Review: Alice Ripoll and Hiltinho Fantástico, PUFF, Sadler’s Wells ★★★★

Hiltinho Fantástico, PUFF, Lilian Baylis Studio, Sadler's Wells Credit Camille Blake

From the favelas of Rio to the Lilian Baylis studio: Hiltinho Fantástico lives up to his name

There is something quietly remarkable about watching a dancer who has performed with Mariah Carey choose a small Islington studio for an intimate solo, stay to answer questions afterwards and, in doing so, carry the entire culture of Rio de Janeiro’s favelas into the room with him. The Lilian Baylis Studio was packed with London’s Brazilian community, who had come to welcome him to this city with a warmth and joy that made those of us less familiar with his world suddenly very aware of just how lucky we were to be in that room.

To understand PUFF, it helps to know a little about passinho. Born in the early 2000s in the alleys of Rio de Janeiro’s favelas, danced barefoot at illegal baile funk parties, passinho grew from the streets into a cultural movement. It is a style built on astonishing footwork, incorporating samba, hip hop, and other Brazilian rhythms, and in its early years it was passed on largely through dance battles. Hiltinho Fantástico is the real thing. He tells us he has regarded himself as a professional dancer from the age of fifteen, when he won one of those battles, and went on to co-found the Dream Team do Passinho, bringing the style to audiences across Brazil and beyond. Tonight, in this small, stripped-back studio, he is barely an arm’s length away.

PUFF is a thirty-five minute solo, directed by Alice Ripoll, Hiltinho’s long-standing collaborator and it begins in an almost aggressive simplicity. The stage is empty and unadorned, the audience seated on all four sides. He enters without music, so that every move of his feet against the floor is audible, every shift of weight felt. When he jumps, you feel it through the soles of your own feet. It is an extraordinary opening gambit that announces immediately that this is a performance interested in the body in its most fundamental state: weight, and perplexity, light and heavy, strength building up through each vertebra, each rib, each separate muscle in the leg, each individual part of the foot. Every muscle is defined. You are watching someone who has absolute knowledge of and command over every inch of themselves.

When the music does eventually come, it feels as though he has conjured it from somewhere inside himself. The score gestures towards Brazilian rhythms with a deep bass that seems to resonate physically, moving between something felt far away and something entirely internal. He shifts between being absolutely inside his body and suddenly, startlingly, outside of it entirely, and that oscillation, that swinging and swimming between states, is at the heart of what PUFF is doing.

The culture of Rio de Janeiro’s favelas presented with shimmering sweat, every muscle and vertebra precisely placed, and the sound of bare feet on a studio floor.

Because PUFF is not simply a dance. It explores the concept of disguise as a way of transmitting silenced cultures: concealing techniques, traditions and ancestral knowledge inside movement, passing them on through the body when other routes have been closed off. At points Hiltinho seems bowed down, chastened; silver paint on his body hints at chains, and voices from what might be a classroom drift in. The odd classical ballet step appears unexpectedly, a pas de chat amid the passinho, as though to remind you that no form of movement exists in isolation. He circles the audience. He makes sounds of his own, grunts, words, breath. And through it all, he sweats, visibly, gloriously, the sweat dripping onto the floor and becoming part of the choreography itself. The paint we see was added to exaggerate the sweat, we learn in the Q&A afterwards. It feeds the energy.

The piece builds to a crescendo and then plunges the audience into absolute pitch blackness. It is a perfectly judged ending: you are left in the dark, slightly breathless, not entirely sure what just happened to you.

RUNNING TIME: approximately 35 minutes, no interval

[Thank you to Sadler’s Wells for a gifted ticket for an honest review.]

Photos: Camille Blake

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