ABSTRACT
Since the 1990s in Brazil, both a series of national tax-break laws catered to arts and cultures and the country’s economic growth have radically transformed how dance is financed and, subsequently, produced, presented, critiqued, and consumed. Beyond the proliferation of companies and productions, some of the most significant changes within the landscape of contemporary dance in Brazil in the last decades pertain to the diversifying solutions through which choreographers and interpreters have sought to navigate across and relate to the globalized world of dancing. More importantly, these financial and artistic transformations point to the equally diverse ways with which contemporary artists in Brazil have sorted, untangled, recombined, and incorporated distinct strings of information, coming from a wide range of sources, and have woven them into self-standing choreographic discourses. Let us call this kind of procedure the gesture of interweaving. In this chapter I demonstrate how the gesture of interweaving, a theoretical lens anchored on Erika Fischer-Lichte’s deployment of the concept of “interweaving” and Vilém Flusser’s phenomenological treatise on gestures, enables us to better understand the contemporary production of concert dance in Brazil. In particular, I examine and contextualize the work of Lia Rodrigues Cia de Danças, directed by Lia Rodrigues, and Grupo de Rua, directed by Bruno Beltrão. As I demonstrate, their gestures of interweaving inform and are formed by a number of factors, such as: (a) the ideas they choose to string together; (b) the technologies they employ in their creative processes; (c) the kinds of bodies they cast and the roles they are assigned to play; (d) the professional alliances they thread with other artists, groups, or institutions; (e) the pathways through which they disseminate their work and ideas. Beyond the diverse range of solutions that these cutting-edge companies have articulated, I propose, their interweaving gestures have enabled them to collectively blur the boundaries between exclusionary dichotomies such as Western and non-Western, center and periphery, and tradition and innovation.
