Parterre

Premieres on October 1, 2, and 3, 2025, at La Briqueterie, CDCN Val-de-Marne,

as part of the Excentriques Festival,

within the framework of the Festival d'Automne.

Parterre is a vibrant gathering orchestrated by Volmir Cordeiro, where five singular identities intertwine, clash, connect, and spill over into the theater’s audience. Continuing his exploration of marginalized gestures and the social dynamics that shape them, the Brazilian artist envisions the stage as a place of assembly, a space where the parterre—the floor—becomes fertile ground for enthusiasm. In this choreography, Volmir Cordeiro brings to life movements and figures deemed weak or vulnerable. Here, every gesture matters, every step holds weight: no movement overshadows another, none is superior.

On a stage evoking the earth, the five performers celebrate proximity, free play, and the impulse to be together without fear of separation. The parterre transforms into an informal territory where citizens, workers, artists, and the overlooked converge, driven by a vigilant and hopeful tenacity. From this shared space emerge forms of resistance, entertainment, and micro-revolutions that lighten the burden of constraints and open new horizons.

Transcultural music infuses the dance with extraordinary diversity, blending sonic fragments from all origins. Voluminous costumes mark social figures while shaping a malleable landscape, where a community unites to transgress, disobey, shed hatred, and embrace love. Bodies hop, circles form, and traversals salute the air. Gestures from below, open arms, stir the audience, sparking enthusiasm. Amid quarrels and eroticism, entanglements weave and unravel in a spiraling dance, where the space contracts and expands. The choreography becomes a bold tactic of playful defiance.

For Volmir Cordeiro, the parterre is an intimate metaphor that reconnects him to his roots, to the distant countryside of southern Brazil. He summons the aridity of his childhood, the poverty he escaped to become an artist. He amplifies gestures often judged as ugly, inferior, or minor, revealing their power and turning them into an act of reconciliation with the past. Through rigorous, intense, sweaty, and joyful physical expression, Parterre invites the audience to dance alongside the performers. Everything is directed toward the theater, which, illuminated at moments, becomes a partner in this parterre—a place where we cultivate our bonds and our absurd joy.