Deborah Colker Dance Company in Dog Without Feathers at Southbank Centre

Deborah Colker Dance Company, Dog Without Feathers, Queen Elizabeth Hall, May 8

Attending Deborah Colker Dance Company’s performance of Dog Without Feathers at Southbank Centre is to be surrounded in more senses than one by the landscape and culture of Brazil, or more specifically by the landscape and culture of the state of Pernambuco on the north-east coast. The title comes from the poem, Cão Sem Plumas, written in 1950 by João Cabral de Melo Neto, a poet and diplomat born in Recife, where the Capibaribe River opens into the sea. 

‘The river 
was like a dog without feathers.’ *

As Southbank Centre’s Senior Programmer for Performance and Dance, Rupert Thompson, writes on the program sheet, ‘One of the key words in the poem by João Cabral…is “espesso”. Although there is no direct translation, it approximately means ‘thickness’, ‘heaviness’ and ‘viscosity’, and is central to the rich conjuring of life João Cabral achieves in the poem.’ The visceral effect on Colker when she read Cão Sem Plumas was immediate and she decided it would form the basis of her next creation. She visited the area with cinematographer Claudio Assis to place herself within the perspective of Melo Neto but through the filter of her own senses as she set out to recreate in another medium what Melo Neto had committed to paper. She subsequently developed a choreographic response using the film, folk music and fourteen dancers to build up a poetic language to explore ‘espesso’ in choreographic form, using the relationship of film to choreography as an eloquent proxy for the poetry; the vertical plane of the screen constantly informs the horizontal plane of the stage and vice versa. 

Dog Without Feathers opens with a filmed sequence of a landscape of dried mud with a little boy walking along a river bed towards the camera. Mud is everywhere in Melo Neto’s poem as both description and metaphor:

‘Through the landscape 
(it flowed)
of men planted in mud;
of houses of mud
planted on islands
congealed in mud;
a landscape of mud
and mud amphibians.’

Colker takes on the metaphor by caking her dancers in mud, transforming them both on the stage and in the film into the elements of river and mangroves — like the crabs and the herons — that emerge from Melo Neto’s words. Under Jorginho de Carvalho’s lighting, the dancers’ muddy bodies in Claudia Kopke’s muddy costumes create a unified aesthetic that keeps us involved in the landscape and in the culture as if we were there. Gringo Cardia’s wooden structures on either side of the stage become ‘the warehouses on the wharf’ and crowded favelas, with the dancers creating a sense of teeming life within overcrowded spaces by climbing on them and wriggling through them while the structures are moved and stacked up against each other. 

There is one difference, however. These male and female dance bodies are not ‘the men without feathers who wither even beyond their deepest rubble;’ they are powerful bodies that jump and turn and somersault with abundant strength and grace. Melo Neto’s poetry describes the tenuous quality of life and the abject poverty along the banks of the river as an effect of the vicissitudes of the environment and the politics of the city’s ‘cultured families’: 

Like the river
those men 
are like dogs without feathers.
(A dog without feathers
is more
than a dog that’s been stripped, 
is more
than a dog that’s been killed.

Colker’s film shows the harsh reality of the landscape she sees, but in choreographic terms the images from the stage are healthy, virile and sensual; we are easily transported into the dancers’ physical world without realising the paradox of the life they are portraying. Perhaps Colker is unwittingly evoking Melo Neto’s verbal agility but the choreographic conundrum remains. She writes, ‘I did not intend Cão Sem Plumas to be political, but it ended up being so, because of the content of the poem and the images on film’. There is no doubt that the eye of the poet and the eye of the camera converge in articulating the political stance, but the enjoyment of watching the performance mitigates the ‘challenge to human ignorance’ that Assis captures and Melo Neto so savagely decries. 

Notwithstanding, Dog Without Feathers is a striking cultural evocation of Brazil that clearly struck a chord with the audience. It’s been six years since Colker’s company was last in London and on the occasion of the current visit, Southbank Centre has made the welcome announcement of Colker as artist in residence. 

*From Richard Zenith’s translations of the poetry of João Cabral de Melo Neto, Education by Stone, Archipelago Books (2005)