Alice
Ripoll

LAVAGEM is the name of Alice Ripoll’s latest creation with the REC Group. Using buckets, water, soap, and soap foam, several generations of Brazilians spent thei whole lives working as cleaners while a racist hegemony considered them dirty.

With this performance, Alice Ripoll investigates this ambivalence using
the act of cleaning as a starting point to create poignant images, considering its scenic and historical unfolding.

When asked about the border wall that separates the U.S. and Mexico, Pepe Mujica ironically replied: “Who is going to clean their houses?” In LAVAGEM, the questions are: What actually needs to be cleaned? The houses, the dirt in the rooms? Or the sophisticated strategies that aim to make some people become invisible? The trails, the history, the scents of fluids – water from bodies – we smell when we come closer?
Soap foam colours the bodies; the bubbles suggest a world of dreams.

By building a close relationship with the audience, and with the aim of finding new ways to establish contact between performers and spectators, the group proposes the experience of a shared space using bodies and ideas.