The Electric Body of the Group Dançando com a Diferença

The Electric Body of the Group Dançando com a Diferença

Inside a bus, at night, on an avenue in Lisbon. Up ahead you can see Elsa, stretched out with her torso over the bus corridor, looking back. It is not clear whether she is sad, or simply thoughtful. Behind her, the window of the bus looks like a huge movie screen, and the lamps follow one another. The lights outside are warm, orange, and inside blue; it seems as if there are two worlds, one in front of the other. The voice of Clara Andermatt, one of Portugal's most respected choreographers, can be heard off-screen: "I think it's 50/50, completely. I can't see that difference, between the body, the soul, and the mind." 

Madeira Island, Portugal, is not one of the best places there is to be born handicapped. It's an island in the North Atlantic with 270,000 inhabitants, so rugged that it becomes difficult to walk 100 meters that doesn't end in a slope. But when 'The Electric Body' starts, the Dançando com a Diferença Group has already left. 

The Grupo Dançando com a Diferença is a contemporary dance company that brings together dancers with and without disabilities. But it would not be possible to make these people known within an island. The founder of the Group, Henrique Amoedo, is Brazilian, founder of the inclusive groups Roda Viva and Mão na Roda, in S. Paulo, Brazil. The choreographers who created the Group's repertoire are among the most respected in Portugal and Brazil: Clara Andermatt, Rui Horta, Ivonice Satie, and Henrique Rodovalho. 

And the dancers: Toninho, for example, is a person who doesn't fit in his house where a wheelchair can't get in; Telmo doesn't fit in the environment where he was born, where children begged for alms and dived to catch pounds thrown into the sea by foreigners in search of the 'exotic'. Viviana even says 'the world out here is getting tighter and tighter, but the dance world is not'. 

We're in Moscow, in Viana do Castelo, at the shows in Brazil.

The group is hilarious on the road, there is nothing like a disability to make a good joke. The group doesn't fit on the island, you see, but maybe it doesn't even fit in a western culture that created all its canons on the model of the Ideal Man, and not on the reality of man. Rui Horta explains this idea better than anyone else in a sequence in a parallel edition where Portuguese soldiers, German Nazis, Olympic athletes, and dancers from the group dancing with the difference, seem to dance the same choreography: 'Before the revolution (of April 25, 1974) the body was a dead body, immobile, I only start dancing because the 25th of April happens. The Olympic Corps itself defended an idea of state. In classical dance, the movements were technical, stylized. The contemporary language is broader, more democratic, and deals exactly with this idea of body that exists, that existed, but mainly with the Body itself.  

One of the last images is of Barbara. She is 13 years old, bald, and convinced that she is the 'second best dancer in the group'. We can't quite make out what Barbara says, as she runs her hand over her belly. 'Is it in her belly, the dance?' we ask. Barbara smiles, 'no, it's in the whole body, the body feels the whole dance'... Then we ask Barbara to teach us how to dance, and she accepts. Her movements are precise, disciplined, her explanations clear. Suddenly we doubt, maybe there is another way to perceive the world, other than this one that exclusively uses logic. 

Because everyone is born with the body that fits, the rest is what you make of it, it's electricity. We are living in the best time in the world, when every body has a man inside, when you feel the world with all its bodies. 'The Electric Body' is like life, it makes you want to laugh and cry, sometimes both at the same time. 

Maybe tomorrow Toninho will go back to his house, which feels more like a prison. But this documentary ends where it begins, in transit. Living is violence, there is nothing more violent than a heart that beats for a while to rest for another. A body only comes home at the end, when the electricity goes out.

Genre: Documentary

Duration: 80 minutesCountry: Portugal

Original Language: PortuguêsYear: 2008

Producer: Die4films

Directed by: Filipe Ferraz

Production: Marta León