On 22 and 23 April, the choreographer Lia Rodrigues is premièring in Madrid a contemporary dance show that was created in the Maré shanty town in Río de Janeiro (Brazil).

Maré is an enormous shanty town which is home to around 170,000 people. It s considered to be one of the most dangerous and degraded places of the Brazilian city and it was there that Lia decided to set up the headquarters of her company in 2004.  She also founded the Maré Arts Centre in 2009 and opened her own Dance School in 2011, where 350 students learn to dance.  It is a multiple project that seeks to give the young people from the neighbourhood the opportunity to move away from poverty and marginalisation through dance.

Along with her students, Lia has generated a series of choreographic steps that symbolise survival and emergency whilst extracting the beauty from waste objects, which are used as the stage design and props.  The piece was designed over nine months in 2017, coinciding with the electoral campaign that brought Jair Bolsonaro into power, and it follows the train of thought of the Afro-Brazilian  writer, Conceição Evaristo, regarding the resistance, in addition to other references to power, the oppressed and the festive carnival floats.

Born in São Paulo (Brazil) in 1956, Lia Rodrigues is one of the world’s best known Brazilian dancers to date.  She was a member of the Maguy Marin group in Paris (France) and on her return to Brazil, she set up the Lia Rodrigues Companhia de Danças in Río de Janeiro. In 1992, she created the Panorama Festival, the most important performing arts festival in Rio de Janeiro, which she ran for fourteen years, and she has worked with the Redes de Desenvolvimento da Maré NGO since 2004.

Her artistic group has been characterised by choreographic techniques that challenge the limits of dance in order to explore questions such as poverty, history, violence and citizenship.

Artistic File:

• Creation - Lia Rodrigues
• Collaboration in creation - Leonardo Nunes, Carolina Repetto, Valentina Fittipaldi, Andrey da Silva, Larissa Lima, Ricardo Xavier, no name, David Abreu, Matheus Macena, Tiago Oliveira and Raquel Alexandre
• Collaboration - Felipe Vian, Karoll Silva and Clara Cavalcante
• Assistant in creation - Amalia Lima
• Playwright - Silvia Soter
• Artistic collaboration and images - © Sammi Landweer
• Lighting - Nicolas Boudier
• Stage Directors - Magali Foubert and Baptistine Méral
• Music - Extracts from traditional songs and dances from Kanak – New Caledonia
• Production - Chaillot - National Dance Theatre (Paris), Autumn Festival (Paris), CENTQUATREPARIS, MA scène nationale (Montbéliard), Künstlerhaus Mousonturm (Frankfurt am Main) im Rahmen des Festivals Frankfurter Position 2019, Kunstenfestivaldesarts (Brüssel), Teatro Municipal do Porto, Festival DDD - dias de dança (Porto, Matosinhos, Gaia), Theater Freiburg, Muffatwerk (Munich) and Lia Rodrigues Companhia de Danças

Approximate Duration: 70 minutes
Recommended Age: All ages