Football is a game where there are two teams of 11 players that try to control a ball and kick it into each other's goal. Or at least that's what we all think. The Brazilians don't think so and so they proved it on Friday evening when a dozen-odd performers tried to demystify the game and their country for Hyderabadis at the Shilpakala Vedika. The audience expected a show of some samba, a little about football, a lot about Pele and something about Brazil.
What the audience got was something else: A red hot pulsating drama about a country and its passion from a clutch of performers who appeared like shamans with amazing capability for physical contortions.
If the two women Paloma do Carmo Pinheiro Gomes and Samara Reis with endless legs and kitschy costumes shimmied their hips to match the samba rhythm drummed up by some virtuoso performances, then the men let down their hair and danced the evening away.
But it wasn't all music, dance and costume show; the performance directed by Toby Gough told the story of Brazil from the time of slavery and Portuguese masters to the struggle and liberation. Interspersing the story with the rise of the nation as a football powerhouse, that has a self belief that the ideal place to keep the world cup trophy in their backyard, the narration in English and the songs in Portuguese created a spell on the audience. The football great Pele apparently credited his on-field showmanship with the ball to a martial art called capoeira.
Then the drama swivelled back to the evolution of capoeira where the African slaves planning a rebellion without recourse to any weapons tried to mask their martial art as a dance form in Bahia region of Brazil. The narration was minimal, the drama breathtaking.
If the men with yellow Tees and Bermudas were dancing in the earlier part of the story, then they stripped down to the waist and revealed their eight-pack abs and tresses that could make women envious.
The men did not limit themselves to dance steps or the fluid moves of capoeira they did cartwheels, backflips and somersaults as if their bodies are made of rubber bands. The amazing drama didn't have a designated choreographer but the martial moves like dance steps which morphed into free style football moves topped by a bit of football showmanship by Arthur Mansilla.
Wearing white canvas shoes, Arthur stepped on the stage and played with the ball making it do his bidding, as if his body was coated with some gum and gravity could not free the ball from him. And to know Arthur Mansilla is an Indian of South African extraction was like the wow factor to the show.
