The beat begins low. A single skin touched, a murmur of friction, then another, and another. Soon, a collective pulse emerges – syncopated, insistent, impossible to ignore. Batucada, in Marcelo Evelin’s hands, is not simply rhythm. It is a gathering, a summoning, a corporeal insistence that refuses silence. It begins in the dark – inside the TAIB, the underground theatre of Casa do Povo, its walls still absorbing the echoes of past voices – before spilling outward, in a movement that is both choreographic and political. This inaugural event marks the opening of the 36th Bienal de São Paulo’s program at Casa do Povo, and also reopens the TAIB with a gesture that is anything but contained.

Born in Teresina, Piauí, Marcelo Evelin is one of Brazil’s most vital and internationally resonant choreographers. His work weaves together performance, activism, and collective practice, often departing from the body as a site of social inscription and resistance. In Batucada, created in 2014 and presented across the globe since, Evelin orchestrates not a fixed piece, but a living proposition: an accumulation of rhythms, presences, and gestures that build toward disobedience.

There is no script, no hierarchy. Instead, Batucada offers a porous score, activated anew by each group of fifty local participants who perform it. The drums – sometimes actual, sometimes mimed with hands, feet, bodies – become weapons of joy and refusal. The performance grows not through spectacle but contagion: it invites the audience to listen not only with their ears but with their breath, their proximity to others. What begins as an accumulation of beats in the enclosed darkness of the theatre soon bursts into the open air. Batucada rejects the theatre as enclosure; it proposes the theatre not as refuge from the world but as its resonating chamber. The city does not remain on the other side of the door – it is the performance’s continuation, its necessary horizon.

Though Evelin conducted workshops at Casa do Povo when starting to work on Batucada over a decade ago, Batucada has never been performed in São Paulo until now. Its arrival is both return and rupture. Inaugurating this Bienal program with Batucada is a commitment. A refusal to begin quietly. In this encounter between Marcelo Evelin, Casa do Povo, and São Paulo’s own bodies and beats, Batucada becomes not just a performance, but a re-beginning.