Dance : Brazil’s Grupo Corpo Makes West Coast Debut

Rodrigo Pederneiras is the Jiri Kylian of Brazil: a choreographer drawn to imposing scores and themes who works in a ballet-based style energized with transfusions from modern dance.

Pederneiras’ Grupo Corpo Dance Company--an 18-member ensemble based in Belo Horizonte--made its West Coast debut at UCLA’s Royce Hall over the weekend, dancing four of his large-scale plotless creations, including the new, full-evening “A Criacao.” The earliest works on view (“Preludios” from 1985 and “Cancoes” from 2 years later) proved little more than public declarations of sensitivity, but the most recent pieces revealed a distinctive vision rooted in the acceptance of human frailty.

No choreographer, however, ever made frailty so aggressive. In “Missa do Orfanato” (1989), he launches assault troops of the halt and the lame: masses of dancers endlessly repeating a litany of pleading hands, bobbing heads, hunching shoulders, twisting torsos, limping walks and despairing slumps to the floor.

In ballet terms, you’d call it character dancing--but Pederneiras turns it into incredibly forceful nonstop unison activity. The way he relentlessly Mickey Mouses the music (Mozart’s early “Orphanage” Mass) scarcely gives his dancers a chance to breathe.

This is Grupo Corpo at its boldest and least prettified, in contrast to the classical platitudes of the generic “Preludios” (piano ballet) and “Cancoes” (lieder ballet) on the same Friday program.

In doggedly working through Chopin’s 24 Preludes, Op. 28, Pederneiras adopts the pointed toes, linear extensions and lyrical flow of ballet, although intriguing gestural ideas, the use of shared weight as a motif and, in particular, group counterpoint herald his more distinctive later achievements.

Step-note relationships remain literal throughout “Preludios,” and Grupo Corpo has the bad luck to be dancing it just after New York City Ballet offered local audiences perhaps the most sublime Chopin ballet of the late 20th Century: Jerome Robbins’ “Dances at a Gathering.”

With its focus on small groups, the conventionally elegiac “Cancoes” showcases individual talents within Grupo Corpo, especially the statuesque Carmen Purri in an acrobatic trio and both Miriam Pederneiras and Werner Glik in the final duet.

Set to Richard Strauss’ “Four Last Songs,” the work expresses its allegiance to contemporary ballet in swirling, gymnastic duets but incorporates enough group floor action to qualify as modern dance. Sometimes it even tries to combine these influences, as when women roll on the floor in extension during the third section. True fusion never occurs, however.

The two-part “A Criacao” (on Saturday) finds Pederneiras beating against his limits and sometimes breaking through, as he takes on Haydn’s mighty “Creation” oratorio and tries to instill new relevance.

In the first half, he seemed content to provide a characteristically propulsive and fussy dance equivalent of the score. But when Adam and Eve enter, so does a dimension of bitter irony, and Pederneiras even dares to comment on the music.

Uriel’s final recitative in the oratorio may be the source of Pederneiras’ approach, since it holds a veiled warning to Adam and Eve: “Oh happy pair, happy for evermore if vain delusion lead you not astray to want more than you have and know more than you should!”

Well, of course, men and women long ago succumbed to exactly that “vain delusion.” So, instead of Eden, Pederneiras shows us unhappy and even ridiculous humans consumed with wanting more than they have and knowing more than they should. This idea occasionally leads him to wanton excesses of his own. For example, the excruciatingly bumptious and even vulgar choreography for Christina Purri and Rodrigo Silva, set to some of the most subtly rapturous vocal music Haydn composed.

Elsewhere, however, “A Criacao” deepens the implications of Haydn’s masterpiece without violating its spirit. And, along the way, Pederneiras even finds a place for dancing on pointe: a section contrasting the florid unreality of a 19th-Century-style pas de deux (danced by Alessandra Papini and Alexandre Vasconcelos) with the slow, painful movement of a troubled modern couple (Regina Advento and Rodrigo Silva).

Like Kylian, Pederneiras avoids toe shoes except in a parodistic context. He wants his dancers grounded and recognizably contemporary. He’s well served. In its ethnic variety, technical power and inexhaustible stamina, Grupo Corpo makes a spectacular vehicle for Pederneiras’ growing international importance.