About
A major figure in contemporary dance, Brazilian artist Bruno Beltrão has been developing his own breathtaking choreographic vocabulary since the early 2000s while endeavouring to deconstruct urban dance codes, and hip-hop in particular. Deeply rooted in our modern world, Inoah draws its initial impulse from a sentence in a book by French sociologists Marie Poinsot and Serge Weber: “The migrant is a pioneer of an open world.” Based on the figure of the migrant – the cursed soul of our times – Beltrão creates a gobsmacking dance piece. Ten young men occupy the stage, move around alone, in pairs of two or three without ever really becoming a group, as each performer constantly reassesses his relationship with the others, oscillating between temporary community and raw solitude.
Inoah is a piece that continues to try to answer old issues important to us: how to dance together from an egocentric vocabulary, how this vocabulary can create other spaces; if there is room for subtlety in urban dances. (...)
Inoã is a neighbourhood of Marica, near the city of Niteroi. We tried to find a large space in Niterói, but it was not possible to rent it. Then we found this beautiful space in Inoã, forty minutes from Rio de Janeiro. Inoa comes from the TUPI indigenous language and there are two main meanings: “high grass”, “high field”. And the other is abbreviation ofNoNã, which means to taper, because it is a region that narrows when it comes across a very beautiful group of mountains of the region called Serra da Tiririca. (...)
We stayed in this shed in Inoã for six months, and this space was all closed with except for these windows, where we could see a piece of a house, a mountain in the background with a telephone antenna, and tangled poles and wires on the other side. An insistent image that ended up persisting, or continued to follow us. I believe these windows are the index of a discomfort. Something that seems to be there to ask us how our dance communicates with the world. In practice we all know that there is no creation from scratch and any work is the fruit of the relationship between body and environment. But it seems that we insist on it because it induces us to ask frequently what difference our dance makes to the world. I do not regard these time passage as a metaphor for our political crisis. Or are they...
Bruno Beltrão, in conversation with Ewoud Ceulemans (De Morgen)
Credits
By: Bruno Beltrão
With: Alci Junior, Bruno Duarte, Cleidson De Almeida “Kley”, Douglas Felizardo, Eduardo Hermanson, João Chataignier, Leandro Rodrigues, Leonardo Ciriaco, Ronielson Araujo ‘Kapu’ and Igor Martins Andrade
Light: Renato Machado
Costumes: Marcelo Sommer
Music: Felipe Storino
Assistant direction: Gilson Nascimento
Production: Bruno Beltrão / Grupo de Rua (Niterói - BR)
Coproduction: Kampnagel (Hamburg - DE), Festival de Marseille (Marseille - FR), Wiener Festwochen (Vienna - AT), Mousonturm (Frankfurt - DE) and Tanzhaus NRW (Düsseldorf - BR)
With the support of: BEIRA
International Distribution: Something Great ( Berlin - DE)
‘Brazil Is Burning, and We’re Just Performing a Lot of Abstract Gestures"
The choreographer Bruno Beltrão is challenging the conventions of hip-hop while grappling with his country’s volatile politics.
THE NEW YORK TIMES, 29/10/2019, by Brian Schaefer
This summer, as fires scorched portions of the Amazon rainforest in Brazil, and the country’s president, Jair Bolsonaro, dismissed international outrage about it, the choreographer Bruno Beltrão wondered whether dance could make a meaningful contribution to his country.
“Brazil is burning,” Mr. Beltrão said in a recent phone interview, “and we’re just performing a lot of abstract gestures.”
Politics and its relation to art were very much on Mr. Beltrão’s mind. A founder of the contemporary hip-hop troupe Grupo de Rua, his 2017 abstract work “Inoah” arrives at the Brooklyn Academy of Music on Thursday. While the dance predates Brazil’s current crises, and Mr. Beltrão doesn’t view it as making an explicit political statement, he wondered if the work nevertheless reflects the country’s long-simmering tensions.
“As the piece stands today,” he said, “does it already present the social turmoil we live in?”
“Inoah” is named for the Rio-adjacent city where Mr. Beltrão, 40, found affordable rehearsal space and where he and Grupo de Rua spent months improvising choreography and sculpting it into a dance. While in residence there, the company worked in what Mr. Beltrão referred to as a large shed overlooking a distant mountain, a telephone pole and tangled wires — a landscape, he said, that seems “to ask us how our dance communicates with the world.”
