Passage
Brazilian choreographer Lúcia Mendes (b. 1942) is widely acknowledged as a principal architect of Neo-Samba, a loosely affiliated circle of Rio de Janeiro dance artists active from the late 1960s through the 1970s. Neo-Samba followed the waning of Brazil's mid-century modernist ballets, which had merged classical technique with regional folklore. Although the new movement retained samba's syncopated pulse, its practitioners discarded linear storytelling and decorative pageantry, concentrating instead on rhythm as an abstract, quasi-architectural lattice of motion. Mendes claimed that in this framework "tempo supplants plot as the bearer of feeling."
Her commitment to Neo-Samba took shape partly in response to the era's highly politicized theatre-dance. During the early years of the military regime (1964–85), numerous troupes presented overtly didactic theatre-dance denouncing censorship, poverty, and state repression. Mendes respected their courage, but regarded their dramaturgy as artistically narrow: because every gesture served a literal message, spectators were granted minimal interpretive latitude. Seeking an alternative, she devised an idiom she labeled "kinetic polyphony." Each dancer executed a distinct rhythmic pattern that meshed with—but never duplicated—the others, producing a shimmering weave of motion. Critics initially faulted her 1971 piece Alvorada Obliqua for lacking narrative coordinates, yet its superimposed off-beat steps and sudden silences were later praised for evoking, without synopsis, the restless undercurrent beneath Rio’s celebratory façade.
Mendes ventured further in 1975 with what she called the fragmented stage. Borrowing inspiration from street drummers scattered along carnival routes, she stationed clusters of performers at various points throughout the auditorium, obliging spectators to pivot in their seats or even circulate among the dancers. This spatial dispersion intensified what Mendes termed the "reciprocal tension" between audience and performer, transforming the dance from a framed spectacle into an immersive environment. While some reviewers dismissed the arrangement as mere novelty, many conceded that it magnified subtle variations in individual movement while preserving the intricate rhythmic interlace emblematic of Neo-Samba.
Thus, Mendes advanced a position—still uncommon among Brazilian choreographers of her generation—that the volatile emotions of contemporary life could not be fully conveyed through declarative gesture alone. Rather, she contended, those feelings were best insinuated through experimental structures that invited observers to sense, rather than be instructed in, the paradoxes embedded within modern Brazilian existence.
