Contemporary Brazilian dance company Grupo Corpo comes to Aspen

Aspen Santa Fe Ballet wraps up its winter season with contemporary Brazilian dance flair. Grupo Corpo, translated as “Body Group,” performs Tuesday at Aspen District Theater.

The company began in 1975, with founders Paulo and Rodrigo Pederneiras emphasizing neoclassical ballet. In the late 1980s, they began incorporating more Brazilian culture after they researched the variety of popular dances, as well as Umbanda, a Brazilian faith.

“We started to dig in our backyard and started to find incredible treasures,” Rodrigo said. “We started to bring it to our classic ballet technique, using a really Brazilian language.”

---

---

Popular, and traditional, dance forms in Brazil share one common aspect: All movement begins in the hips.

“There is a sensuality in the way they dance — even a sensuality in the way they walk,” he said, adding that arm movements differ depending upon the region.

---

---

Since then, Grupo Corpo has earned a reputation worldwide for its unique fusion of Brazilian culture, African rhythms, and classical ballet technique.

Tuesday’s performance features two pieces, approximately 40 minutes each.

The first, “Gil Refazendo,” showcases music by Gil Refazendo, a composer, musician, and writer known as one of the godfathers of Brazilian music. It’s not only a tribute to this important artist, but also a testament to the spirit of renewal, revision, and rebuilding. The Pederneiras initially created a dance (named “Gil”) based on Refazendo’s soundtrack in 2019, and after the pandemic forced a hiatus, they completely reconstructed the choreography but kept the music.

“Gilberto Gil – with his metaphysical thinking, his ideas, and his deep-rooted environmental activism – became a perfect interpretation of the need to rebuild what has been devastated, to put right what has been allowed to collapse,” Paulo wrote in a press release.

In “Gil Refazendo,” a background image of magnified sunflowers slowly returns to life. Females dressed in raw linen and males wearing casual pants and shirts dance under a simple white light, accompanied by ancestral drums, electronic distortions, a jazzy woodwind section, and other traditional African instruments. The end of the soundtrack includes a poem Refazendo recites, punctuating the rhythmic dimensions of the composition.

Tuesday’s performance closes with “Gira.” Rodrigo based the choreography on rituals in Umbanda, a widely-practiced Brazilian religion, which includes elements of Catholicism and African possession spiritual practices. In African cosmology, Eshu is a messenger between the spiritual and material worlds, ruling both order and chaos.

“It is a communion between spirits and the living. It’s a really beautiful religion,” he said, describing rituals that include jumping and spinning to drum rhythms. “Thirty or 40 people turn and jump and turn in a very tight space with their eyes closed, and no one touches anyone. It’s unbelievable.”

Bodies of dancers off-stage are covered in black tulle, along with black walls; in this way, they lend a presence of ether, creating an eerie atmosphere that seems to have no end. On stage, dancers with naked torsos and white skirts move to the rhythms and melodic moments. Throughout the piece, “Gira” conveys human beings’ primordial need to connect with the divine.

Overall, audiences are in for a very unique performance.

“It’s a kind of work that only Grupo Corpo does. People have never seen something like this,” he said. “We have a high balletic mission and technique and many kinds of elements of our culture, and we love to share a little bit of our culture that is really not well known in the States.”

More info: aspensantafeballet.com