That desire to be in dialogue with the world shows how far Grupo de Rua has evolved. What began as a standard hip-hop crew relying on spectacle has become a thoughtful challenger of hip-hop and street-dance conventions, as well as the gender expectations that accompany those forms.
Grupo de Rua’s journey began in the early 1990s in Niterói, a suburb of Rio de Janeiro. Mr. Beltrão was around 12 when his friends dragged him to a dance club where MC Hammer and Sir Mix-a-Lot were the rage. The dancing there inspired Mr. Beltrão and his friend Rodrigo Bernardi, who started taking, then teaching hip-hop classes; when they had founded Grupo de Rua, or Street Group, in 1996, Mr. Beltrão was only 16.
Grupo de Rua took a turn toward the unconventional when Mr. Beltrão attended university and was exposed to a broad spectrum of contemporary dance and artists like William Forsythe, who disassembled familiar forms and reassembled them in unfamiliar ways. Mr. Beltrão began to question his own work: If contemporary dance could be performed in silence, and wasn’t afraid to turn its back to the audience, why not hip-hop?
Mr. Beltrão began experimenting, and his group made inroads on the contemporary dance scene. “But suddenly we were kind of excluded from the hip-hop scene,” he said. This version of Grupo de Rua made its New York debut in 2010 with “H3,” which introduced audiences to the company’s affecting brand of unadorned theatrics and virtuosity without swagger.
Those qualities remain in “Inoah.” David Binder, the artistic director of the Brooklyn Academy, said the dance was “incredibly intense one moment and incredibly joyous the next.” Mr. Binder was also impressed by Mr. Beltrão’s mix of styles and his vigorous deconstruction of masculinity. “Together, it’s really creating something singular.”
In a recent conversation Mr. Beltrão discussed the themes that have long informed his work, the impact of Mr. Bolsonaro’s administration on Brazilian culture, and whether politics should be more directly addressed in his future work. What follows are edited excerpts.
What aspects of hip-hop dance are you examining in “Inoah”?
The movement [in hip-hop] is not inviting dancers to be together. It’s not a dance that asks the other person to be close. Actually, it looks like you’re doing the opposite, like the gestures are expelling, pushing away. In “Inoah,” in our improvisation, we’re always searching for a gesture [that connects] two people, a gesture that needs the other person. One work that influenced a lot of “Inoah” was “N.N.N.N.” by William Forsythe that I totally love and that I think is really one of the best works I have seen.
What did you take from the Forsythe?
One of the things is the relationship to weight. When I met Forsythe, he did a gesture with me from “N.N.N.N.” I gave my arm to him, and then he threw my arm up, and he said: “You see? You’re totally blocked.” Then I relaxed, and he did it again.
This movement is very simple, but it was amazingly meaningful for what [Grupo de Rua] was doing because we are not very keen on this kind of giving weight or giving yourself to another body. People were not relying on each other. They were not trusting.
But there is an intimacy, vulnerability and a kind of anti-machismo among your dancers that’s not typical of hip-hop.
One of the questions we are asking is: Is there any space for subtly, for softness — for being not tough and not hard the way hip-hop always is? Is there space to be another way?
We always feel that for the hip-hop audience, our work is not very easy because there is darkness, because there is silence, because there is movement that is not spectacular. But we don’t care because we know that if we wanted to, we could do something explosive all the time. But the way we impact how people receive our work is by being subtle, by being soft, by being slow.
You have said you’re interested in how hip-hop interacts with the world. How do we see that in “Inoah”?
“Inoah” is a very abstract work, and it’s not easy to take concrete solutions or thoughts from it. It’s a dance piece full of gestures, and it’s totally not precise.
This is a question I’m asking all the time: Does what we do now already have all the signs of the turbulence that is happening around us? Or do we still have to refine what we are doing to be more engaged, to be more political? And at the same time, how can we do a dance that’s not influenced by our life? This is impossible.
So how have politics in Brazil influenced your work?
