer holidays, Paulo Ribeiro had with Magic Lantern (1987), the autobiography of Ingmar Bergman (1918-2007). Not yet imagined, who was engrossed with the book, as the wanderings of Swedish filmmaker about connections between (his) life and (your) films would inspire the choreography that was released last November, in Viseu.
“Sem um tu não pode haver um eu” is the reason for being, in art and life. As the thoughts of filmmaker gave a body to the concerns of the choreographer, the phrase jumped the book and gave the name to the ground. The soundtrack includes part number, as is expected, extracts in off from the Magic Lantern, interspersed with texts of Paulo Ribeiro himself. The obsessive themes from Bergman, transposing to the screen the best tradition of Nordic dramaturgy, hover over this performative and sensory version of the Bergman universe: the incessant combat with God, reflections on art, amorous turbulence.
Paulo Ribeiro loves movies, and it was not the first time that the seventh art invaded their dance. When, in 2011, at the invitation of Luisa Taveira, choreographed for the National Ballet Du Don de Soi, was the unmistakable world of shadows and specters of the Russian filmmaker Andrei Tarkovsky, its thick and disturbing spirituality, catalyzing the large human vacancies choreography.
But, in that summer, the exciting rediscovery from Bergman caught in full the choreographer internal crisis. There corners facing us in the journey, and emotions to the surface, take the foreground of life. The solo prefigured the only performative figure adjusted to intimate debate.
And it again, at fifty-four years old, alone on stage, more than two decades volved since the first and only soil of his career, Usage Mode (premiered at the Biennale University of Coimbra in 1990, and presented at Europalia 91, to mark its confluence with the new Portuguese dance) and Rambo Ribeiro (1993, Cycle Self-Portraits, involving his dog, Maori), after a premonitory appearance in the prologue to Jim (2012).
The movement is now more dense and melancholy. However, we find that spasmodic and convulsive way tragicomic penchant that surprised the audience when he landed in Portugal at the end of 80. Brought to the dance a driving personality, unorthodox season: an exuberant physicality, that was not the strange part of past adolescence in Brazil and the practice of martial arts; and “heureux hasard,” as he likes to say, it was, though fortunate, belated discovery of contemporary dance, when he decided to swap Brazil for the adventure of traveling the Atlantic in the opposite direction, backpacking, and try a new life among Belgium and France.
Ribeiro involves the incompliance Bergman toward the characters and human affections - so paradoxically flooded with compassion - a warm southern light. And can the unthinkable: paste forever to the most tímeles love songs, “Insensatez” (fabulous version of Robert Wyatt), the image of his body, his back to us, and the hands to go into the trunk self-warmth or a dance with a pair absent or imaginary, and soften the severity Nordic with a nostalgic bonhomie towards the inclemency of love. And, in a last wink choreographer to director, to make us believe in the invisible focus on your lone figure on the scene, leaving him in the end, delivered to your own story chamber.
The most confessional and autobiographical works of Ribeiro is on disarming candor with which exposes us an affective map and unprotected risk. This is with no doubt, a solo of maturity.
But if we listen to what the mobilized for dance twenty years ago, we noticed the lines of continuity, where also erase distances between what is individual and what is collective: “(Only a solo allows freely explore what is dear to me): live intensely the passing moment, responding spontaneously and intuitively to unexpected stimulus: I leave from state of the soul after that I canalize for a great theme and great theme that is deeply connected to the present moment, to what excites me and worries that time, serving as an engine for such a spontaneous as possible physicality. The theme will be filtered through me as I go on living and feeling the body, in the case of solos, or is filtered through the people who are ahead of me, the way they live, and boiling , subject to commitments however we have created together. Basically, each work is a game, a game of life and emotions, very present.”1 (Assis, 1995)
1 Assis, Maria (1995). Movimentos. Edições Danças na Cidade.
* Critical of dance in the journal Público, Teacher at the Faculty of Human Motricity, Technical University of Lisbon. Researcher at the Institute of Ethnomusicology - Centre for the Study of Music and Dance.
SHOW WHAT IS NOT SEEN
Cristina Peres*
In an open to the public at 2008, A Pina Bausch Festival organized by the São Luiz Municipal Theatre and the Centro Cultural de Belém, the dancer Nazareth Panadero stated that “surprisingly” discovered that dancing after fifties “was better than ever before.” Finished the sentence with a short break to coincide with the roll of the eyes from the roof of the Winter Garden, back to the audience making them with that radically incomprehensible timidity of people who make a living between the stage and the backstage to prepare for the step. Panadero seemed to be counting the seconds to finish the term for the appearance of a proof the contrary, possibly born of incredulity in assisting of someone. But the truth is that even if someone had a bizarre mission there for gathering evidence to contradict the dancer, people have extended to confession tolerance. And wait patiently for a “biographical truth,” without being able to evaluate to what extent well they are unwilling to give up what they like. Neither the artists who follow and register as part of your personal property. Sem um tu não pode haver um eu is a play of arrival. Says: this is my body, which is your known for decades, we’ve already got tired countless times that I’ve shown from all angles, whose movement was often borrowed to others, but that is me and my works this way, and now, in 2013-14, that is. In this soil, Paulo Ribeiro takes us by himself, as if hehad “solved”, decades after another solo 1991 Usage Mode, how does someone your age (biological and artistic) may be present in a solo, fully exposed, as assumed in the interview at the end of the creation process. If I had not assumed the same would be visible, even though the work make an incursion (also) for materials that are not Paulo Ribeiro / creator nor the character of the solo, but in the case, Ingmar Bergman, a proposal assumed dialog between.
Dancing after fifty can clearly be plenty. Surprising is for sure. If we want, Paulo Ribeiro is wholly in this soil, which runs the lexicon of its own and natural. However, has a capacity of detention, stop, ultimately, of silence, which has never been so patent before. Maybe I’m talking about what seems to me the central core of the creation process of this solo, in turn technique, since the result: Paulo Ribeiro was filmed and reviewed the rehearsal reeling. And only he will know the hours it took to do it. The public can ignore how the choreographer lingered in that gesture of making / reviewing the motion. But it seems to me that the gesture was repeated the “quantity” enough times to have been inscribed in the structure of the show as a kind of matrix, most visible in the first third of the solo. Just that to me seem “enough” biography - understood as matters peek through a crack improbable – regardless of all the information that comes through music, texts extracted from the autobiography of Ingmar Bergman, or even the first text solo where Paulo Ribeiro throws the bait of “explanation.”
If we want to, and although the Paulo Ribeiro / dancer not have imagined the possibility of hiding the face during the interpretation of your solo, as purposely did Trisha Brown, this piece is crossed by the unsaid. Challenges the audience to go on his way, beyond the identifications that structure has taken part in the encounter that makes the theme - the language of the swedish director. In particular what Bergman did insist on portraying the difficulty to match “what is” to “what would be expected.” I would risk to repeat, the purpose of Without you I can’t be one, as I suspect that the Nazareth Panadero do: it’s amazing what maturity reserve.
*Journalist
