INTRODUCTION TO AS PALAVRAS- CIE CLAUDIO BERNARDO
We come from both here and everywhere; this is to say from nowhere.
Alain Touraine
As Palavras: the Words in Portuguese.
When Claudio Bernardo gave a name to his company in 1996, he has already achieved ten or so choreographic pieces. The name of the company gives a key word to understand his coming artistic projects. Dance is, first of all, a matter of speaking, a way to express oneself in order to take a stand. Literature has always been a major source of inspiration for Claudio Bernardo. The name of the company, As Palavras, refers to literature but also evokes the misunderstandings and the feelings of anxiety words may arouse. When facing a foreign word, an unknown word, one’s reaction is to seek its meaning(s).
Space orientations, body sensations… Claudio Bernardo, and then the audience, face and question the oddness. Never does he give a univocal answer. His dance stays far away from any postulate and therefore, becomes a sensitive opening; insofar as literature, music, theater, set design create an imaginary and heterogeneous world in which the audience is asked to draw his own map.
From Brazilian gold mine to salt mountain (Usdum, 1990), from hospital room to shrine (Dilatatio, 1992), movements combine; they surpass the snapshot of the moment to lie in collective memory.
For instance: The hysterical levitation of a Sainte Thérèse d’Avila, the heaviness of human body in Dilatatio. A lost body hung above a drop, precariously balanced between life and death in Géométrie de l’Abîme (1996). Plain touches and exchanged glances into the cold, aseptic, yet colorful and magical world of Systole (1997), inspired by Frida Kahlo.
Only what does not belong to me attracts me. Law of Man. Law of anthropophagi. Quoting this aphorism from the famous “Anthropophagous Manifesto”, the Brazilian poet Oswald de Andrade describes what could be the composite character of Claudio Bernardo. In an unprejudiced way, Claudio Bernardo takes over different views, absorbs and mixes elements coming from different worlds. Fernando Pessoa and Kafka, Thérèse d’Avila and Jean Martin Charcot, Francis Bacon and Jean Cocteau. Popular and erudite, regional and worldwide, real and imaginary. Cultural cannibalism. In so often called surrealistic Belgium, Claudio Bernardo finds a creative place dedicated to his dancing map-making, which stand as possible answers to what reality seems to be asking us strongly: how to live with our differences.
His research goes from this outside and unknown environment filled with differences- intellectual, physical, chromatic- to an anxious and flexible interiority. Contrasts sometimes soft, sometimes violent, and ever-present in his choreographies. Aggressive caress from a hand that stops the other from speaking (Histoire de sel 1990). The metaphysical emptiness of Pessoa’s poetry filled with flesh and weight (Géométrie). Spellbinding ritual in which the audience switches from cold to hot, techno music and Sacre du Printemps, individual and group (Incandescência, 1999).
This strong taste for unexpectedness appears in a most fascinating way, in the trilogy that Bernardo choreographed on the topic of the memory. His stage direction of the Sacre du Printemps plunges us into a no man’s land. Between afro-brazilian ritual and rave party, sacred and pagan, baroque and post-modern. This research goes on in Paixao (2002). In The Library (2006), the choreographer, along with his dancers, plays a part he loves most: the mapmaker. A kind of a cartographer who, from his travel notebook, from his living experiences, draws new boundaries to tell us the story of his discovery of the unknown, his knowledge of the unexpected. A beautiful way to speak about passing on and heritage.
As Palavras deals with scattered and fragmented issues. Yet, through the choreographic process, diversities combine. Therefore the position of the company within the Communauté Française de la Belgique (French Community of Belgium) is extending. Since to speak implies to take space.
Rodrigo Albea, Journalist, Author of the master’s essay “Métissage culturel et danse- le cas de Claudio Bernardo” University of Paris VIII, Dance Department, October 1999
