Volmir Cordeiro (Brasil / France) – STREET
Duration: 60 min.
Recommended age range 12+
Performance language: English.
With “Street”, Brazilian choreographer Volmir Cordeiro transforms the public space into a vibrant theater, traversed by struggles and encounters.
In this intense solo, created in 2015 and now emblematic of his style, he explores the many faces of the street, accompanied live by the powerful percussion of Washington Timbó. The street becomes a place of passage, refuge, and combat. The dancer’s body carries the words of Bertolt Brecht, responding to his poems on war.
Through explosive gestures blending samba, capoeira, and urban wandering, „Street” reveals the raw beauty of a world in motion, crossed by both pain and joy. A striking, physical, and committed piece, to be discovered the way one enters the street: without knowing what you will find, but certain to emerge changed.
Volmir Cordeiro is a Brazilian choreographer, dancer, and performer born in 1987 in Campina Grande (Paraíba, Brazil). Trained in contemporary dance and theater in Rio de Janeiro, he moved to Paris in 2011 to pursue his studies in the ex.e.r.ce master’s program at the CCN in Montpellier, under the direction of Xavier Le Roy.
He has collaborated with major figures of the contemporary scene such as Lia Rodrigues, Emmanuelle Huynh, and Nadia Lauro. In 2015, he founded the company Donna Volcan, where he serves as artistic director. The name Donna Volcan refers both to the production structure and the overall artistic project he leads, embodying an explosive, queer, and political aesthetic that blends dance, performance, live music, and theoretical research. Volmir Cordeiro’s work explores marginalized bodies, minority identities, social violence, and the poetic power of vulnerability.
A repertoire of choreographic and performative pieces that question norms of gender, class, and race through radical, often frontal and collective gestures. The work is structured around three main axes:
- Bodies and politics: exploration of bodies in resistance, minorities, and invisibilized narratives.
- Hybridization of forms: crossing between dance, performance, live music, text, and installation.
- Transmission and inclusion: workshops, masterclasses, pedagogical residencies with diverse audiences (amateurs, students, local communities).
The company is also committed to research projects (publications, conferences) and interdisciplinary collaborations (with visual artists, musicians, philosophers).
Choreography: Volmir Cordeiro
Performance: Volmir Cordeiro (dance) and Washington Timbó (percussions)
Costumes: Volmir Cordeiro and Vinca Alonso
Production: Donna Volcan
Coproduction: La Ménagerie de Verre, Paris
With the support of Musée du Louvre, Laboratoires d’Aubervilliers, LE CN D Centre National
de la Danse, ICI – CCN Montpellier / Languedoc-Roussillon
“The Donna Volcan” company is supported by a convention from the DRAC Île-de-France.
Premiere: 2015
Photos by Blandine Soulage (Lyon Dance Biennale 2025), Marc Domage
Website: https://volmircordeiro.com/
Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/volmirc/
Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/volmircordeiro/
The festival “New Baltic Dance” is funded by the Lithuanian Council for Culture, the Vilnius City Municipality, the Lithuanian Culture Institute, and the EU.
