Barbara Raubert
SusyQ Magazine
Madrid
SEP-OCT 08

Hogaza

We offer a reflection on the work of this Brazilian creator who begins to ascend in international alternative scene.

Her body is an intervenient object where pure beauty and fine brutality give hands on a surprising visual poem. Fruit of a mind that questions the things status quo while masking herself in an absolutely neutral face attitude, the Brazilian choreograph succeeds in conferring a greater protagonism to her depersonalized action. Forceful like that is Marcela Levi in her "scenic works", although when speaking outside she seems slight and near. But in the scene that's another thing. In the cube where everything is possible, the force of her will to express cannot be contained nor be formated by any cloth piece besides her own skin and thus, all naked, she raises herself like a terrorist of the present with the inexorable asseveration of human body's temporality, her battlefield, that she displays without shame or modesty. Her ascending career, with the pieces Massa de Sentidos and In-organic, is conquering lands. After her passage by Complicitats festival, in Barcelona, the cycle Solos para un espacio blanco, at Laboral Escena in Gijón last June, and her recent participation in the Cocoa festival, in Buenos Aires, her name is becoming more and more familiar in the international alternative scene.

Halfway between dance - the body as weapon and simultaneously as battle area -, theater - with textual and formal narratives - and sculpture - with the use of external elements applied to her body to transform and recreate it -, these "scenic" pieces that intend to focus our glance towards the edges between the interior and the outside of the things, the bodies and the facts, like with the Russian dolls of one of her pieces, have many references but are totally unique. At In-organic, eight hairpins penetrate her mouth from her closed lips towards the outside, creating a kind of metallic muzzle that even prevents the speech and shout, whereas a pearl necklace 25 meters in length goes around her until surrounding and fitting her naked body, from the lower abdomen to the chest, transforming itself into an as precious as cruel cage-dress. Like in Massa de Sentidos, this fine ferocity choreograph maintains the same type of dis-located relation with the objects that are part of her props, retaking the idea of Duchamp's objet trouvé as a disorientation experiment and its consequent sense reconstruction, which allows us to obtain new perspectives to old facts.

The displacement producted by Levi forces a strangeness in relation with all that surrounds us at the same time as, while following the same models of abstraction, it highlights parallelisms which exist between apparently distant facts, like the bread paste and the human body, in Massa de Sentidos, or death and feast in In-organic, two of the three parts of its trilogy on the external body and the internal body, still to finish.