Lilo Weber
Neue Zürcher Zeitung
Zürich
August 2010

Bunnies carrot war

Around the hole everything is edge by Marcela Levi
Dance from Brazil - The Zürcher Theaterspektakel will also continue to trace the theatrical scene in South America. One of the most exciting discoveries is likely to be this year Marcela Levi.


There was a time when there was war. And it was so terrible that people still talk about it. Marcela Levi crawls across the stage as if it was a trench, and then she reads a book about a brutal battle of the birds in which blood flowed from the sky.

Sounding of war

Then comes Flávia Meirelles and brings the sound of war. From the delicate body of the dancer bursts of machine gun fire, sirens and missiles arise. She writhes, clicks, screams, rattles. And drops, carelessly twisted on the ground, the carrots bandoleer.

Two women play war. And they do that in the duo "around the hole everything is edge", by the dancer and choreographer Marcela Levi, without actually communicating with each other, but with full use of their bodies and of 200 carrots, which are shredded and scattered on the battlefield at the end. It's logical that one of them, Marcela Levi, repeatedly as woman in rabbit fur, means: in bunny mask, lustfulness on stage. This war is also, ultimately, a battle of resources. But carrots are both objects of desire and the means of appropriation: guns, belt bombs, grenades, knives, etc... And they remind us, of course, an anatomical fact which the two women dont have, but it sounds like an allusion. Would men be leading this war? Just scared little rabbits?

This would be too simple to be from Marcela Levi. The artist, born in 1973 in Rio de Janeiro, operates on different levels, such as content and form. And she worked for several years on a body language that disturbs the hierarchy between body and object. Thus, the carrots become, in "around the hole everything is edge, both the tool and the direct expression of the bodies. Marcela Levi has worked many times with photographers - and, for this piece, with the Brazilian writer and visual artist Laura Erber.

Normalization of violence

She thematizes not only violence, but normalization of everyday violence, and she does it with flash images, as in comics and animated films. But she always stops, suspends the sense of the piece and "around the hole everything is edge" appears as a painting in which a pattern is formed from the assembly of different parts. The duo reminds us at the same time the composition of a musical piece, with different voices, themes and variations, composed entirely of small parts that always revolve around the same themes: violence, war, fanaticism, self-effacement. An exciting work.