Deborah Colker © Companhia de Danca Colker company reviews May 2004 UK tour... Tue 4th & Wed 5th May, 7.30pm High Wycombe Swan 01494 512000 Fri 7th & Sat 8th May, 7.30pm Birmingham Hippodrome 0870 730 1234 Tue 11th May, 7.30pm Salford The Lowry 0870 787 5790 Fri 14th & Sat 15th May, 7.45pm Sheffield Lyceum 0114 249 6000 Fri 21st & Sat 22nd May, 8pm Truro Hall for Cornwall 01872 262466 Tue 25th May, 7.30pm Northampton Derngate 01604 624811 Deborah Colker Cia. de Dança website more Jeffery Taylor reviews

Stifling the urge to give her a good shaking, you would inevitably chat along the lines of the cost of canine care, she has five dogs, and the vicissitudes of adolescents, she has two. And nothing about her Alice band style blond hair and cosy air of Latino Aga-land prepares you for the nightly sight of Colker, 43, dancer / choreographer / lunatic, 20 feet in the air spinning like a human hamster on a mini Ferris wheel. Most schizophrenics are tortured by their split personalities; Colker is delirious about hers. “I now have the best of both worlds, artistically and materially,” trills the third generation Brazilian with Russian Jewish family roots, currently touring the UK. “But when I was 16 I had a great crisis.”

Colker and her two elder brothers, Flavio and Marcello, were brought up in a respectable Jewish educational tradition that only the best will do. Colker was a dutiful daughter, and excelled at whatever she turned her hand to. “My father taught me the piano when I was 8,” she remembers, “and I won a lot of prizes.” Father Adolfo, who died aged 69 four years ago, was a shining example to his offspring when it came to multi-faceted excellence, practicing simultaneously as an architect, a concert violinist and conductor, and in later life when the family fortunes dipped, dealing in gold jewellery. “I was good at school but I worked hard at my piano and kept getting top marks,” says Colker. “Then I discovered volleyball.” It was the perfect antidote to the loneliness of the savage endless practice required of a budding concert pianist. “I discovered the satisfaction of fighting for success in a team and I could channel all my physical energy. I eventually became the captain of Club Hebrew, the main amateur team in Rio.”

But being a good girl for her parents’ sake proved too good to be true. Hailed as a “great player” in athletics and a “great talent” on the classical keyboard something snapped in the teenage Colker. “Being the best at everything was too much responsibility,” she recalls, “I went with a friend to a modern dance class and I realised dance combined the energy and emotion of sport and music and gave me a way to communicate with the world. My parents were horrified, worried that their little girl who could do everything was throwing it all away. My father said that there is no market for modern dance in Brazil; there is no money to be made, pointed out my mother, Anita. That was a challenge.” And in the rigid Brazilian social caste system, a female dancer in the 70s was synonymous for tart. Nevertheless, free from parental pressure Colker built a professional empire in the art form of her own choice, and then created her own domestic bliss.
 

Since forming Companhia de Danca Deborah Colker in 1994, she has gained an international reputation with works like Rota featuring a giant wheel, which she is presenting on her current UK tour, as well as awards from her own country, Germany and Britain’s 2001 Laurence Olivier Award. She has her own company cultural centre in the Lapa docks district of central Rio and a perk of the job is rehearsing on Copacabana Beach. “With hot weather all of the time, we don’t often wear a lot of clothes,” she observes. “In Britain you often need to wear a coat. It leaves us Brazilians feeling more aware of our bodies, whether sensual or sexy or not.”

Her own slice of homely heaven is close by Rio’s Botanical Gardens with breathtaking views across Copacabana and the South Atlantic. It is a luxurious villa housing Colker and her two children, Clara, 19, and Miguel, 17, and a motley collection of dogs. Colker is long divorced from the father of her children and asked her steady boyfriend of eleven years, Joao Elias, who is also her company manager, to move out five years ago. “We’re still close,” she explains, “but the spider’s web that wraps you up when you both live and work together was too much for me.

“Dance is about pleasure, sex and being alive,” she continues, “but at 43 I’m learning different kinds of energy. I love my garden and spend hours tending it; I love going to my farm in the country and riding my horses, but I also ride my bike around Rio, an exciting, violent and dynamic city. But I am really happiest spending time with my children, Clara, studying industrial design and Miguel who is still at High School. We sit round the dining table and question everything together - What? Who? Why?” Just like a good Jewish mother should. Adolfo and Anita must be heaving a huge, if belated, sigh of relief.