Marcelo Evelin  A Invenção da Maldade

[Dance]

Ceramic and metal chimes hanging from the ceiling petrify the strange atmosphere. Akin to the howls of wind that dare to break through the sanctuary-like silence, they then become the piece’s orchestra. Around a campfire, the Brazilian choreographer invites spectators to come into the closest possible proximity with the tumult of the seven dancers’ bodies.

Frenetic, mysterious, unpredictable, even incongruous, the movement of the performers brings us close to the enigma. A paradox seems to bring them together. Is this animalistic purity or aggressive affection? Before us we observe a writhing, liquefied mass of ‘desubjectified’ presences, of solitudes juxtaposed in the space. Stemming from a host of different nationalities, the dancers represent a diversity of ways of being in the world, an otherness which forms an integral part of Marcelo Evelin’s experimentation. In Portuguese, there is a difference between mal, “bad”, and maldade, which could be translated as “evil” or “viciousness”. Flying in the face of the politically correct, the twilight, ghostly world that the choreographer conjures up puts emphasis on the archaism and innocence of evil. A child who does harm does not know the power of his own strength. Following on from reflections by the philosopher Jonas Schnor, Marcelo Evelin and his team plunge, in a non-speculatory way, into “the depths of evil”. They set off in search of a reinvention of the primary body, one which is rid of its interior self, a figurative place, both here and far away, in which desire and thought collapse. A Invenção da Maldade looks into the instant when evil sets out to look for its own origin but hears no answer. It throws light upon the place where the question comes up against an unknown, a hole in the world.
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Running time : 1h10
Warning: the dancers perform naked for the duration of the show