Volmir Cordeiro Métropole

What is the place of life, death, and the injured but still alive human body in the metropolis? In a new solo, the dancer and choreographer Volmir Cordeiro explores, in the company of the musician Philippe Foch, social violence and movement as its combative response.

Dedicated to Lia Rodrigues, with whom Volmir Cordeiro collaborated as a performer prior to basing himself in France, Métropole is the product of the trials and tribulations of the year 2020. With the sanitary constraints making it impossible to bring to fruition a collective project, Volmir Cordeiro opted to focus his efforts on a work of a smaller scale. In response to an invitation from the philosopher Paul B. Preciado, presently carrying out a cycle of reflection at the Centre Pompidou, he draws up the outline of a “dance for the revolution”, which has in turn become the starting point for his new show. Onstage, the Brazilian choreographer begins with an assessment of what he terms as the “fabrication of fear”: a social de-naturalization embodied, metaphorically, by the tentacle-like public space of the metropolis. Set to the percussion of Philippe Foch, he then returns to the animal-like nature of the body as a way of patching up the wounds, via the invention of a dance in the form of a combat arena. Métropole brings into being a choreographic response to the structures which, in today's world, put constraints on the living.