We’re consciously discussing this inside the company because we would like the piece somehow to be more clear, so that we could touch these themes more precisely, instead of it being so abstract. But at the same time, I’m very afraid of being too clear or being very specific with an idea. It can diminish what we are doing. In university, we studied some letters of [the 18th-century choreographer Jean-Georges] Noverre, and one of the things that struck me was this phrase that he has, that if you want to say too many things with dance, just write a letter and don’t do dance.
How has Grupo de Rua felt the effects of the new government?
If we were not having [much] support before, now it’s totally unthinkable to have any kind of financial support in Brazil. We don’t have one single performance in Brazil, not one single invitation [to perform] in our country. This is not normal. If we didn’t have this relationship with the international scene, I don’t know if the company would be alive. How would we have the power inside to continue? How do the artists who don’t have this relationship with the international scene, with all the resources, how are they surviving?
Running backwards in advance of yourself
On Language and Community in the Work of Bruno Beltrão and Grupo de Rua de Niterói (fragments)
Jeroen Peeters
Expanding hip-hop with yet another movement dialect has never been Beltrão’s interest. For that, he is too critical of hip-hop’s branding strategies, just as claiming a single language is too narrow a space for developing complex thought. That we humans are anyway all too keen on pursuing habits and patterns is one of the concerns that underpin Beltrão’s playful deconstruction of hip-hop dances, their machismo and the cult of virtuosity and black music. Recurring strategies in his pieces are embracing contradiction and exposing hip-hop’s phraseology to other cultural languages and practices, including those of contemporary dance and of the theatre space. Influenced by choreographer Jérôme Bel, the early works have captions, irony and waterproof dramaturgy to tame the potentially rambunctious energies of clashing languages. H2 (2005) has both aspects, but leans towards a choreographic articulation of the movement material and the overall composition, which becomes only more present in the later group works H3 (2008) and CRACKz (2013). To unravel the intriguing running backwards scene at the heart of H2, which seems to contain some crucial questions in understanding Bruno Beltrão’s body of work, we must follow its wayward and smouldering energies, moving both forward and backward in time.
‘The most important questions in my work have always been aesthetic in nature, rather than social or political, even though this artistic focus does have wider implications.’ This is one of the first things Bruno Beltrão said when I interviewed him in May 2004.
In spite of Beltrão’s assertion, we did actually speak about the productional conditions of his Grupo de Rua, a local group of boys from Niterói who would never have imagined leaving that context but suddenly found themselves travelling to international festivals. We spoke about problems of tolerance and violence in Rio de Janeiro, and about the relation of survival and being creative with limited means. We spoke about the narrow views of hip-hop that provide a shared language and horizon for Beltrão and his collaborators, but also about challenging this fundamentalism, pushing hip-hop into a crisis and exploring it as a language and knowledge system. After a long, rambling conversation Beltrão concluded:
Developing openness for an existing reality and analysing it, that’s what I find important. How can hip-hop contribute to a better understanding of the world we’re living in? That’s perhaps rather too big a question, certainly since I don’t have a particular future in view. Yet you have to believe in something to be able to make work, even though there will always arise doubt.
Holding on to the doubt and appreciating the artistic questions and formal choreographic quality is a challenge with which Beltrão’s work confronts the spectators. And it invites me, as a writer, to move through the constraining experience of its formalism in order to discover the work’s worldly character. [...]
Asked how he translates wider concerns that surround the work into artistic questions, Beltrão told me:
Style and signature are side issues; it’s rather a matter of developing concepts to interpret existing material. What is art? How do people behave in a group? How do they relate to expectations and leadership? How do power relations function? That sort of question interests me. I don’t dance myself any longer, for I don’t find my own body language specific enough to construct complex arguments. To me it is exciting to see how other dancers appropriate these concepts, how their ways of thinking and moving are related. [...]
