Swallowing her whole: Volmir Cordeiro at Danspace Project

Volmir Cordeiro in Inês
(photo: Cristiano Prim)

One day, I met a woman named Inês. I wasn’t satisfied with just looking at her – I wanted to get closer. I immediately put aside my role as an observer and began to live with this “being of flesh.” It wasn’t enough to capture her; I had to swallow her whole.  -- Volmir Cordeiro

The figure you see in the photo above is Inês.

Or perhaps I should say it is Brazil-born dancer Volmir Cordeiro encasing the being of Inês in his rangy, barelegged body in a study named, Inês, presented by and at Danspace Project with Performa.

That's already a lot surrounding a woman who is not there, and this does not even take into account the audience also surrounding a woman who is not there.

Inêssssssss.  The cry of her name issues from Cordeiro's lips like an invocation of an orixá. Or a viper's hiss. Or a spray of rum from the mouth of a macumba priestess. Or all of these things at once.

Inês lives. Yes, an actual person, a sexagenarian and mom. By word of Cordeiro (and a useful post-show Q&A with Miguel Gutierrez and translator Patricia Hoffbauer), we know two other things: 1) She wants to get on a reality TV show. 2) She has had "a radical amount of plastic surgery," as noted by Gutierrez, to make herself a better candidate for elusive and likely ephemeral celebrity.

We must imagine what she looks like. What Cordeiro looks like borders on the wolfish. And when he strides right up to the edge of the audience's front row, right up to the eyeballs there, he can intimidate. Especially since he holds that place of dominance for a long time. Even when swiveling his limbs, or moving sideways along the row or venturing inside an aisle, he's a force that seems to want to pin you in your seat. You don't know what, in the very next second, could burst from him. And you don't want to know.

In your own head, you're walking on eggshells.

Is that Inês?

If so, she seems unbalanced enough to achieve the reality TV stardom she desires.

He/she is reckless with his/her body--especially when Cordeiro tapes his eyelids shut--in ways that make empathic/empathetic people like me cringe.

Is that Inês?

A useful tidbit from Danspace Project's material on Cordeiro (now based in Paris):

Volmir Cordeiro...is currently working on a PhD thesis on figures of marginality in contemporary dance at Paris VIII University. His studies and time spent in the favelas of Rio with Lia Rodrigues’ company reflect a desire to bring to life those who are “condemned to weaken, disappear, derail.” In previous works Cordeiro has explored the physicality of marginal and underprivileged figures.

Inês fascinates her observers, even as she scares them. How strange that her dream is such a flimsy thing, far flimsier than she herself must be.

Final performance of Inês: tonight at 9pm. For information and tickets, click here.

Danspace Project
St. Mark's Church-in-the-Bowery
131 East 10th Street (at Second Avenue), Manhattan
(map/directions)

Just come get this mess

Can you just clear it up? I need a little more clarity. -- Peter Richards in Para-dice (Stage 1)

When Patricia Hoffbauer auditioned for DTW's Fresh Tracks series, she says, David White argued that her dance was too messy and disorganized. But my guess is that mess is often the point. Because either you're going to have a tidy piece of work or you're going to have a real piece of work (meant in both senses of that term). Hoffbauer sees everything in terms of the mess.

And what she has going on now at Danspace Project--a phenomenon called Para-dice (Stage 1)--is messy to the max on purpose. Sprawling throughout space and time, it doesn't even have a discernible beginning or a definitive end. And oh, that middle!

Add the fact that Para-dice (Stage 1) is messily shoehorned into an evening with another phenomenon called The Adventure (instigator: Trajal Harrell), a nightly sample of choreographic research experiments-in-progress and, on the evening I attended, a thought-provoking party game for audience members followed by an invitation to stick around for wine. What's going on here?

If narrative is power, is there any coincidence whose narratives are visible? -- Patricia Hoffbauer in Para-dice (Stage 1) 

What seems to be going on is a kind of blasting open of assumptions about what it means to make and perform dance, what it means to try to give a lecture on dance and culture (with Hoffbauer and collaborators vividly referencing and mercilessly deconstructing Brazilian history, pop culture and stereotypes), what it means to consume art, what it means to critique it or to willingly live with it and participate in its meaning. It complicates everyone's safe story--and just what does it mean to have a crush on a smooth-singing, smooth-looking samba/funk star who turns out to have been an informer for the dictatorship devastating your country?--and it continuously interrupts "serious" art with entertainment and vice versa. And it does all these things with an almost unimaginable seamlessness and insouciance.

One of my favorite moments happens very early on: There's a smallish film screen set up on one side of the space, and some hazy imagery comes on for just a few seconds before the images inexplicably slide away onto the back wall of St. Mark's Church's sanctuary. Why in hell should the images stay on a little screen when they can more rambunctiously, even sacrilegiously, splash themselves, as in a movie theater, across far more impressive space? This filled me with cheer, and the oncoming dance--riddled with graceful humor among other good and smart and skillful things--kept me alert throughout.

The piece was created in collaboration with its performers--Peggy Gould (so deft and pleasurable to watch in her duet work and other interactions with Hoffbauer), Elisa Osborne, Peter Richards (whose visual contributions include samples from Brazilian filmmaker Glauber Rocha) and George Emilio Sanchez (responsible for much of the text). Costumes are by Liz Prince, lighting by Kathy Kaufmann.

Every performance includes a different work from The Adventure. (Last night, for instance, dancer Anna Whaley "stole" Thibault Lac's solo, 2, Line, Science--simply constructing a sandpainting-like diagram of white powder on the church floor and dustbusting it up again, all to the strains of Eric Clapton's "Cocaine.") So go and see what adventure's in store for you this weekend. 

Patricia Hoffbauer's Para-dice (Stage 1) and The Adventure

continuing tonight through Saturday, 8pm

Danspace Project

St. Mark's Church

Second Avenue and Tenth Street, Manhattan

Tickets