Get Ready for Rio: Meet Guest Artist Milla Oliveira!
/written by Rachel Rimmer
Guest Artist Milla oliveira. photo by sam gerke.
We are in full swing here at the BFan studios as we get ready for Rio! Our New Year’s Eve show is unlike anything we have done before, and we are so excited to share this dance theater story with you. As we near this world premiere at the end of the month, we want to take you behind the scenes with us in this blog series: Get Ready for Rio!
This week, I was able to sit down with visiting visual artist, Milla Oliveira, and talk to her about the work she is doing for Arrivals: Rio. We hope you enjoy the following interview, and that you will join us at this World-Premiere show!
“To me it's like evidence of magic” —Milla Oliveira, on the path that led her to creating the visual art of Arrivals: Rio.
This week, we welcomed artist Milla Oliveira to our studios. Milla is a painter and sculptor, born and raised in Rio de Janeiro, who has lived in the Pacific Northwest for over a decade. She has called Eugene home for the majority of that time. After stopping by our studio to watch the dancers rehearsing Walls, the number she is painting sets for, I was able to sit down with Milla at our warehouse as she prepared to prime our set walls for painting.
“Growing up in Rio I was very much connected to movement practices and rhythms.”
The density, colors, and flavors of Rio all give Milla a unique relationship to creating visual art, where the rhythms of her hometown are echoed.
“Movement and dance were my first creative languages growing up in Rio.”
It was not until she moved to Oregon that she began drawing and painting. Now, Milla feels that color is the medium by which she brings forth the music and gesture that she previously brought out through dance, creating a bridge between visual language and physical, bodily language.
Milla’s move to Oregon proved a stark contrast from Rio. The sensorial experiences of Oregon, described by Milla as colder, darker, and more quiet, were shocking when compared to the more open and expressive culture she was accustomed to in South America. This is why Milla began painting. Visual art became a way of reconciling the differences in her environmental experiences. Using color, gesture, and movement—things she could control—provided a reconciliation with her physical surroundings that she could not control.
Milla has not only been inspired by her roots in Rio, but she has also found new ways to understand the vibrancy of this world through connecting to the land of the Pacific Northwest.
“In Oregon, it's the natural landscapes that give me that sense of fullness, and that sense of musical, harmonial composition...I found in that the same idea of diversity and nourishment that I felt like I had from a different way in Brazil, in Rio specifically.”
Flowers, especially, inspire Milla.
“Their color, their potency, their sense, the patterns by which they grow...they’re the most direct source of expression and gesture available [in Oregon].”
detail shot of milla’s work in progress, drawing inspiration from gardenias. photo by milla oliveira.
This inspiration drawn from flowers now brings us to discussing the magic of her journey to Ballet Fantastique. When we originally asked Milla if she would be interested in painting a few walls for this dance, we told her that one visual inspiration was the gardenia flower, and that our dancers would be using the walls to move to Brazilian music. At the time, we did not know how much of her creative process was influenced by nature and rhythm. Milla described the request as a
“Synchronistic confluence of all the things that excite me the most and that make me me and that are really part of my practice: Color, movement, flowers, and Brazilian music..”
She further shared that, as she was leaving Vancouver (where she had just finished her last project before coming to Eugene), the moment she completed her painting and stepped out of the building she saw, among the many plants that had died for the winter, a row of vibrant gardenias.
“I don’t know, to me it's like evidence of magic...To have the things that you are devoted to look back at you, this felt like a moment like that.”
Milla then showed me some of the draft paintings she had done in preparation for this project.
“I paint with water...painting with water brings a dynamic aspect of time...you have a very limited window of time in which everything needs to happen...I facilitate the paint and I also step out a lot and I let the paint actually take its own gesture and its own form.”
In progress shot of milla’s work with color and water. photo by milla oliveira.
She says it feels like a dance, where she moves in and out of a painting, her moments out informing her next motion in. She always works with the same combination of colors, but it's her rhythm that creates divergent experiences of the same color. When I inquired more about this rhythmic process of forming the color, she shared that she uses music, mainly Brazilian street music from Rio to paint.
“For this, I went straight into the slums, music from the slums, music from very popular street-based Brazilian culture.”
We went on to discuss more of her process of actually creating a painting.
“For my own sake, all of the rewards for me are based on a sense of presence. And it's fleeting, it's like a moment. In the colors there is a flow and a space that I reach where I’m not pushing something, and I’m not passive either, I’m fully present. Being more and more in that space, that's what I really care about. I go there, and when I come out I see what it’s done...I’m not judging, that's not important to me to see [to] control. [What is important is] to reach that point of presence.
The conversation then carried over into ballet, and the intent behind this dance in particular.
“I think performance has so much of that. Really being, really existing.”
Milla sharing with me some of her experimental rough drafts she did in preparation for this project.
Together, in our discussion, we recalled words our executive director, Hannah Bontager, had been sharing earlier that day when Milla visited our rehearsal. Bontrager wants to provide freedom for the dancers to look inward in this performance of Valeria Da Costa Ball’s (1967-2016) choreography, Walls. During rehearsals, Bontrager continually encourages everyone to stop looking in the mirror, forget that they are being watched, and just be present in the movements. This dance is about the individual experience, and granting permission to understand it in your own way
Milla hopes that the walls she is painting, with the energy and intent of “you don’t need to control everything, just be present, don’t focus on how you are being seen” will inspire the dancers as they perform. She believes in the importance of creating space to individually and uniquely experience what a note feels like, and to be able to move from that.
“All of the magic we experience in art is about unifying that focus... when you are really allowed to fully embody your focus, and let that guide the movement...That is a more full and powerful gesture.”
Milla then shared with me her final thoughts on the art she is creating for us, as she prepares to begin her work:
“I think there is a brilliance in even this prop. Having a box be a continuation and a mediator between the dancer and the space of the stage. It's very unique. And I hope that it serves them like that... it's an extra permission to really connect with whatever is really exciting them in their dance or their moments”
We are incredibly grateful to Milla for sharing her talent, inspiration, and wisdom with us this week, and we hope this bit of her story and artistic process inspires you. Join us this New Year’s Eve at the world premiere of Arrivals: Rio to witness these incredibly dynamic pieces of art in motion.
milla at the studio working with our dancers on “walls”.