Marcela Levi, Lucía Russo Let it burn

The choreographers Marcela Levi and Lucía Russo bring us a dizzying, political solo, performed by the dancer Tamires Costa. Her black body is traversed by other bodies – invisible ones – and by history, sounds, stereotypes and the audience’s gaze. This proximity with the audience is both disturbing, and a source of interplay.

Eruptive and unsettling, Let it burn, a solo co-created with the dancer Tamires Costa, is a contradictory experience of density and purity. What is causing this body to move and how should we look at it? What images and ghosts traverse it? Marcela Levi and Lucía Russo have put together traces of a host of existences shrouded in flames, ranging from Thelonious Monk, Dizzy Gillespie, Josephine Baker, Valeska Gert, Macunaíma, Grande Otelo, Jorge Ben Jor, Mc Carol, and Michael Jackson, to Nina Simone and Woody Woodpecker. The dance itself is traversed by stereotypes associated with black bodies, which catch our eye and then fade away in the same movement. The piece is a political one, similar to how the work of Lia Rodrigues can be, and with whom Marcela Levi has often collaborated, prior to founding her own company with Lucía Russo. With Let it burn, the two choreographers embrace contradictions and ambiguities directly via the gest itself, making the experience both a very immediate one and a telling one, but which is also beyond our grasp.