30/11/25 Borda, Lia Rodrigues

Last night, invited by my friend Shanti, I went to see Borda, choreographed by the Brazilian artist Lia Rodrigues.

My first impression of the whole performance was: shocking, very trippy, very fuerte, very intense, like a long journey from the body down into the subconscious, being slowly pulled into some huge wave of emotion and dream.

A little introduction to Lia Rodrigues.

She was born in 1956 in São Paulo, and she is both a dancer and a choreographer, now based in Rio. She studied classical ballet as a child, and in 1977 she founded her own company, Grupo Andança, in São Paulo. After spending a few years in France, she returned to Brazil. She has always grounded her work very concretely in social reality: bodies, politics, community, the margins, imagination, these threads are all tangled together in her work.

According to the programme booklet for Borda:

Borda in Portuguese comes from the verb bordar, which means to embroider, to decorate, to add an edge, to make something richer and more layered. At the same time, it can also mean border, margin, edge, threshold, outskirts, the line that separates “here” from “there.”

In the programme notes, it says that borders can be geographical or political: they can be barbed wire, walls, checkpoints, but they can also be invisible hierarchies, identities, languages, even smells. They decide “who is allowed in and who is kept out,” “who belongs here and who doesn’t,” “who is recognised as having the right to exist.”

But borda can also be an in-between space: both here and there at the same time, the zone between departure and arrival, a place that is somewhere and nowhere. In a more abstract sense, borda is also tied to imagination and fantasy: when we embroider an edge or trace a line, we are also inventing new patterns and new worlds. Imagination amplifies dreams, fables, mirages and acts of creation, and gives us the possibility of crossing those borders we can see, and those we can’t.

At first there was a deep, dense darkness, and only slowly did a faint trace of light begin to appear. It gave me the feeling that something was “being born.”

That slowness felt like waking up inside a sac of amniotic fluid.

The entire scene, the set, the objects, the costumes, the makeup, was white or a creamy off-white. Extremely simple, almost washed into the same pale tone.

Every movement unfolded in extreme slow motion.

All the lines were blurry, shapes were unclear, everything hovered in an unnamed haze, while the tension quietly built up, bit by bit.

You could hardly see anything “moving”, but after a while, at a certain moment, you suddenly realise: oh, they’ve been moving all along.

Every image has soft, bleeding edges; the lines between one composition and the next are slowly shifting and flowing.

Inside this whole white world, I saw and felt intense pain, anger, wounding, anxiety, hopelessness, self-loathing, collapse, as if those emotions were being pulled out of the body layer by layer.

I felt something inside me surging, and I had no idea what to do with my inner child, where to place her.

In that moment, all I could do was press my hand against my heart.

My tears kept rising.

I felt unbearably oppressed and suffocated, and at the same time, there was a very strong sense of connection.

At a certain moment, the atmosphere suddenly shifted.

Each performer began changing into these extremely shiny, exaggerated, almost over-the-top costumes. Under the lights they glittered and flickered, torn and ragged.

Their faces and bodies suddenly felt wildly alive: completely committed, a little crazy, full of energy, utterly present.

They danced with abandon, with a kind of purity and openness, a bit goofy at times, full of passion, yet also incredibly sensitive, subtle, transparent, full of joy, almost tipping into ecstatic.

In that moment, I felt that at the core of everything was simply love and presence, that feeling of being fully here, fully open.

After all the pain, tearing, falling, breaking, suffocating, I felt myself becoming just as naked, just as honest, just as liberated.

I felt that tonight, even if I was “just” sitting there, simply staying and watching this performance was already a journey in itself.

Some of the things I thought only I knew about, only I was dealing with, and the little “Shikin” inside my heart, were given a place to be held in the light.

Everything that happened on stage felt like a physical manifestation of that part of my heart, being revealed inch by inch in front of me, something I could almost touch, that could be seen, received, and resonated with.

A part of me was healed, was seen, was connected, was answered.