Bruno Beltrão & Grupo de Rua: Crackz

The Brazilian choreographer Bruno Beltrão has the unique talent of reflecting reality in the abstract, while at the same time making the abstract concrete. With his company Grupo de Rua (Street Group), founded in 1996 in Niterói, near Rio de Janeiro, he became famous for his danced deconstruction of hip-hop. While hip-hop relies primarily on individual virtuosity, Beltrão creates high complex collective choreographies for his company with which he takes over the theater stage. In H2(2005) and H3 (2008), unique combinations of minimalistic solos and tumultuous group sequences, he was able to achieve his international breakthrough. He was awarded New York’s prestigious Bessie Award for H3. Beltrão now presents the German premiere of a new work.

In CRACKz, Beltrão examines art in the digital age as the result of a long process of web-based recycling, downloading, remixing, and sharing. Without providing any aesthetic guidelines, Beltrão asked his dancers to search the Internet for choreographic material and to make selections from what they found. Based on this repertoire of “gestures created by people,” he develops his new work as a dance piece without a national location, a nomadic experiment using web-archived movements between popular culture and the avant-garde.