Zona Franca review: An exuberant exhibition of hopes and dreams, with an undertow of darker memories

Zona Franca

O’Reilly Theatre

★★★★☆

The pristine white-floored stage of the O’Reilly Theatre offers a blank canvas for the opening night of this year’s Dublin Theatre Festival. Seventy-five minutes later it is covered with glitter, powder and small grey balloons, byproducts of the latest work by the Brazilian choreographer Alice Ripoll and her company Cia Suave. The scattered remains and shiny confetti stuck to sweaty bodies reflect Ripoll’s gloriously messy choreography, which can flip between slow-paced theatricality and breathlessly quick urban dance.

The stage is a free zone (zona franca) for the 10 dancers, who improvise within a barely perceptible, and a presumably loose, choreographic structure.

Zona Franca was in the process of creation during the uneasy transition late last year from President Jair Bolsonaro to the newly (re-)elected Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva, and Brazil’s political journey from far right to centre is palpable in the choreography, like a release valve. But although the prevailing mood is of joyousness, the exuberant exhibition of hopes and dreams also contains the undertow of darker memories.

[ Dublin Theatre Festival: Full coverage ]

Rhetoric-free, the dancing is powerful because of its ordinariness. Meandering periods of counterpointing gestures and images are drawn from everyday life: a couple kissing, a giggly group blowing raspberries on each other’s stomachs or an individual solemnly praying. These are often doused with equal measures of absurdity and irreverence, such as individual butt cheeks twerking in time to music. Individuals can at times be introspective, but they are never maudlin. In contrast, the short sections of pumped-up unison immediately create harmony and community, as the dancers revel in the joyous musical beats.

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This tension between individual and society is ever present. Ripoll questions the way individual judgment is clouded by the imposition of the collective. Is an individual dancer’s decision to join in the group dancing an act of blind acquiescence or of powerful comradeship?

The vocabulary is a free zone of styles, a mash of urban and folk dance, mime and vocalising. Brazilian contemporary dance has long incorporated urban and traditional styles; now it can also draw on the culture of internet borrowing, where steps can be copied from online videos and the obscure can become mainstream.

The urban-dance style passinho (meaning ”little step”) appears in Zona Franca as patterns of lightning-quick foot movements as the waist swivels from side to side. What started as a YouTube video made by a small group in the Jacaré region of Rio de Janeiro eventually featured in the opening ceremony of the Rio Olympics, in 2016, and earned the ultimate corporate endorsement of featuring in a Coca-Cola advertisement.

[ Zona Franca choreographer Alice Ripoll: ‘With each new dance we go one step more looking for freedom’ ]

This is now the pervasive free zone, not just for artistic creativity but for society. Everything can be observed, and that changes both individuals and their community. Ripoll turns down the opportunity for a slam-dunk unison finale, which would guarantee a standing ovation and payback for the 10 performers’ incredible physicality and commitment. Instead Zona Franca ends with a couple on a table at their most intimate, being recorded under the glare of lights from cameraphones held by the other performers.

Zona Franca continues at the O’Reilly Theatre, as part of Dublin Theatre Festival, until Saturday, September 30th