Volmir Cordeiro

If in society, gatherings have become increasingly rare, and if in the theatre itself, the experience of democracy has grown weaker, how can we revive the enthusiasm that collective occurrences provide, and the seditious jubilation of social ardour? Can we "get back to the pit", and re-establish the place occupied by bodies, imaginations, and contact, along with all the power of the conflict, and the eroticism contained within the assembly? Volmir Cordeiro summons the subversive potential of figures condemned to "minor" existences within which they are confined, oppressed, and marginalized. By blending the learned with the popular, and by blurring social identities, the Brazilian artist distorts all forms of representation. He studies in a painstaking way habitual gestures, humble ones, to be found in the lower body, at ground level, gestures which are anchored in the ground, even to the extent of being crushed. On the stage, the raucous moving bodies, their volumes amplified by assemblages of raw materials, become noble ones. They are the vectors of a contagious lack of discipline that overflows from the stage to the pit, and vice versa.