Alice Ripoll - Zona Franca (Free Zone)

The Zona Franca dance show by Alice Ripoll at the Auditorium Parco della Musica, as part of the RomaEuropa Festival, is a narration of Brazil and its favelas in all its aspects, an open area, in which urban rites, traditions and contemporaneity mixes on the scene, giving us glimpses of lives, landscapes, segments of a world and a country in which a desire for rebirth germinates.

Together with the previous shows Suave and Cria, Zona Franca continues the project of the relationship between urban and popular dances in Brazil and contemporary staging; this new work in fact intertwines Passinho, Contact Dance, Theatre-Dance, vocal research, Afro and Afro-House contamination, Sabala, Tik Tok, and even the dances of the north and north-east of Brazil - such as brega funk - create a pièce which gives the idea of ​​a carefree birthday party or a riot, during which the explosion of a balloon marks a sudden change, causing a scare, an implosion, a shock, in which the bodies of the dancers represent a celebration of life with its cycles of death and rebirth.

Choreographer, performer and movement director for theater and cinema, Alice Ripoll was born in Rio de Janeiro. At 21, while studying to become a psychoanalyst, he embarked on a completely different path in which he began research on dance and the possibilities of research on the body and movement. Having graduated from the Escola e Faculdade Angel Vianna, she began working as a choreographer.

Ripoll directed many shows, in some of which he also danced, often working with actors and circus artists; his work, made of continuous research, embraces contemporary dance and urban dances in Brazil. He currently directs two dance groups, REC and SUAVE, with which he investigates the relationships between contemporary dance, theatre, performance and Brazilian urban dance. His shows have been presented in numerous festivals and theaters in Brazil and abroad, such as Panorama Festival, Rencontres Chorégraphiques de Seine-Saint-Denis, Zurich Theater Spektakel, Kunstenfestivaldesarts, Center Pompidou, HAU, Wiener Festwochen and many others.

Photo credits: courtesy of the Auditorium Parco della Musica​ official site