Grupo Corpo: stunning start to dance events at the Edinburgh Festival

Goodness, what a start to the Festival. The Brazilian super-troupe Grupo Corpo made their exuberant entrance on the Playhouse stage with a double bill that took us straight to their homeland. It began with the pulsing rhythms of Gilberto Gil, composer, activist and legendary master of Brazilian music, whose work combines traditional bossa nova and samba, with electronic modernism. The company’s dance style, similarly, is a blend of abstract contemporary and ethnic, with some classical hints thrown in. It’s easy on the eye but deceptively complex in its footwork and timing.

For the opening piece, Gil himself has re-imagined the score from some of his earlier compositions, which explains the title Gil Refazendo (‘Gil Re-made’), the piece having been commissioned as a celebration of his eightieth birthday. Choreography for both pieces was by the company’s resident dance-maker Rodrigo Pederneiras and although it may have lacked variation, it was stunning. From the moment the first dancer took the stage for a thrilling solo of impossibly arched backbends (is her head actually going to touch the floor?), precise footwork and rippling fluid arms that led lives of their own, to the full-on company finale, the movement never eased up for a second. 

Freusa Zechmeister’s costumes – women in white silk tops and shorts, men in pyjama-like trousers and tops – emphasised the loose-limbed abandon. Wheeling, the highest of high kicks, shimmying and rippling – so involved were they in their individual movement that it was 20 minutes in before any dancer even touched another. When they did, there was a lovely duet danced in underwear, with the woman swung high, back and forth. Oh, and there was a bit of a conga line as well...

With the second piece, Gira (Spin), we were right in tune with the tagline for this year’s Festival: ‘Rituals that unite us’. Brazilian culture is a vibrant mix of West African, Portuguese, religion and eroticism, ancient and contemporary, and perhaps less familiar here than it should be. Which is why Gira had a bit more to say for itself, evoking as it did the spirit of Umbanda, the Afro-Brazilian religion in which participants whirl and spin, freeing their bodies to unite with ancestral spirits. Here was ritual indeed. Women and men, all topless, whirled and leaped with abandon, their white flowing skirts swirling about them. There were more of the trademark backbends and thrust-back heads, arms outstretched; one solo to a muffled but insistent sax (music here was by Metå Metå) was gripping. It all ends in frenzy.

They’re such fabulous dancers to watch that you could forgive the fact that the choreography in both pieces was – well, a bit repetitive. On the other hand, another word for that might be hypnotic.

It was impossible not to be won over by this company. They’re handsome, fabulously fit, lithe and lovely, and the audience clearly adored them – they were on their feet almost before the music had stopped. The Director’s introduction to Festival events talks of ‘the importance of collective experiences’ and hopes that productions will ‘create an intensified sense of shared space, time and emotion’. I’d say Grupo Corpo got that about right.