music: Caetano Veloso and José Miguel Wisnik
Grupo Corpo celebrates 30 years of uninterrupted activities since 1975 with Onqotô, a choreography about human perplexity and inexorable pettiness before the vastness of the universe. The idea for the soundtrack written by Caetano Veloso and José Miguel Wisnik came up in the middle of a well-humored discussion about competing versions for the creation of the Universe. Wisnik and Veloso imagined the Big-Bang set against an ironic maxim coined by Nelson Rodrigues, the greatest Brazilian dramatist and sports commentator, to express the importance of the most traditional soccer match in Brazil: "the first Fla-Flu started forty minutes before the void." So they jokingly thought of the great primeval explosion whose English name came to epitomize the Anglo-Saxon primacy in the scientific world that validates Anglo-Saxon cultural world supremacy being superseded by Rodrigues' maxim, taken as proof of the unmistakably Brazilian character of the Cosmos in its conception. Then they wrote 42 minutes of instrumental tunes and songs for the soundtrack, building a sequence of rhythmic, melodic and poetical dialogues between those two "competing" primal scenes and, moreover, stressing the feeling of helplessness before the universe that is inherent to human condition.
The choreography by Rodrigo Pederneiras contrasts and juxtaposes verticality and horizontality, chaos and order, roughness and tenderness, and volume and sparseness, moving along and sometimes going against the soundtrack, unveiling underlying meanings, melody, and rhythms.
Paulo Pederneiras designed a curtain wall with vertically stretched dark leaden rubber straps, creating a concave space that implies at times a cross section of the globe, or a hollow, or a black hole, or nothingness or the primeval void. The stage lighting designed by Paulo Pederneiras makes reference to soccer stadiums with a series of spotlights attached to the metallic structure that sustains the curtain wall.
Costume designer Freusa Zechmeister turns the dancers into an anonymous mass that blends with the scenery, allowing thus that choreography and scenery come to the fore in their full three-dimensionality.