29th Tiradentes Film Festival - In praise of cinema that dances: a letter to Marcela Borela

Tiradentes, January 2026

Marcela,

My vertigo with your film was triggered by the petit allegro – not by chance, the warm-up for the great leaps. The piano, which plunged me into my own personal abyss, plays the coda of the prologue of Sleeping Beauty – a ballet also dizzying in its excesses – which, in some way, reminds me of the kind of temporal fold (or unfolding) that Cross My Flesh proposes to make. Tchaikovsky's score, cut up in this scene at the end of its beginning, made me conjure my own ghosts in the tangle of its anachronistically spectral images. To the recordings of Quasar, this long-standing company from Goiás, I superimposed the memory of a traveling stage in the city of Curvelo, where one day I found myself in a state of prayer and plenitude, bewitched by that same moment of music. Agnostic, I have faith in the miracles of dance.

Silvia Federici, an Italian Marxist historian who blesses my belief in a magical materialism, also believes in its mysteries. In Beyond the Skin – a work whose title, like that of your film, suggests the transformative violation of our carnal boundaries – she writes a praise of this kind of unbridled mobility through the accumulation of our desires which, against the paralyzing and domesticating discipline of neoliberal capitalism, circulates knowledge and struggles. For her, we need to decipher this language of exploration and invention to guide ourselves towards our health and healing.

(Although it's difficult to heal from dancing)

Federici also says that we must listen to the language and rhythms of nature to guide ourselves towards the health and healing of the Earth. Dance, in fact, is an investigation of these powers of connection and friction: it imitates the processes by which we relate, in an ethical, though never placid, continuity with the world. The film archives you summon, right at the beginning of Cross My Flesh , prove this atavistic connection. Alice Guy-Blaché's caged tigers have the same indomitability as the women who, for so long, were imprisoned by the limits of a film frame. Loïe Fuller , half beast, is flower and serpent. Another pioneer, Isadora Duncan, the mother-socialist goddess of modern dance, understood her rebellious wildness when she abandoned ballet shoes and codes to project her solar plexus to the sun and spark with free impulses.

I think that your way of filming the workers at Quasar, moreover, is driven by this same electric-inventive current. You seek, for example, a poetic continuity between the dancers' sewing and the costume designers' spinning – a fusion between the lyrical-labor-driven machine-bodies of Germanie Dulac and the spatial traversal trick of Maya Deren.

(You belong to that lineage of witches).

There is a clear assertion: the seed of aesthetic experience begins to be watered from outside the rehearsal room. Nourishing the plants feeds artistic creation, and one only glides on linoleum that someone has stretched. That said, the visual and haptic extension that interconnects the everyday gestures of various crafts seems to me very much in keeping with the disruptive essence of a dance tradition that begins by abandoning the static beauty of classical forms. There are few things as beautiful on screen as the illusionistic sequence in The Red Shoes (1948), which, however, depends on the completeness of Moira Shearer's agile brisées , only perceptible from a certain distance. In Cross My Flesh , you erase wholeness to expand other sensory universes. Even with the tactile proximity of the camera, you profane Henrique Rodovalho's choreography. From an erotic friction, another hybrid creature is born. Contact improvisation is also a method of giving birth to cinema.

(In a country where public funding is still insufficient to adequately support the working class in our field, high-risk pregnancies last ten years and childbirth is performed with forceps).

A confession: in the plastic trance and interlude of your expressive materials, I was struck by the dreamlike suspension provoked by direct documentary observation, in the manner of Wiseman. However, I understand that, beyond your experimental ancestors, there is another affiliation here that cannot be denied, even though you, in the best sense, are a bastard daughter. Wiseman manages to capture the Apollonian quality of the Olympian members of the Paris Opera company, while you surrender to the Dionysian frenzy that we cook up here in the tropics, something that comes from someone who has already experienced the thrill of the wings and the post-show pleasure.

Marcela, have you ever thought about going back to dancing?

(I ask this knowing, given our shared biographical background, that we can find similar pleasures in life and in engaging with films).

Rumor has it that on Saturday night, it was the storm that cut the power amidst the enigmas of the public conversation with Júlio Bressane, and that I fainted in the early hours of the morning in Tiradentes because I traded my dinner voucher for half a bottle of wine. But I attribute the incidents to Bacchus and the other divine spirits invoked by the ecstasy of your impure forms.

Thank you for that,

Juliana

This text was originally published on the Sara y Rosa website .