The two performers, Davi Pontes and Wallace Ferreira, enter the space completely undressed, except for their black sneakers. They pause, scanning the surrounding audience with their piercing gaze before they start a rhythmic clomping. The synchronised foot-sound is punchy, their torsos inclined slightly forwards, their bodies responsive to some physical action of self-defence – though one might not feel the lurking of assault in this particular context. However, there’s an urgency and astuteness in their way of moving, like in a momentary confrontation with danger when two options are only available: fight or flight.

Repertório No. 2 seems to emphasise the unrelenting resistance with which the duo comes face to face with something fearsome: not by being chased away but by making their bodies a weapon of negotiation. The challenge in real life might be dizzyingly fatal yet this repertoire of bold gestures becomes a good reminder that in some cultures dance practices derive from survival techniques and are not merely a matter of abstracted virtuosity.

As things heat up and drops of sweat create a gleaming layer on their bodies, unexpected poses are edited into the heart-throbbing sequence: some are cunningly provocative, like crouching as if sexually teasing the audience, others are more outwardly shy, like Renaissance odalisques. Any exoticising resemblances are not purely coincidental: the two performers, after all, playfully interchange between scopic regimes, negotiating both historical representations and everyday survivance. Their rhythmic endurance, however, might not only be about persistence: their fleshy presence is both strong and tender, their bodies ambiguously sonorous and visually seductive, claiming their own space of freedom.

If freedom for Pontes and Ferreira is fought for on a daily basis, making the fight both a manner of practice and a gesture of political awareness of identity, then Repertório stresses that constant rehearsal of the social, when bodies make up their space where once there was none. This corporeal negotiation might be allegorical, but more so it is real, as performers squeeze in between members of the audience, making discomfort palpable and felt, our eyes turned the other way, too literal to be taken as it is: a form of choreographic revolt.