Companhia Urbana de Dança

Direct from Rio de Janeiro, Brazil, and this time for a four day residency, this fierce young company will perform two works from their high energy repertory, featuring choreography by Artistic Director Sonia Destri Lie:  NÊGO (I. You. We. All Black) and Chapa Quente on Saturday, March 26, 2016 at 9:00 p.m. at Mid Stage Theater at Miami Dade County Auditorium (2901 W Flagler St., Miami, FL 33135)

“Classic hip-hop moves are visible — the rippling of arms, the rolling on backs — yet they have been stretched and shaped into something new.” NY Times

Freely mixing urban street styles, social dances, and thought-provoking contemporary vocabulary, the audacious and dynamic Companhia Urbana de Dança unleashes startlingly new forms for a truly moving experience. This poetic and explosive company stuns with stamina-testing solos and jaw-dropping group movement that defies the limits of physicality while retaining choreographic rigor. Chapa Quente has been described as a work that finds sensuality in strength and an exploration of how momentum can extend into many directions at once (NY Times). NÊGO (I. You. We. All Black), whose underpinnings are so controversial the company was asked to change it’s name when it first debuted in the US so that it would not be misunderstood, is a work whose movements originate in corporeal personality of each of the dancers when it is confronted and merged with that of the others. These two works conceived and choreographed by director Sonia Destri Lie, are ripe with bodies that talk about violence, about the fight for freedom, for the right to write a different history, different to the one that the narrow streets of the favelas seem to be leading to.