Grupo Corpo

One of Brazil's most popular contemporary dance ensembles, Grupo Corpo combines Afro-Brazilian movements with ballet and modern dance to create an innovative and visually dynamic stage performance unlike any other. Documentarian Jürgen Wilcke gives viewers a glimpse into the inner workings of this world-renowned troupe as the 19 dancers prepare to wow audiences around the globe with their energetic presentations of grace and passion.

Created in 1992, 21 was a turning point in GRUPO CORPO’s career after a decade of dancing to pre-existing music. Not only did they now dance to music written exclusively for them – they had done it before early on in the hits Maria, Maria and Último Trem (both soundtracks by Milton Nascimento and Fernando Brant), but they also established that this was to become a house rule. It allowed Rodrigo Pederneiras to start building an extensive choreographic vocabulary with markedly Brazilianist inflexions that would become one of the company’s trademarks. A web of combinations of rhytmns and tonalities around the number 21 were written on geometric scores specially created by Marco Antônio Guimarães – the artistic director of Uakti Instrumental Workshop and designer of the unconventional instruments that give them their unique sound.

A game between what you hear and what you see, where the baroque of Bach and the baroque of Minas Gerais, in Brazil, are performed as dance. The choreography aspires to what is above, and the music, to what is inside Bach's scores and which Marco Antônio Guimarães, the composer, helps us discover. Among blue, gold and dark, a dance that celebrates the architecture of life: a continuous flow from where surprising kinetic constructions emerge.

Benguelê is an exaltation to the African past and to its remarkable and deep roots in Brazilian culture. Striking from the stage, without any shame, any trace of the classical technique - which, however, is present in the formation of the dancers, supports the complex choreography - the choreographer evokes, from beginning to end, Afro-Brazilian rhythms such as maracatu, candomblé and congado. Anarchy and frenzy replace the symmetry and order of the dancers on stage. Pas-deux and fouettés give way to standing beats, hips, shoulders and pelvis. The rhythmic diversity comes alive to the sound of the inspired music of composer, singer and guitarist João Bosco. There are eleven themes - specially created as the Benguelê theme music, or recreated as the chorinho 1x0 by Pixinguinha, or Tarantá and Carreiro Bebe, from folklore.

Created to celebrate Grupo Corpo’s 40th anniversary in 2015, Dança Sinfônica is built on the memorialist theme proposed by Artistic Director, Paulo Pederneiras. In this first symphony created specially for the dance company, Marco Antônio Guimarães, the author of anthological works such as 21 (1992) and Bach (1996), combines a sophisticated plot with original pieces and evocative musical passages from ballets recently produced by Grupo Corpo. The set of themes, written masterfully for the 90-member Philharmonic Orchestra of Minas Gerais, and interconnected by ingenious musical bridges performed by the Uakti group, allows Rodrigo Pederneiras to revisit the best works from the group’s entire repertoire, and also to process, with the experience accumulated through decades of working on detachment of form, a kind of synthesis of a choreographic scripture assembled over 34 years of residence at the company.

The rites of ‘Umbanda’ – one of the most widely practiced Brazil-born religions, which resulted from a combination of ‘Candomblé’ with Catholicism and Kardecism – serve as the great source of inspiration for the aesthetic scene design of Gira. ‘Exu’, the most human of the ‘Orixás’ – without whom, in religions of African origin, the ritual simply won’t happen – is the main poetic imagery which evokes the eleven musical themes especially created by Metá Metá, for Gira. First and foremost, the artistic creators of Grupo Corpo had to delve into the universe of Afro-Brazilian religions in preparation for the theme proposed by Metá Metá. However, the performance is far from being a mimetic representation of these syncretic rituals. Instead, the choreographer Rodrigo Pederneiras re(constructs) the powerful glossary of gestures and movement he accessed as he experienced rites of ‘Camdomblé’ as well as ‘Umbanda’, particularly ‘Exu’ ceremonies (giras de Exu).

The principles of interdependence and complementarity that govern human relationships serve as choreographer Rodrigo Pederneiras’ point of departure for the creation of ímã. Smooth and vital, trivial and strange, the piece by GRUPO CORPO is marked by the stage’s constant alternation between full and empty. Solos, duos and smaller and larger groups form and dissipate throughout in an incessant game of union and dispersion. The soundtrack composed by + 2, a trio made up of Domenico, Kassin and Moreno, superimposes tones and textures of a wide range of diverse instruments – guitar and ocarina, or synth and cuíca – to journey through abstract themes that are essentially melodic or typically electronic, revealing influences that range from bossanovista João Donato to ‘70s afro-music icon Fela Kuti, visiting contemporary Japanese multi-instrumentalist Cornelius along the way.

