Third week schrit_tmacher justdance! festival

Hope? None!

Dancing on the volcano: Alice Ripoll’s choreography ‘Zona Franca’ confronts us with the attitude to life in Brazil’s favelas. At first glance it is irritatingly colourful, at second glance it is abysmally black. Ambiguity that opens our eyes.

By: Harff-Peter Schönherr

It’s beautiful here, at first glance. There is drumming, there is dancing, there is singing. Sun-warmed light caresses young, smiling people. Silvery balloons float above them, like promising worlds. Others, deep red in colour, beckon like the fruits of paradise. They wear afros, they wear dreads, they wear a lot of skin, they wear sensual clothes. A celebration seems to be in the offing – or continuing, perhaps forever. This is what happiness looks like. Or so you think.

But it’s not like that. All this is just a façade, just an escape into a make-believe world to escape the misery of the real one. Behind it all is the hopelessness of the favelas, the poverty of the informal, often improvised neighbourhoods of the marginalised, which tourists exploring Brazil’s big cities usually only catch a glimpse of, even though picturesque misery is more in vogue than ever in travel photos today.

The fact that everything is just a façade becomes apparent when the excess, the exaltation of appearances suddenly gives way to silence, when the singing becomes a lament. These breaks are hard. We see them again and again. And the more often we see them, the more shockingly we realise: the characters we encounter here are trapped in deep despair, in fatalistic pessimism. They do not change the conditions that torment them, they merely suppress them. Above all through a lot of empty, artificially overheated physicality.

Alice-Ripoll_ZONA-FRANCA©TANZweb.org_Klaus-Dilger

The people we meet as performers in Alice Ripoll’s choreography ‘Zona Franca’ know what life in the favelas feels like. They have experienced it. In Rio de Janeiro. On their own souls, on their own bodies. It is oppressive that Ripoll does not let them show an image of resistance, not a demand for a better, more humane life, but only self-stunning.

If you don’t look closely, you will only see scurrilities. A belly is pre-inflated and drawn in. Magic glitter trickles through the air. Freak acrobatics are celebrated, a tongue sticks out. A bowl emerges from the pocket of a food delivery man, the contents of which seem to taste good. The tyres and spokes of a wheel make music. Football and polonaise are played. People dance what young, urban people dance when they are among themselves, often to brute electronics. Someone kicks a red ball into the audience while stadium penalty freneticism is played.

If you look closely, you can feel the breaks. The BPM of the drum machine no longer just sounds like music, but like a machine gun. Clusters of people no longer clump together in situational ecstasy, but in agony, out of a fundamental lack of proximity. Fighting and shooting gestures are not just hinted at in the game, but become serious. It’s not just balloons bursting to cover the stage with the shimmering, brightly coloured particles from inside them, because they stick so attractively to sweaty skin afterwards, it’s dreams bursting. People don’t just shout and whine out of exuberance, but out of powerlessness. People don’t just isolate themselves because street dance is about competition, but because they are incapable of feeling a sense of community. Young women don’t just dance out of lasciviousness, foot fetishism isn’t just lived out of curiosity, but so that you can still feel something in this cold world.

Alice-Ripoll_ZONA-FRANCA©TANZweb.org_Klaus-Dilger

The audience laughs at times. Did they not look closely? Is it laughing because it would prefer to do the opposite?

Ripoll is taking a big risk, as is evident here. She wants to show symbolic actions, multi-layered and profound, and she succeeds. But her colourful fireworks of the seemingly happy make deciphering them a challenge. And her sometimes absurd props, the presence and energy of her actors, threaten to obscure the fact that we are confronted with an attitude to life that recognises the search for new self-determination, but ultimately ends in self-abandonment.

Ripoll’s risk begins with the title: ‘Zona Franca’. Translated from Brazilian Portuguese, this means free trade zone. So what can we expect here? Danced economic liberalism? A play that the far-right US autocrat Trump, enamoured of nonsensical tariffs, will surely soon put on the index?

Of course not. Ripoll’s dance piece is first and foremost a collective psychological impulse. It aims at the freedom of art and thought, at personal freedom, civic freedom. What confronts us here is, as concretely as abstractly, a free space, a space of possibility, a zone of free action. At least potentially. Ripoll’s characters do not utilise it. And in doing so, they show us what would happen to us if we were to do the same: we would fall victim to a repetitive loop of entertaining, distracting, but blindness-inducing inanities.

The diversity of the characters in ‘Zona Franca’, the diversity of their actions and omissions, is a celebration of diversity par excellence: ‘Zona Franca’ is recommended to anyone who is susceptible to demagogic populists like Trump, who suggest that our salvation lies in uniformity, in a return to the supposed simplicity of days gone by, as an antidote to the complexity of our modern world. Diversity, it shows, is strength, despite everything. A play that trains the analytical eye for ambiguities.

The 75-minute play, promises the organiser, ‘tells of the hopes of a disinherited generation’, is a ‘political-poetic experience’ and aims to create a ‘space in which both performers and audience can find freedom at a time when dark clouds are gathering worldwide’. That is also a risk. Because as Ripoll’s hapless happiness burns down on us, we ask ourselves, increasingly frustrated, when all this will be realised.

It is not redeemed. What disinheritance is meant, and what politics, is not revealed. And certainly not which freedom will help us to defeat the darkness. Ripoll himself has emphasised that the election victory of Luiz Lula da Silva over the far-right Brazilian autocrat Jair Bolsonaro in 2022 influenced the work on ‘Zona Franca’. We state: This influence has not left any direct traces on the stage.

What Ripoll offers us is an enigmatically shocking dance on the volcano. No less, but also no more. Would more have been more? We will never know.