No escuro do cinema descalço os sapatos

“What is it that move us, what sets us in motion?” The question heard at the start of the film from a dancer remains in limbo. The magnificent black-and-white framing by the filmmaker-cum-photographer offers an answer that is above all else corporal. Commissioned by the Portuguese National Ballet for its fortieth anniversary, Cláudia Varejão films the company over one year, with a fondness for detail that inclines towards inserts and a search for abstraction. What we find is not a microcosm locked into its strictness but a place open to foreigners and a mix of classical and contemporary. The same openness is seen in the work in progress: “dance has the possibility of being ambiguous”, points out a choreographer who asks the dancers to express a succession of opposite emotions, but to return to a neutral facial expression after each change. Although chronology leads the brightly lit studios into the theatre’s darkness, Cláudia Varejão does not seem to view the show itself as the climax: when the performance of The Firebird or Giselle arrives, what the viewer recognises is a familiar dancer in her costume, rather than some archetypal character. From the wings, the filmmaker focuses above all on the intense concentration of the dancers, who once off stage watch on from the darkness – and can perhaps discreetly take off their ballet shoes. (Charlotte Garson)