TOT

Marcela Levi & Lucía Russo / Improvável Produções (Brazil) - 3 against 2: Psycho Tropics

What happens when the faun from Nijinsky's iconic ballet L'Après-midi d'un Faune turns up in Vogue dance? And what if Brazilian rhythms inject the Egyptian Isis myth? Improvável Produções steers towards a clash rhythms with an unparalleled creativity. These times are crying out for it.

The polyrhythm of 3 against 2 is omnipresent in both electronic music and Afro-Brazilian music. Additionally, within feminist discourse, polyrhythmics is a way of visualising rhythms of traditionally ignored groups and questioning histories written from the point of view of those in power.

3 against 2: Psycho Tropics, a new creation by Improvável Produções, explores the coexistence of different rhythms in a way that does not lead to separatism, with the tropical rainforest as its source of inspiration. According to indigenous thinker Ailton Krenak, the tropical rainforest is a web of intertwined lives. The tropical rainforest whispers myths, pulses and dispels mirages. It is a crossroads, the epitome of polyrhythmics.

The piece depicts an encounter between the faun of the forests and Nijinsky's ballet with old-way vogue style and the ancestral Afro-Brazilian Oxumarê dance. The Old Way vogueing style draws on Egyptian hieroglyphics and breathes linear design and symmetry. Similarly, Nijinsky's L'Après-midi d'un faune is influenced by Greek friezes, Egyptian and Assyrian frescoes; in terms of eroticism, all these influences are not inferior to each other.

This makes 3 against 2: Psycho Tropics an exercise in imagination that tries to intertwine distances. Voices of traditionally ignored groups also resound loudly, questioning history as it has been written so far. Or, as creators Marcela Levi and Lucia Russo say: "Time to dedicate ourselves to exposure to different rhythms, to collecting fragments, indications, questions, texts, images, dances, sounds, intensities, moods and voices."

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