ORIGAMI-BODIES IN THE RHYTHM OF PASSION
Balé da cidade’s top notch cast celebrates the company’s 40th birthday with Canela Fina, Cayetano Soto’s sophisticated and elegant piece

Besides for the wardrobe, Canela Fina doesn’t fit in that uncomfortable common place that strikes many international choreographers that come to Brazil: to make the brazilian sensuality their theme. The Spanish Cayetano Soto and the dramatist with whom he works, Nadja Kadel, soon realized this trap, changing from sensuality to sensibility, thus exploring the body’s senses. Between those, they priorized the smell, filling São Paulo’s Teatro Munipal’s stage with 50 kg of cinnamon.

The “fine cinnamon” that names the piece, although, is not that one. It is an old expression in their language to describe something of good taste, something that makes you enjoy life. Here, the enjoyment is to discover an young choreographer (Cayetano Soto is 33) being able to produce an authorial and instigating ballet style.

His pas-de-deux are surprising. They reminisce of Lego pieces being put together unusually. The shapes produced are very different from the customary ones, for they do not look like combinations of two bodies, but articulations of one not antropomorphic being. The dancers are origami-bodies that fold without sharing a common axis. The centrifugal force tangles everything in contacts that seem only transitory.

The relation between dance and music follows the same logic, breaking the anticipation at every moment. Michael gordon’s Weather One (1997) works as a sound environment that presents itself as another text layer, making the choreography more complex.

The difficulty of execution is obvious in every new proposition, and BCSP’s top notch cast executes the task with dexterity. Besides this unusual method of creating movement, everything is done in high speed, and the 16 dancers execute all the lines necessary with the finish that each of them require. And, happily, it is not a virtuosity stravaganza. Canela Fina is about style development, not an easy thing to find, specially around ballet, although it remains a very populated area in the dance scene of today.

The tonalities that blend the skin of the dancers with the ochre of the surroundings are achieved with a lighting design capable of embellishing the scene just in the right measure. Canela Fina celebrates BCSP’s 40th birthday with great dignity. And is even better when watched after a visit to the exciting 300 photo expo put together by Ana Teixeira, the company’s assistant artistic director. In it, the four decade trajectory is punctuated with information that puts this important story in circulation with all the quality it deserves.

Co-produced by the Gran Teatro del Liceu de Barcelona, Canela Fina will be performed there in September, and also in France (Biarritz) together with Dualidade@br, created by the Iranian Choreographer Gagik Ismailian in 2001, and Perpetuum, created in 1992 for the Grand Théàtre de Génève by Ohad Naharin and that he restaged for BCSP in 2003. In Germany (Bonn), A linha Curva, by itzik Galili, will also be performed.
O Estado de S. Paulo, Caderno 2, 14/07/2008, by Helena Katz

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