Grupo Corpo Review
Grupo Corpo
ìmâ Onqotô
Grupo Corpo is an exciting contemporary dance troupe. Their movements are energetic and staccato like the beat of the tribal sounding music that accompanies them. Both playful and passionate their show is mesmerising.
The dancers in ìmâ appear on stage like charcoal spiders: pairs of bodies slinking out, four feet and four hands on the floor, torsos raised to the ceiling. Their bodies lithe and perceptible through the clinging costumes, the intimacy of the dancers moving in synchronicity, is almost sexual. The choreography is meant to demonstrate the attraction and repulsion of particles: their magnetism through the contact of their bodies towards and against each other.
In some of the set pieces it appears as though one dancer controls the other as they might a puppet or a rag doll, and at other moments they move together, springing off but not away from each other. It wasn’t so much a feeling of weightlessness that the dancers conveyed as it was a feeling of elasticity and strength. They didn’t float, they leaped, and I felt solid and clumsy sitting in my seat watching them,
Onqotô was more overtly Latin influenced. The music was more sultry and the dancing more samba. There was some very use of a curtained wall at the back of the stage through which the dancers would appear or disappear, and brilliant lighting where their shadows danced huge and then shrinking behind them.
There was one intense moment when one of the male dancers appears born head and shoulders, then torso, then whole body, slowly into a pool of red light that lit up his damp skin. The brief male nudity (announced in the program) was not as uncomfortably erotic as the piece that preceded it. I felt that even in the darkness of my seat I was witnessing something I shouldn’t have been watching.
The meaning of the two pieces was rather lost on me, but the fun, bold colours and energy made it an undeniably compelling performance.