Para que o Céu não caia (So the sky doesn’t fall)

Based on the shaman Davi Kopenawa, from Yanomami culture, Lia Rodrigues makes reference to the myth of the end of the world: a ritual dance where ten dancers use their rhythms to evoke the need to protect their Amazonian forest from ecological disasters. A very organic piece where the audience is on the same level and where flour, coffee and turmeric are sprinkled on the dancers’ bodies to symbolise ruined nature.

Born in São Paulo, Lia Rodrigues was part of the Maguy Marin company in Paris. On her return to Brazil, she founded the Lia Rodrigues Companhia de Danças in Rio de Janeiro which offers activities, dance laboratories, productions, classes and rehearsals throughout the year. In 1992 she created the Panorama Festival, which she ran for fourteen years and which has become the most important event of its kind in Rio de Janeiro.

The company has been creating educational and artistic activities for Rio de Janeiro's Maré slums since 2004, in collaboration with the NGO Redes de Desenvolvimento da Maré. It was on the basis of this collaboration that the Centro de Artes da Maré was established in 2009 and the Escola Livre de Danças da Maré created in October 2011. Throughout her forty-year artistic and professional career, the choreographer Lia Rodrigues has devoted herself not just to creation and artistic practice, with commissions and performances in the world's main capitals, but also to teaching, organising workshops and seminars around the globe. She believes in the synergy between art and social processes and combines activism with utopias.

The show includes several related activities: Art as a tool for social transformation, Lia Rodrigues, Àngels Margarit and Eduardo Bonito, Reports on Lia Rodrigues, Body workshop with dancers from the Lia Rodrigues company and Para que o céu não caia, with Roger Bernat.