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Touring List
16.06.2020 Szene Salzburg / Sommerszene 2020, SALZBURG (AT) - Canceled (COVID-19)
15.06.2020 Szene Salzburg / Sommerszene 2020, SALZBURG (AT) - Canceled (COVID-19)
12.06.2020 Kaserne Basel, BASEL (CH) - Canceled (COVID-19)
11.06.2020 Kaserne Basel, BASEL (CH) - Canceled (COVID-19)
08.06.2020 Biennale Danza - Biennale di Venezia, VENICE (IT) - Canceled (COVID-19)
10.05.2020 Mercat de les Flors, BARCELONA (ES) - Canceled (COVID-19)
09.05.2020 Mercat de les Flors, BARCELONA (ES) - Canceled (COVID-19)
08.05.2020 Mercat de les Flors, BARCELONA (ES) - Canceled (COVID-19)
12.03.2020 Stadsschouwburg Utrecht, UTRECHT (NL) - Canceled (COVID-19)
10.03.2020 Chassé Theater, BREDA (NL)
28.02.2020 Theater Rotterdam, ROTTERDAM (NL)
26.02.2020 ITA - Internationaal Theater Amsterdam, AMSTERDAM (NL)
13.02.2020 Bâtiment des Forces Motrices Antigel Festival, GENEVA (CH
08.11.2019 Walker Art Center, MINNEAPOLIS (USA)
02.11.2019 BAM - New Waves Festival, NEW YORK CITY (USA)
01.11.2019 BAM - New Waves Festival, NEW YORK CITY (USA)
31.10.2019 BAM - New Waves Festival, NEW YORK CITY (USA)
25.10.2019 Théâtre Le Manège, MONS (BE)
23.10.2019 Concertgebouw Brugge, BRUGGE (BE)
16.10.2019 Théâtre de Liège, LIÈGE (BE)
15.10.2019 Théâtre de Liège, LIÈGE (BE)
12.10.2019 Grand Théâtre de Luxembourg, LUXEMBOURG (LU)
11.10.2019 Grand Théâtre de Luxembourg, LUXEMBOURG (LU)
09.10.2019 STUK - House for Dance, Sound and Image, LEUVEN (BE)
06.10.2019 La Raffinerie / Charleroi Danse, BRUSSELS (BE)
05.10.2019 La Raffinerie / Charleroi Danse, BRUSSELS (BE)
03.10.2019 Vooruit, GHENT (BE)
29.09.2019 Torino Danza Festival, TORINO (IT)
28.09.2019 Torino Danza Festival, TORINO (IT)
26.09.2019 Roma Europa Festival 2019, ROME (IT)
25.09.2019 Roma Europa Festival 2019, ROME (IT)
16.11.2018 Théatre Louis de Aragon, TREMBLAY (FR)
13.11.2018 MA Scene Nationale, PAYS DE MONTBELIARD (FR)
10.11.2018 104 - Festival d'Automne à Paris, PARIS (FR)
09.11.2018 104 - Festival d'Automne à Paris, PARIS (FR)
08.11.2018 104 - Festival d'Automne à Paris, PARIS (FR)
07.11.2018 104 - Festival d'Automne à Paris, PARIS (FR)
06.11.2018 104 - Festival d'Automne à Paris, PARIS (FR)
02.09.2018 Yamaguchi Center for Arts and Media, YAMAGUCHI (JP)
01.09.2018 Yamaguchi Center for Arts and Media, YAMAGUCHI (JP)
29.08.2018 Berliner Festspiele / Tanz im August 2018, BERLIN (DE)
28.08.2018 Berliner Festspiele / Tanz im August 2018, BERLIN (DE)
26.08.2018 Noordezon Performing Arts Festival, GRONINGEN (NL)
25.08.2018 Noordezon Performing Arts Festival, GRONINGEN (NL)
24.08.2018 Noordezon Performing Arts Festival, GRONINGEN (NL)
23.08.2018 Noordezon Performing Arts Festival, GRONINGEN (NL)
19.08.2018 Zürcher Theater Spektakel, ZÜRICH (CH)
18.08.2018 Zürcher Theater Spektakel, ZÜRICH (CH)
17.08.2018 Zürcher Theater Spektakel, ZÜRICH (CH)
16.08.2018 Zürcher Theater Spektakel, ZÜRICH (CH)
27.07.2018 SESC Vila Mariana, SÃO PAULO (BR)
26.07.2018 SESC Vila Mariana, SÃO PAULO (BR)
15.06.2018 Athens & Epidaurus Festival, ATHENS (GR)
14.06.2018 Athens & Epidaurus Festival, ATHENS (GR
13.06.2018 Athens & Epidaurus Festival, ATHENS (GR
09.06.2018 Dansens Hus, OSLO (NO)
08.06.2018 Dansens Hus, OSLO (NO)
05.06.2018 Culturgest / Alkantara Festival, LISBON (PT)
04.06.2018 Culturgest / Alkantara Festival, LISBON (PT)
31.05.2018 Cidade das Artes / Festival Rio H2K, RIO DE JANEIRO (BR)
08.05.2018 Kunstenfestivaldesarts 2018, BRUSSELS (BE)
