Looking Back: Company History
Artistic Director Paulo Pederneiras
The contemporary Brazilian dance company Grupo Corpo was founded in 1975 in Belo Horizonte, Brazil and debuted its first work, Maria Maria, the very next year. Featuring original music by Milton Nascimento, a script by Fernando Brandt and choreography by the Argentine Oscar Araiz, the ballet would go on to spend six years on stage and tour fourteen countries. But even though the piece was an immediate critical, popular and commercial success, the group’s distinctive artistic identity, its long term popularity and its artistic achievements have been the fruits of a long, arduous journey. As a result, the group started operating in its own premises from 1978.
While the success of Maria Maria was still reverberating throughout Brazil and in various European and Latin American countries, Grupo Corpo (literally Body Group in English) never stopped working, staging no less than six productions between 1976 and 1982. In the first phase of the group’s existence, the influence of Araiz, who in 1980 would write O Último Trem, was evident in varying degrees in the dance troupe’s work. However, the company’s distinctive features and personality were chiefly moulded by Paulo Pederneiras, the man responsible for sets and lighting the group’s performances and its artistic direction and the dancer Rodrigo Pederneiras, who left the stage in 1981 to assume the role of full time choreographer.
In 1985, the company launched what would be its second great success: Prelúdios, a theatrical piece incorporating twenty four Chopin preludes interpreted by pianist Nelson Freire. The show debuted to public and critical acclaim at the First International Dance Festival of Rio de Janeiro and would cement the group’s reputation in the world of contemporary Brazilian dance.
Grupo Corpo then entered a new phase, establishing its own unique theatrical language and choreography. Starting with an erudite repertoire featuring the works of Richard Strauss, Heitor Villa Lobos and Edward Elgar, among others, the company began combining classical technique with a contemporary re reading of popular Brazilian dance forms. This would become the group´s trademark.
In 1989 the company debuted Missa do Orfanato, a complex theatrical reading of Mozart’s Missa Solemnis k.139. Almost operatic in dimensions, this ballet became such an aesthetic triumph that, nearly two decades later, it remains in the company´s repertoire.
The group underwent a radical transformation three years later with the production of 21. This ballet confirmed the uniqueness of Rodrigo Pederneiras’s choreography and the unmistakable persona of the dance troupe. Utilizing the singular sounds of Brazilian instrumental group Uakti, as well as ten themes composed by Marco
Antônio Guimarães, 21 leaves behind the group´s preoccupation with technical form and sees it taking apart melodies and rhythms in order to explore their underlying ideas. The decision to once again use specifically composed scores – a mark of the group´s first three shows in the 1970s – allowed it to further explore the language of popular Brazilian dance.
In the work that followed, Nazareth (1993), Rodrigo Pederneiras’s fascination with traversing the worlds of both popular and erudite music found a perfect opportunity for fuller expression. Inspired by the verbal games of Brazilian literary icon Machado de Assis (1839-1908) and by the works of Ernesto Nazareth (1863-1934), a seminal figure in the formation of Brazilian popular music, the work was scored by composer and literary theorist José Miguel Wisnik. Though built on a solid, classical foundation, the production brought together in good humored fashion the light hearted and sensual elements inherent in Brazilian popular dances. The partnership of Grupo Corpo with contemporary authors has been such a success that scores composed especially for the company have become the norm, and each score has inspired a new creation.
Beginning in the mid 1990s, Grupo Corpo intensified its international touring. Between 1996 and 1999, it was the resident dance company of the Maison de la Danse in Lyon, France. Several of the group´s creations (Bach, Parabelo and Benguelê) were first staged in Europe over this period.
Today, having created 36 choreographies and given more than 2,300 performances, the Brazilian dance company maintains ten ballets in its repertoire and gives 70 performances a year in places as distinctive as Iceland and South Korea, the United States and Lebanon, Italy and Singapore, the Netherlands and Israel, France and Japan, Canada and Mexico.
The minimalism of Philip Glass (Sete ou Oito Peças para um Ballet, 1994); the vigorous pop and urban sounds of Arnaldo Antunes (O Corpo, 2000); the primordial experimentalism of Tom Zé (Santagustin and, with Wisnik, Parabelo, 1997); the African sensibility of João Bosco (Benguelê, 1998); the metaphysical verse of Luís de Camões and Gregório de Mattos with the light touch of Caetano Veloso and Wisnik (Onqotô, 2005); the rootsy modernity of Lenine (Breu, 2007 and Triz, 2013); the sound diversity of Moreno, Domenico and Kassin (Ímã, 2009); the contemporary vision of Martin Codax’s medieval songs by Carlos Núñez and José Miguel Wisnik (Sem Mim, 2011): Grupo Corpo has drawn on all of these elements and more to produce shows of a very diverse character – cerebral, cosmopolitan, primitive, existential, tough – while always keeping in sight the company’s distinctive traits.
