After the end of the Bolsonaro regime, a new optimism is emerging.
Arnd Wesemann discovers a rediscovered future in the works of Alice Ripoll, Davi Pontes, and Wallace Ferreira.

Brazil, as the fourth-largest democracy in the world, experienced its president, Jair Bolsonaro, as a beast. From 2019 until December 2022, his far-right policies targeted the restriction of rights for wage earners and minorities. On a grand scale, Bolsonaro showed contempt for women, any form of queerness, any form of non-white skin, Indigenous people, the press, and environmental protection. Meanwhile, state resources and public assets were privatized to the benefit of a few major economic players. With devastating consequences: Bolsonaro broke all records in deforestation of the rainforest. He viewed the pandemic as a conspiracy against himself, a plot against him as a milestone in the global rise of neofascism and against his friend Donald Trump, who eventually granted him asylum in Florida. By 2022, Brazil’s wealth had become concentrated among a historically low number of beneficiaries. The general population had no money left. Famine prevailed, armed robberies and rampant poverty spread not only in remote regions but also in megacities like Rio de Janeiro and São Paulo—at the expense of public education and healthcare.

Fear and Poverty—The Capital of the Right

The consequence: poverty and fear make people ignorant. Both fear and poverty are the capital of the right, says Alice Ripoll, a choreographer and trained psychologist who discovered dance during her studies and went on to found two companies in Rio de Janeiro—first Companhia REC in 2009, then Companhia SUAVE in 2014. She describes what the end of Bolsonaro felt like: as if the members of her company were "returning from war," "like a reunion after a war," "as if we were coming from a war zone..."—a war against the poor and minorities, where there were no resources, no aid, no infrastructure for self-help.

A Chaotic Drawing from Everything

Her latest work, Zona Franca, emerged from this shock. Through dance, it now feels like an explosively foaming liberation from a clogged bottleneck. Alice Ripoll says, "Dance worked like a kind of medicine and almost saved me. It has become my personal mission to convey this connection and healing power to others as well." Says the psychologist. But the choreographer in her is focused on something else: small steps. They are called "Passinho" in the favelas of Rio de Janeiro. A dance of the youth, made up of infinitely many fragments yet considered the only purely Brazilian urban dance style—a wild sampling of steps, regardless of their origin, stolen from the vastness of YouTube and folklore, a "Dancinha," a mix of funk, samba, hip-hop, vogue, Afrohouse, Sabala, TikTok, and dances from northern and northeastern Brazil such as Pisadinha and Brega Funk. This style blend feels like a free trade zone, a "Zona Franca," where no royalties are paid and no taxes are collected—a chaotic drawing from everything, a magnificent chaos, which in Brazil is also called "Zona Franca."

Something else is fascinating: the explosive yet melancholic joy of togetherness among the ten dancers on stage—colorful, bright, radiant, loud, greedy, hungry, full of energy. It is like a moment when—after COVID-19 and Bolsonaro, after hunger and oppression, after endless police operations in the slums of Rio—the survivors realize that they have survived, that their dignity is no longer languishing in the subjunctive but has reawakened beyond all imposed rules. With a dance that adheres to no academic or formal style but rather feels like a liberation from traditions and schools. Perhaps this is what makes Zona Franca so contagious—these eternally driving rhythms and exalted bodies, this sense of a precisely controlled flow of liberated bodies by Alice Ripoll—as a danced utopia. Because it remains one. Naturally, the subsequent government under Luiz Lula da Silva is struggling to even halfway repair what was destroyed in four years under Bolsonaro’s regime that is now indicted for attempted coup. But that does not concern this closely-knit troupe, which was originally founded as an educational initiative, received funding only as such, and has nurtured and empowered the already practiced street dance in the neighborhood with such pride and energy that Alice Ripoll and her troupe, with their three productions so far—Zona Franca, Suave, and Cria—are now on a world tour, from Kyoto and London to Zurich and Munich.

Dance of Self-Defense

With a similar power, this duo also liberated themselves: Davi Pontes and Wallace Ferreira, two queer dancers, also from Rio de Janeiro. Both are also visual artists, and their main opponent inadvertently became Jair Bolsonaro, whose often-imitated trademark, the finger-gun gesture, three fingers forming a pistol, was openly directed against people like them—out of racist, seemingly evangelical hatred toward those who live differently. Bolsonaro was not yet in power when the hunt began against the Queermuseu in Porto Alegre, which was accused of promoting so-called gender ideology. Soon, trans actress Renata Carvalho and visual artist Wagner Schwartz felt the same persecution. Schwartz fled the country after the video of his suddenly criminalized performance La Bête went viral. In this atmosphere, in 2018, Wallace Ferreira and Davi Pontes came together during their bachelor's degree and founded what they call the "Dance of Self-Defense."

Of course, they did not mean Capoeira or another combat-oriented dance art, but rather a strategy to survive in their country, which, in the name of freedom, took away their freedom to live as who they are: artists, Black, and queer. That same year, they created their first joint work, Repertório N.1, in the small Galeria Vermelho, just two weeks after Bolsonaro's election. Their rhythmically stomping performance as two naked artists was not public but was shown in a filmed version—including the scene in which Wallace Ferreira raises the finger-gun, appropriating the president's weapon.

Step by Step, They Hammer on the Ground

Since then, their work has intensively engaged with questions of appropriation and the status of the Black population—the so-called minority—primarily with the help of American dance scholar André Lepecki and Brazilian artist and philosopher Denise Ferreira da Silva. Well-founded theory met practice in 2021 with the continuation of their self-defense trilogy, Repertório N.2., Pontes and Ferreira enter the space naked, wearing only black socks and sneakers, marching in sync. The stage floor vibrates as they hammer down step by step, awakening the audience in this echo chamber, holding a voguing pose, staring intensely at the spectators, tense, breathing heavily before continuing their march before an audience that sometimes flinches in discomfort, sometimes flirtatiously engages in the interaction of gazes.

By 2023, when their Repertório N.3 premiered, Bolsonaro was already history. It is a liberated, therefore even more radical performance—with their bodies now in visibly upright posture, the "precious version," as they now march in expensive white Nike sneakers, freely moving among the audience, penetrating their space, communicating more agilely, as if a burden had been lifted. Instead of Bolsonaro's finger-gun, they now smile at their audience with a heart-shaped hand gesture, as if artistic self-defense had finally succeeded—the regained right to a free existence in a publicly protected museum or theater space.

By Arnd Wesemann

Zona Franca is presented by International DANCE Festival München in cooperation with Münchner Volkstheater.
Zona Franca and Repertório N.2 and N.3 are supported by Goethe-Institut.

Credits:

Co-production: Festival de Marseille, Festival d’Automne à Paris, Charleroi Danse, RomaEuropa, Tandem Scène nationale, tanzhaus nrw, Teatro Municipal do Porto, Julidans, Les Mécènes DanseAujourdhui