Guiherme Botehlo, a Brazilian from Sao Paulo where he was born in 1962, the son of a psychologist and an opponent of the regime, already an accomplice of the English DV8, and Caroline de Cornière, who trained at the CNDC in Angers, are partners in the Alias company, based in Geneva, and in the unbridled imagination of the creations that have made the Swiss group famous. In always unusual contexts - the set is essential for them, like in the cinema - from the walls with tropical wallpaper that ooze water in “Moving A Perhaps”, a place where a woman desperately tries to keep the things of life under control, to the house that explodes with aggressive energy, or rather marital violence, in “Contrecoup”, from which Pascal Magin made an exemplary film, mixing interiors and exteriors, awarded at Dance Screen 1999 at the “holy” workshop of “Mr Winter”. It is good to know that his journey of conquering a dance theatre full of surreal moods, a place of laid-back intimacy, starts from his engagement as a classically trained dancer in the company of the Grand Théâtre de Genève - at the time when it was directed by the Argentine Oscar Araiz - from which he broke away, feeling the discomfort of a constrictive shell, to found his own group in 1987, where he investigated the experiences of the dancers, in existential themes, in search of that deep and authentic meaning, balanced between neurosis and contradictions, which alone can give truth to movement, avoiding those exercises in style, perhaps very elegant, which seem aestheticizing and inauthentic compared to his desire for "content". His first work to be shown in Italy was “En manque” in 1994, about loneliness and couples, about the need to be loved – the common thread of dance and perhaps of the 2001 edition of the Rovereto festival – followed by “Moving A Perhaps” in Bologna and “On ne peut pas toujours être en apnée” in Polverigi, before “Mr Winter” this year in Ferrara and at the CRT in Milan, the story/s of the manager of a crazy shop selling sacred articles, with a profusion of Madonnas and crucified Christs of all sizes. A very Latin-American store that is also a bar and a newspaper reading corner and a catalyst for presences on the edge of the absurd, from street vendors to bums to pregnant women, fake and real, amidst continuous brawls between the owner and the clerk and his eager daughter. This, of the grotesque phase shift, is the chosen terrain of Botelho, researcher of still unexplored points of view, of penetrating and evocative images, of unusual perceptions, of pre-conscious emotions, of provocations aimed at the body through improvisation, and inventor with his interpreters of bittersweet and tragicomic theater pieces, where the word is not lacking - for each dancer in their own language - and where, at the same time, the dance is of excellent quality, in the personalization that each of the components of Alias puts into play with frankness and without fear of revealing themselves to the viewer. "Honesty and integrity" are the key words of Botelho's dance, woven with a thousand hidden stories, to "talk" about the "things of life" with the intelligent, and a little autobiographical, bodies of his dancers.
“L’odeur du voisin”
“A man who eats alone, at a restaurant, does not just absorb food”
G. Haldas
A reality in two times: through different atmospheres, characters follow one another, fragments of life captured from the unusual angle of everyday life. Then the image folds back onto a closed place that forces some of these characters into promiscuity. Thus another reality is created that has to do with the incessant coming and going of distance and proximity, with that slight gap that pushes reality into a strange familiarity. “Yes, look carefully at this image, turning your gaze to infinity, and you will see a type appear suitable for making a photocopy of it”.
