Atravessemos! - Portrait de la ville de São Paulo is part of the series of city portraits developed by Emmanuelle Huynh and Jocelyn Cottencin since 2016.
A journey through gestures, movements and stories, of a monster city, a river... 21 million inhabitants, over 150,000 hectares of surface area. An urban expanse. An endless variation of greys. Communities. Fractures. Dances. Music.
During a residency in September 2022, 10 artists from the Pontifical University of São Paulo and 9 artists from the Dance Performance Workshop at the Beaux-Arts de Paris shared their daily lives, memories, history and fiction. The city's neighbourhoods and sites - Avenida Paulista, Praça de Sé, Quartier Liberdade, Minhocão, Parque da Agua Branca, Villa Lina Bobardi, Casa do Povo, Museu da Imigraçao Japonesa, etc. - were the group's terrain of action and habitation, through workshops and performances. With the election of Jair Bolsonaro in 2018, Brazil experienced an extraordinary political shift that was part of a general movement of withdrawal, nationalism and populism. The residency took place just before the elections that brought Lula back to power (January 2023).
This experience produced and crystallised forms that will be reactivated during the installation-film-perfomance at Chaillot - Théâtre national de la Danse. Each performer will then be able to take on the role of his or her Brazilian partner or passer-by, to bear witness to the relationship between space/memory/architecture, and make visible the encounter in a cartography of shared experiences. The notion of the border - whether symbolic, psychic, geographical or identity-based - will be the thread running through this fourth portrait of a city that powerfully conveys all the contradictions and tensions of contemporary society, but which also has a highly singular relationship with the body, hospitality, dance and music.
Practical info
Théâtre national de Chaillot
1, place du Trocadéro et du 11-Novembre
75116 Paris
Tuesday 21 May at 7pm
Free admission
