Laura Erber
Rio de Janeiro
March 2017

IRON MOUTH
a creaking of iron, hinges

Envelopes of the body offer an impression of unity and protection that the porousness of senses and the restlessness of nerves constantly torment and deny. If the body cannot be thought and lived as a structure enclosed in itself or an autarchic system, the senses of smell and hearing are the most pervasive, the ones that most intensely state the corporeity as an experience of irremediable crossings. One might close the eyes or avoid being touched, although it becomes a more complicated matter when we're exposed to sounds and smells that can be desired - the sirens' chant - or not - the moanings of the ailed ones. By articulating onstage a body-sweat guided by the sound - "boca de ferro" or "iron mouth" is also the name given to loudspeakers -, this piece by Marcela Levi and Lucía Russo faces the visual hegemony that, in the Western Culture, always tended to define and cast the bodily experience and its aestheticization. Here, the sound - in articulations equally intense as heteroclite - drives the mutations and collapses the subjects unity on the stage, thus producing a body that dances around its own hellish holes. Absorbing from the tecnobrega genre its most devilish part, performer Ícaro dos Passos Gaya beautifully incorporates the energy of desperation that once again gives the cards of losing oneself by means of successive movements of possession/dispossession. In a sort of mesmerizing vertigo, the body receives the spirals of a raucous sound along with its callings of urban and decayed nature, ensuing from a mystic- and mythless reality, yet it unveils its potency by suspending oppositions, becoming radically receptive to the penetration forces. As in Caravaggio, here the earthly drama is also a dramatic mass of undigestible forces, those that, even though we cannot elaborate, the body transpires and regurgitates, like the mad master of a tribe whose cult rules remain unknown to us. This way, we take part in this nervous dance of the body placed in exhaustion, as well as the exhaustion taken as an energy that displaces the symmetric schemes and confronts us to the vibrating intensity of vitalities accommodated within the impotency, of a sensitivity capable of welcoming the violence of nerves, they who are ever challenging an explosion of skin and a disarticulation of bones, producing onstage the spasms of a slacked and triumphing body, exhausted and reinvigorated, as well as fragile for having radically opened itself to the actions of its own forces.