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Voyeur / Samba and Love

 
Mark Harding Review by Mark Harding 4 Published: 8 Aug 2025 Assembly @ Dance Base Show Dates: 31 Jul 2025-24 Aug 2025

This is a company of superb dancers, with incredible energy, strength and seemingly supernatural powers of synchronisation.

Wit and intelligence, with dancing of energy, excitement, and great skill

Both dances in this double bill were composed by Brazilian choreographer Lili de Grammont, yet they are very different in their tone and methods of dance storytelling.

The first piece, Voyeur, is not so much about the watcher but explores the impact of being watched. There are intricately synchronised group dances, and also duets – usually with the other dancers sitting on chairs, coldly observing. Accompanied by aggressive electronic music, the dancing is fierce and thrilling, sometimes with hints of violence.

There are implications of surveillance as peer pressure or government control. The observers use torches like spotlights to dazzle the eyes of a couple dancing, to emphasise certain features, and to throw distorting shadows. Being watched inevitably turns the life of the person under observation into a performance. This brings to mind the distortions of life when living under a totalitarian regime or – if I’m not stretching it too far – presenting one's life for public consumption on social media.

The dancing in Voyeur may be intricate and joyous in its skill, but the show hits greater heights in the second piece of the double bill – Samba and Love.

During the costume change, Grammont explains that during the censorship of the military dictatorship, the 1960s song Samba and Amor, with lyrics by Chico Buarque, was renowned for its critique of the regime, which was hidden within the words to avoid censorship.

Unlike the rather abstract Voyeur, the piece that follows is more concrete in its storytelling, yet more subtle in its impact. The choreography is more varied and allows the dancers to display additional skills of comedy and dance storytelling. A superb soundtrack of driving electronic music incorporates vacuous speeches, TV shows, and the blare of street life. Domestic scenes of normal life are shown, but public discourse is trivialised. Important questions may be asked by the TV interviewer, but there is never a coherent answer.

Life is normal, but there is something hidden underneath: only the very last scene hints at the underlying menace as one person decides to stand out from the crowd.

This is a superb piece of wit and intelligence, with dancing of energy, excitement, and great skill.

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The Blurb:

A double bill by Brazilian choreographer Lili de Grammont. Voyeur opens the evening, inviting the audience into a charged, intimate space where private gestures unfold under the weight of being watched. Samba and Love closes with intensity – a visceral response to the burnout of modern life, where samba rhythms become a physical expression of exhaustion, desire and resistance in a world that demands too much. Both works explore vulnerability, control, tenderness and tension – revealing the impossibility of escaping from rhythm, from the gaze, or from ourselves.