Returning for its much-anticipated second year, the official São Paulo Showcase returns to Scotland this summer with a stunning roster of work – including Igor Gasparini’s (RASTRO, 2024; ANIMA, 2023, ELO, 2019; Under the Skin, 2016) blazing and beautiful ‘urban contemporary dance work’ Border Bodies.
Supporting Paragraph: Border Bodies blends urban dance techniques and contemporary perspectives to create a complex work that sees our current emotional, social, gendered, racial, psychological, historical, and geographical borders dismantled to form new ideas of togetherness and unity. Performed by seven dancers of different backgrounds and dance training specialties – including hip hop, breaking, popping, voguing, modern, and contemporary dance – T.F. Cia de Dança’s piece will ask Scottish audiences what happens when we question, dismantle, and cross boundary lines and barriers.
T.F. Cia de Dança is an artistic group based in São Paulo (Brazil) since 2002. The group consists of professionals from diverse dance backgrounds interested in researching Contemporary Urban Dance. Over 24 years, the company has built an impressive reputation that has proved the group’s prominence in the cultural scene of the State of São Paulo, including winning the APCA (São Paulo Association of Art Critics) Award for Best Dance Performance (ELO in 2019), and the nomination for RASTRO in the Best Choreography/Creation category in 2024.
Unravelling ideas of hierarchy, prejudice, and separation, Border Bodies will T.F. Cia de Dança’s distinctive practice of ‘dance-research’ realised physically to create a unique performance rooted in rituals of sharing and exchange; a fearless performance experience that dually explores the contemporary questions of our time, and inspires conversations that look to the collective future, through movement. Bringing a thematic boiling pot of intricate motifs to Scotland’s loved Dance Base venue, the seven dancers embody a routine that sees them intertwine and collide like atoms, moving together and apart to explore what ‘the collective’ means for humanity today.
Border Bodies (‘Corpos de Fronteira’ in Portuguese) is an innately collaborative work centred on exploring the beautiful and vast heterogeneity of humankind, and our intrinsic need to connect. It will run from 7-30 August 2026.
This post was last modified on May 27, 2026 9:37 am