07.05.2018 Kunstenfestivaldesarts 2018, BRUSSELS (BE)
06.05.2018 Kunstenfestivaldesarts 2018, BRUSSELS (BE)
05.05.2018 Kunstenfestivaldesarts 2018, BRUSSELS (BE)
04.05.2018 Kunstenfestivaldesarts 2018, BRUSSELS (BE)
06.04.2018 Festival de Curitiba, CURITIBA (BR)
05.04.2018 Festival de Curitiba, CURITIBA (BR)
15.03.2018 PACT Zollverein - Tanzplatform Deutschland 2018, ESSEN (DE)
14.03.2018 PACT Zollverein - Tanzplatform Deutschland 2018, ESSEN (DE)
11.03.2018 Hellerau - European Center for the Arts, DRESDEN (DE)
10.03.2018 Hellerau - European Center for the Arts, DRESDEN (DE)
22.10.2017 Tanzhaus NRW, DÜSSELDORF (DE)
21.10.2017 Tanzhaus NRW, DÜSSELDORF (DE)
17.10.2017 Frankfurt Lab / Künstlerhaus Mousonturm, FRANKFURT (DE)
16.10.2017 Frankfurt Lab / Künstlerhaus Mousonturm, FRANKFURT (DE)
05.07.2017 Festival de la Cité Lausanne, LAUSANNE (CH)
04.07.2017 Festival de la Cité Lausanne, LAUSANNE (CH)
27.06.2017 Festival de Marseille, MARSEILLE (FR)
13.06.2017 Wiener Festwochen, VIENNA (AT)
12.06.2017 Wiener Festwochen, VIENNA (AT)
11.06.2017 Wiener Festwochen, VIENNA (AT)
10.06.2017 Wiener Festwochen, VIENNA (AT)
06.06.2017, Theater der Welt / Kampnagel, HAMBURG (DE)
05.06.2017, Theater der Welt / Kampnagel, HAMBURG (DE)
04.06.2017, Theater der Welt / Kampnagel, HAMBURG (DE)
Bruno Beltrão
Bruno Beltrão (born in 1979 in Niterói) is a Brazilian choreographer who has worked with his Grupo de Rua since 1996. He uses urban dance styles in the context of conceptual theatre and has combined various influences, including hip hop, to form abstract choreographic lands- capes. Beltrão has wanted to direct films since he was a child and he was fascinated by cinematographic and computer-generated three-dimensio- nal universes. However, at the age of 13 he began dancing in matinees in his hometown, starting his unexpected relationship with hip hop. In 1994 he received his first dance lesson from the Israeli teacher Yoram Szabo. A year later, his studies were interrupted and he began to teach street dance in the city’s schools. In 1996, at the age of 16, he created the Grupo de Rua de Niterói with his friend Rodrigo Bernardi. In its first two years, Grupo de Rua was dedicated to competitive dance and made appearances at festivals and on television. During this period, while they lived intensely in the hip hop world, the way the techniques of street dance were usually translated to the stage no longer attracted the group’s interest as much as it had. They actually wanted to bring hip hop dance out of the confines of its own definition. In 2000 Beltrão enrolled in the dance faculty of the Centro Universitário da Cidade in Rio de Janeiro. In 2001 the duet From Popping to Pop premiered at the Duos de Dança no Sesc in Copacabana. This piece was Beltrão’s official debut on the contemporary dance scene in Rio de Janeiro and also marked a tur- ning point in the career of a choreographer who was starting to develop a personal vision for the dance he had been performing. Also in 2001 he created Me and my choreographer in 63 with the dancer Eduardo Hermanson. At the end of that year, Rodrigo Bernardi left the company and Beltrão took over running Grupo de Rua. Since then he has choreogra- phed Too Legit to Quit (2002), Telesquat (2003), H2 (2005), H3 (2008) and CRACKZ (2013). Since 2002, Grupo de Rua is touring internationally.
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Inoah © Kerstin Behrendt