Rui Horta: “Scope”

In 2005, Portuguese choreographer Rui Horta presented a piece called “Set Up” as part of a trilogy that, in general terms, sought the place of the body in this vicious world. This implied for him the use of technology to explore the vagueness that today’s fast-moving times have imposed on the body. “Set Up” was far removed from the consistency of “Pixel,” his 2003 opus, especially because Horta obviously wasn’t able to clarify where he wanted to go with that body.

His new piece, “Scope,” the last part of this tri-logy, continues the theme without seemingly taking it any further. In 2005, he stated: “When words are not enough, bodies carry the only possible communication.” Now he says: “The body in which we still knot ourselves is the hinge that opens and closes, the point that crosses from the inside to the outside of what we see and feel. It alone is the territory of encounter.” A state that, for the philosopher Michel Foucault, gives rise to two extreme positions: “Either they create a space of illusion that rejects the yet more illusionary real space, as well as all the inner places in which life is divided. Or they create another space, as real, perfect, meticulous and neat as ...