Volmir Cordeiro

Volmir Cordeiro is a Brazilian choreographer, dancer and researcher. After theatre studies, he collaborated with Brazilian choreographers Alejandro Ahmed, Cristina Moura and Lia Rodrigues before joining the “Essais” training course in 2011 at the Centre national de danse contemporaine d'Angers, directed by Emmanuelle Huynh. He has participated in pieces by Xavier Le Roy, Emmanuelle Huynh, Vera Mantero, Nadia Lauro & Zenna Parkins, Lâtifa Laabissi and Rodrigo García. After a first cycle of solos (Ciel, Inês and Rue with Washington Timbó), he created the duet Époque (2015) with Marcela Santander Corvalán, L'œil la bouche et le reste (2017), a show for four dancers that is presented as an exhibition, Trottoir (2019) presented at the CN D as part of the Festival d'Automne in Paris, and the duet Métropole (2021) with the percussionist Philippe Foch. He is the author of Ex-Corpo, published by Éditions du CN D, a work devoted to the figures of marginality in contemporary dance and the concept of the artist-researcher. In 2022, with Erosion, a new piece for the dancers of the CCN Ballet de Lorraine in Nancy, he will revisit the Ballets suédois, a Dadaist troupe that was based at the Théâtres de Champs-Élysées between 1920 and 1925.

Making serious funny
“Shift, step past, twist, undo. Stumble. With joy and horror. Exaggerate. Make room for comedy. Come with props, make-up and costumes. Compose an act: a short scene that is worked on every day for a week – collectively – and which is addressed to all audiences. The aim is to make people laugh at the serious. To propose a troubling body-catastrophe. To do this, you need a certain practice of disorder, disobedience and the wisdom of the multiple. You have to choose a single function that runs through the whole scene. You also have to work on an emotion (joy, horror, fear, tenderness). Stay modest and never be satisfied with overly simple solutions. Play with a self-formed situation. Task: to create a scene-figure-sponge, thirsting for imagination and in whom a taste for questioning authority is welcome.”

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