Volmir Cordeiro is a Brazilian-born dancer and choreographer currently working on a project at Les Laboratoires d’Aubervilliers since august 2015, which he will be incorporating into his doctoral research on marginal figures in dance which he is currently pursuing in the department of Dance at the University of Paris-8.
Volmir Cordeiro is a Brazilian-born dancer and choreographer currently working on a project at Les Laboratoires d’Aubervilliers since august 2015, which he will be incorporating into his doctoral research on marginal figures in dance which he is currently pursuing in the department of Dance at the University of Paris-8.

Via staged gestural re-enactment, his research project at Les Laboratoires will be concerned with interrogating the modes of analysis of certain choreographic works, specifically the body of works in his artwork-thesis. What is at stake in this project is a shift from writing to gesture through re-enactment of the analysed work on stage, in order to complicate the relations between description and performativity. Formal modes and creative procedures tied to dance work are used in order to apprehend the shift from ‘viewed work’ to ‘lived work’, as part of a project that pursues the power of words in relation to dance.

The aim of the project is to further explore the perception and reading of a gesture through its fictional, physical and sensory embodiment, through both writing and the lived experience of the body on stage. The life and experience of the ‘studio’ configure a particular approach to works, mystifying them thanks to the forceful enigma articulated with the changes tied to shifts in medium.

It will involve viewing the video of the unfolding work, transcribing it and experiencing it physically, writing and then re-writing the experience, to the point of making this process a sort of procedure through critical intensification of the dancer’s body vis-à-vis the choreographic work. One of the works in Volmir Cordeiro’s corpus is O samba do crioulo doido by Brazilian choreographer Luiz de Abreu which grounds this approach in which the gesture of a work is experienced as a strategy for interpretation and analysis.