Zona Franca
With Zona Franca, dance company Cia Suave from the favelas of Rio de Janeiro brings a political and poetic total experience with exciting Brazilian dance and music styles in the pressure cooker. The vibrant eclectic mix resounds with untamed energy: the call for freedom from a young and contemporary Brazil, eager to rise from the ashes.
Passinho, with its ultra-fast footwork, the tight rhythms of dancinha, confident vogue, samba and hip-hop are favourites among Brazilian youth. Dance and music styles are the perfect means of expression to quench the thirst for life and express the desire for freedom. Alice Ripoll combines this eruption of zest for life with theatre and song to make the call of the new generation deafening.
We seem to find ourselves at an after-party, at that half-awake moment in the morning where everyone descends into their own world. But when the confetti balloons start popping and the party guests manage to challenge each other while twerking, one big pulsating ritual emerges that moves back and forth between vulnerability, anger, and joy. Zona Franca is an overtly political dance piece. It is about hope and optimism in a time of transition between Brazilian presidents Bolsonaro and Lula. How can a community develop in a damaged social context?
“(...) a powerful statement of contemporary dance embodied in contemporary bodies, leaving one to wonder how to define today's Brazil: a volcanic eruption of rhythms and identities trying to figure out what follows.” - Dance Art Journal
Alice Ripoll
Alice Ripoll (°Rio de Janeiro) was studying to be a psychoanalyst when she took a deviant turn at the age of 21. She felt curious about the possibilities of the body and movement research, so she decided to study dance. Alice graduated from the Angel Vianna’s school, an important center for dance and motor rehabilitation, and started to work as a choreographer.
Alice started directing and performed in a few pieces as well – mostly of herself. She has worked with dancers, actors and circus artists. Her work embraces contemporary dance and urban dance styles from Brazil. Through research, the work opens space for the dancers to transform the experiences and memories that live in each one, into images. Currently she’s directing two groups. Cia. REC and Cia. SUAVE.
Founded in 2009, Cia REC is a powerful group of dancers from the Favelas in Rio de Janeiro that elaborates and recreates contemporary art. Their work is on the threshold of dance and performance. It often questions the political and social situation in their home country. The experiences and memories of the dancers are used to create socially relevant performances that are not only aesthetically strong, but also leave a lasting impression on the audience. With Cia REC, Alice Ripoll created the performance aCORdo in 2017. In 2021, LAVAGEM premiered. Here, reality and fantasy mingle in a delirium that reminds us of an apocalyptic dream.
Cia. SUAVE began with the creation of Suave, which premiered at the Panorama Festival in 2014. Having as inspiration the passinho (short step), a new style of urban dance that derived from Rio de Janeiro’s funk, the show stands out for its unique energy, the quality of its performers and the refinement of the structure created by the choreographer. The second performance of the group, CRIA, premiered in 2017. Inspired by the Dancinha (little dance), a derivation from passinho dance, the performance explores a mixture of affection and sensuality through the interweaving of funk with contemporary dance.
In 2023, Zona Franca premiered at the Festival de Marseille. This creation weaves together contact dance, TikTok, Afro-house and passinhon. “Free zone”, freedom, is the central theme in Zona Franca.
