Choreographer Guilherme Bothelo reconnects with the invisible of the movement of life through the ages.
How can we construct a truth that would revert to the archaic body, suggesting the mechanics of life in struggle for its emergence from darkness? This is what Guilherme Bothelo explores in Counter-Worlds with his Company Alias. The artist thus invites the audience to withdraw into the enigma of subjectivity, the invisible and the unconscious.
See less, see better
Under the electro tablecloths signed by Mexican Murcoff, the show begins in an unusual way. Equipped with a small infrared telescope used to observe nocturnal animals, each viewer faces a darkness filled with ghostly presences, emerging from the depths of time. The body shapes thus float in a black and white vision.
Then, back to chiaroscuro without glasses. Time then becomes weightless. The dancers' bodies evolve in inverted positions. We see outcropping, here bent legs, feet, arms, hands. There, a wrinkled back of his vertebrae and muscle convulsions appear. All the dancers stand up and turn as if caught in a backwash or mill movement with paddle wheel.
Gently stunned by such anatomical strangeness, the spectator is no longer a voyeur but a confidant. In turn, the eight dancers emerge from the memory of similar chimeras. They evoke plants, stones and even totems. In a female back, we think we recognize a talking face or the moving mask of Scream's serial killer. Further on, legs raised towards the sky meet in rhombuses, improbable vulva or open doors to the afterlife.
Odyssey of the species
At the borders of the visible, a third part sees a huge metal sphere-geode vibrate and move. Matrix, egg, spaceship, sanctuary refuge? A "counter-world", surely, both primitive and futuristic. The comparison with the mysterious monolith of the film 2001. Stanley Kubrick's Space Odyssey is a must.
The vibrating sphere is an enigmatic survival and announcement. For an open intended end between solitary despair and a drive towards the unknown. Or the eternal persistence of naked life in its multiple forms.
Bertrand Tappolet