Fiery affairs, devouring lust, disastrous jealousy, broken hearts, brutal longing, contempt, rancor, and indifference in lyrics that border on the kitsch and dazzlingly beautiful melodies – these are the exuberantly romantic songs written by Ernesto Lecuona (1895-1963). They captivated choreographer Rodrigo Pederneiras in the mid-eighties, and two decades later in 2004, GRUPO CORPO celebrated the all-time greatest genius of Cuban music, opening for the first time since 1992 an exception to the house rule that the dance company would only dance to soundtracks especially composed for them. The result is a 38-minute ballet simply called Lecuona, an infatuating sequence of pas-de-deux followed by a single ensemble number created by Rodrigo Pederneiras to twelve aching love songs and one Waltz by the famous composer of Siboney. Lecuona has a singular character among all the other ballets by GRUPO CORPO.

Nazareth is Corpo’s homage to Brazil’s most erudite song writer, Ernesto Naza­reth (1863-1934). The 1993 ballet brought together onto stage the impishly sensual Brazilian ballroom dance and Corpo’s trademark sophistication. Composer José Miguel Wisnik wrote the soundtrack based on the works of Nazareth, the inventor of the “Brazilian tango.” He explored the concept of melodic mirroring to operate retrograde computer-generated movements that are assembled into crystalline surprising musical constructions, absolutely original contemporary recreations of Nazareth’s music. These pieces are commentaries, quotes, and variations on Nazareth’s music that point to a host of new exciting directions. Grupo Corpo’s remarkable team of creators worked hard to blend the erudite and the popular in this kinetic/visual rendering of Ernesto Naza­reth’s genius.

A game between what you hear and what you see, where the baroque of Bach and the baroque of Minas Gerais, in Brazil, are performed as dance. The choreography aspires to what is above, and the music, to what is inside Bach's scores and which Marco Antônio Guimarães, the composer, helps us discover. Among blue, gold and dark, a dance that celebrates the architecture of life: a continuous flow from where surprising kinetic constructions emerge.

The country side inspiration and the resulting contemporary sound track, written by Tom Zé and José Miguel Wisnik, for 1997’s Parabelo, prompted the choreographer from Grupo Corpo to bring into life that, which he himself refers to, as his “most Brazilian and regional” creation. From working and devotion chants, from the memory of the rhythmic baião and from the exuberant and an ever present, entangled, rhythmic points and counterpoints, emerges choreography full of hip swaying and feet stamping. It’s a ravishing statement of maturity and of the expressive teachings, developed throughout many years, by the maker of Missa do Orfanato and Sete ou Oito Peças para um Ballet. The aesthetic of the votive offerings, from country side churches, inspire Fernando Velloso and Paulo Pederneiras in the creation of the 15 meter X 8 meter panels, which provide support for the ballet’s stage setting.

The ocean (in Vigo), that takes and brings back the beloved one, the friend, is also the one that gives life and movement to Sem Mim. With a choreography by Rodrigo Pederneiras, scenography and lighting by Paulo Pederneiras and costumes by Freusa Zechmeister, the creation of the Brazilian dance group is rocked by the original soundtrack woven by the hands of the Viganese musician and composer Carlos Núñez and by the Brazilian from (“the ocean”) of the city of São Vicente José Miguel Wisnik, from the only set of pieces of music from the Galician-Portuguese medieval profane songbook that got to us with their respective original sheet music: the famous cycle of the ocean in Vigo, by Martín Codax. The seven chants, dated from the XIIIth century, are the oldest testimony and the most appreciated survivals of one of the aspects of the troubadouresque tradition in the region at that time: the so called “friend chants”.

The sensation of being just a hair’s breadth away from the blade of the mythical sword of Damocles was so imperative during the entire gestation period of the ballet from Grupo Corpo that it not only became the broad motif, but also inspired its name: Triz, an onomatopoeic term most likely deriving from the Greek triks/trikós (hair), symbolized in the expression por um triz (by a hair). In order to stimulate the creation of the soundtrack for Grupo Corpo’s ballet, Lenine himself placed Damocles’ sword above his own head by constructing a musical topography interlaced with rhythmical subversions (a passion) from a single leitmotif and using only strings. In a work where the occupation of space reflects the diabolical intermittence and guile worked on time by Lenine’s music, the possibility of creating a series of female duos acted as a soothing moment and a pause for breath.

Created from the solemn Mass composed and governed on the occasion of the consecration of the Orphanage Church in Vienna in 1768 by a Mozart who had not yet counted his thirteen years, the 1989 Mass of the Orphanage is among the highest works of the Corpo Group. Already establishing the first codes of a choreographic writing that would reach its maturity three years later with 21, a watershed in the trajectory of the company, Rodrigo Pederneiras transforms his corps de ballet into a mass of devalued people who, contrary to what the ordinary Catholic Mass preaches, portrays rather the tragedy and misery of the human condition that the longing for glorification of the Divine. In a state of permanent contrition, the bodies of the dancers ritualize the helplessness, fear, affliction and loneliness inherent in the inapprehensibly earthly and transitory nature of the human species. In the incessant search for verticality, their convulsive gestures sound like cries of mercy.