Silent Hip-Hop: Brazilian Choreographer Breaks the Moves Away From the Music

written by Mary Murfin Bayley

Until I saw Brazilian choreographer Bruno Beltrão’s piece, H3, at On the Boards, I hadn’t realized how much hip-hop moves normally look as if they were impelled by music, how the dancers seem to be shoved around by blasts of sound. What is left when the music is removed is an odd and sometimes beautiful thing.

Bruno Beltrão's troupe

To generalize here for a minute, if you say ballet is about being airborne and gravity-free, modern dance is about yielding down into the pull of gravity, and jazz is about gravity gone horizontal, then you might say that hip-hop is about the isometric pull of the body against itself, that the gravity is a shifting force within the body of the dancer. The hip-hop dancer’s physicality is so much about strength and the flow of movement within himself and about his own solidity and compactness of movement, that when he does get airborne it is amazing — like watching a rock float, or a stone suddenly spin up in the air.

[More after the jump]

H3 starts quietly and tenderly with two dancers in tightly controlled, delicate movements that ripple from shoulder to clenched hand, from foot to pelvis, elbow to twisted wrist. The dancers roll their heads as if being slapped, but they are very much in their own space, interacting — touching sometimes — but not looking at each other. There is a spasmodic, mechanical aspect to some of this movement, like the flare of static on a screen, but in the patient attention which Beltrão gives to these movements there is also surprising vulnerability.

The piece builds. More dancers come on casually in twos and threes. They run backwards at breakneck speeds or leap at each other from opposite corners. They jump up into the air, wound up into an airborne crouch or grabbing at their own legs, as if launching off a diving board.

However, H3 is not about spectacle.  There is a sense of power being held in check and only unleashed incidentally as part of some other exploration or conversation between the dancers. Displays of competitive bravura and one-upmanship have been ditched for a sense of interaction and play.

Beltrão began as a street performer in the city of Niteroi near Rio de Janeiro at the age of nine, formed Grupo de Rua with partner Rodrigo Bernardi when he was sixteen, and went on to study art history and philosophy. In this work he uses hip-hop not as an end in itself but as a vocabulary for his own elaboration on contemporary dance. In the program notes he is said to be seeking to “set street dance free from sheer virtuosity...to pull the dancers from isolation” and to give them “the freedom to explore, to seek out the other.”

The hip-hop dancer’s physicality is so much about strength and the flow of movement within himself, about his own solidity and compactness of movement, that when he does get airborne it is amazing, like watching a rock float, or a stone suddenly spin up in the air.

The sound score by Lucas Marcier and Rodrigo Marcal left large sections of silence allowing us to focus us on the skid and slide of the dancers’ shoes and the slap of the dancers' bodies making contact. The intermittent and quiet uses of recorded city sound — background car horns in the distance — were intercut with sections of rhythmic percussion. At times, a rare energizing blast of loud sound, not more than two notes and followed by silence, seemed as broken away from music as these hip-hop steps were from their normal context.

Gualter Pupo’s set design clarified the open space with a single rope of light, which started out as a neat rectangle but was eventually shaken free to snake across the shiny black surface of the bare stage. Renato Machado’s lighting shifted at the end to reveal thousands of scuff marks in the shiny surface, a visual accompaniment to what we had just heard.

The nine powerful dancers of Grupo de Rua, each with a very distinctive style and approach, were Bruno Neres, Bruno Duarte, Danilo Pereira, Augusta Eduardo Hermanson, Filipi de Morais, Kleberson Goncalves, Kristiano Concalves, Luiz Carlos Gadelha and Thiago Almeida. They were dressed by costumer Marcelo Sommer in unassuming t-shirts and slacks that could be worn down any street but with enough saturated color to emphasize their moves.

In this piece, Beltrão breaks the hip-hop dance vocabulary free from its usual context of loud music and bravura moves and let us see the vulnerability and tenderness of the dancers. What I came away with was the way dance can be all about restraint — from the predictability our own traditions often create for us.

Bruno Beltrão’s troupe, Grupo de Rua, performed at On the Boards January 28 - 31, 2010. For information on future programming, visit their Web site, www.ontheboards.org.

Mary Murfin Bayley recently returned to Seattle after two years in Italy, where among other pursuits, she studied Italian Vernacular Theater with Manuelita Baylon and Commedia dell’Arte with Roberto Andrioli.  She reviewed dance for the Seattle Times for many years and was a regular contributor to Stage Directions Magazine.  Contact her at marybayley@aol.com