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Arts Intel Report

RomaEuropa Festival 2025: Lia Rodrigues—Borda

Borda by Lia Rodrigeus.

Oct 10–11, 2025
Largo di Torre Argentina, 52, 00186 Roma RM, Italy

The Lia Rodrigues Companhia de Danças is based in Rio’s favelas, but the dances themselves move for long minutes with the slow deliberation of the European avant-garde before erupting in postmodern fashion into a makeshift folk dance or erotic anarchy. Rodrigues crowds the stage with stuff—castoff mattresses, plastic tarps, fabrics in clashing colors and patterns—that either liberates or entraps its inhabitants. As nearly every one of the Brazilian choreographer’s decades of world-traveling dances has traced the line between folksy and heady, bawdy and melancholy, physically crowded and emotionally austere, they all could have been named Borda (Borders). And this recent one is. —Apollinaire Scherr

© Sammi Landweer