A group of friends performs an experiment about space and duration, body and dance. One of them jumps from a structure repeatedly, others just watch, while someone else inhabits the house under construction.
After Salsa (2020, also filmed in Argentina), Igor Dimitri proposes, in Rehearsal & Repetition, a series of enigmatic associations: a building under renovation is transformed into a choreographic space, a construction worker’s hammering is juxtaposed with the staged gestures of parkour, jumps and backflips are orchestrated between bags of cement and rubble, and popular sayings are added to all this. Dimitri brings these elements together through a montage that fuses the movements of the bodies to the film’s raccords, so that film, space, body and language merge into a series of formal “rehearsals and repetitions”. The building under construction mirrors the “in-process” ballet and both translate into a film where the essayistic quality is taken literally. The walls lack plastering and the gestures lack refinement, while the film takes pleasure in the process of creation, in the beauty of the unfinished. And then the screen freezes, movement stops, space evaporates and – suddenly – an orgiastic unity is discovered in those bodies that have neither beginning nor end. – Ricardo Vieira Lisboa
