In the heart of Rio de Janeiro, where the vibration of the city mixes with the rhythm of its people, Marcela Levi and Lucía Russo gave birth to Improvável Produções, a space for research, training and creation where the most improbable things happen, as bodies meld with the imagination. While Marcela Levi trained in Brazil, dancing with Lia Rodrigues’ company and possessing a social sensitivity very close to that of her fellow artist, Lucía Russo comes from the Argentinean Patagonia and went to the National University of Arts in Buenos Aires before studying dance in Amsterdam. Their creative union brings together all these points of view and is based on cultural hybridisation, but far from Eurocentric perspectives or primitivist claims. On the contrary: they celebrate the decentred, inclusive and plural coming and going, where multiple ways of moving and being moved coexist, even in joyful dissonance.
Their mantra is that “time needs time to do what time does”, and it is consistent with their creative processes, which are deliberately long. In 2022 they were residents at the El Graner creation centre and shared their creative tools, research strategies and tribulations with the city’s creators. They had already strolled along the Rambla with Sandwalk with Me (2014), in which they wore shoes with soles full of beach sand that forced them to walk extremely slowly. Two years later, they went to the opposite extreme with the mammoth piece, Boca de Ferro, which brought the sound of Caribbean technobrega to the Sala Hiroshima. Also in 2016 they presented Mordedoras at the Mercat de les Flors, a kind of cannibal ritual full of eroticism and regenerative violence.
During the pandemic, as happened to all stage creators, they had to find their audience through the screen, and this experience made them rethink their relationship with images and bodies that exist without flesh and sweat. In fact, sweat is very present in their works, as an empirical demonstration of the energy of dance that is transformed into heat.
The three pieces that form the Improvável Produções constellation are post-pandemic fruits that are sure to turn the heat up. Fuera de cuadro is a performative activation of the film they created during the lockdown, and c h ãO | grrRoUNd (2021) speaks of the music that makes us move despite all limits. Their most recent creation, 3 contra 2: Psico Trópicos (2023), is a dance and music piece that brings the memory of dance into the present: of the mythicised Nijinsky to underground voguing and many other ghostly images that breathe life into dance.
Bàrbara Raubert
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