The strong Fúria of Lia Rodrigues

Brazilian artist Lia Rodrigues established her company and set up a dance school in the Maré favela in Rio de Janeiro. She presents her new creation, Fúria. “The imagination is a place of freedom.”

What was your inspiration for Fúria?

The dancers and I worked from images we’d collected. Images from all over the world, but particularly those illustrating the life of black people in Brazil. The writer Conceição Evaristo, who is Afro-Brazilian and comes from a favela, was like a beacon for us in our research. She helped us a great deal when we were thinking about this piece. We worked with anything we found in our space, old clothes, a small bit of wood, a little piece of plastic thrown in a corner. We tried to create poetry out of these broken and discarded bits and pieces.

How do you work with your dancers?

In this piece I’m working with nine dancers who are all very different. Four of them come from our school and that’s really emotional for me. I’ve known them since they were teenagers and now they’re artists talking with their own voices! The dancers improvise and I’m trying to organise what we want to say together. It’s like a big laboratory we’ve been bringing material into for nine months. The piece is written day to day with everyone’s involvement. I organise the ideas that emerge, the desires, the thoughts; we talk a lot.
 

Is there a great deal of visual work in Fúria, like there is in your earlier pieces?

Unlike other pieces where the audience shared the space with the dancers, this one is performed front on. We wanted to have this experience and it changes things a lot. Even if, as I said, we work with quite limited material, we’re trying to create a specific ambiance, a kind of Brazilian baroque with costumes and characters. At the moment more than half of the dancers are living in the Maré favela. They bring this singular imagi-nary world, different colours, a particular aesthetic. We have figures of kings, queens, made out of nothing. And I love this magic of nothing. We’re positioning ourselves in a kind of non-linear narrative, close to imagination and dreams. The piece is being created at this particular, terrible time of elections that will have a big impact on people, especially in the favela. Fúria surrounds us, we’re immersed in it. So what can we bring to it all? Perhaps a bit of calm and silence. But above all imagination, which is a place of freedom.

Interview by Delphine Baffour

Published in La Terrasse, 21 October 2018 – nr. 270