Dublin Dance Festival 2026: Puff

Hiltinho Fantástico in Puff. Image, Camille Blake

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Described as channelling Passinho, an urban dance style born in the favelas of Rio de Janeiro – alongside samba and capoeira - Puff aspires to conjure the idea of a light breath. Brazilian choreographer Alice Ripoll employing the motif to illustrate how silenced cultures adapt and persist even when seeming to vanish. Dancer Hiltinho Fantástico’s supple hip sways, gentle arm flows, and light-footed footwork all rooted in a heritage of Afro-Brazilian dance. Yet for all its noble ambitions Puff falls short as a dance piece. The swagger, energy, and irrepressible confidence of Passinho lost to a reimagined version of it.

In Puff almost everything that makes Passinho a popular and vibrant dance form appears to have been subverted. Where Passinho is joyous, public, social, beat driven and extroverted, Puff is depressed, private, solitary, performed mostly in silence and introverted. In no time at all, Fantástico’s mercury like liquidity, and sweat polished skin, seems to run out of visual intrigue. Efforts at lightness also achieve the opposite effect by creating a feeling of weight. Extended arms raised crucifix fashion, as if wrists were attached to invisible threads, head lolling about like a bobble toy on gyrating shoulders, feet performing rapid hops, skips and jumps, all suggest a human marionette worked by a poor puppet master. The body ever upright fails to break free of the ground, despite snap jumps. Weight ultimately drawing the body down to crawl before lying still, the sound of a school lesson floating through the speakers. Rising again, it begins again. Ripoll wisely keeping it to 30 minutes.

Less a choreographed routine so much as an extended movement phrase with intermittent embellishments, Puff relies too heavily on laps around the rim of the round so Fantástico can display his impressive rhythmic undulations dressed only in football shorts. Flashes of movement occasionally referencing tap, Michael Jackson or breakdance. But Puff suffers from the law of diminishing returns offering less and less of visual and visceral impact the longer the performance goes on. If a delightful sequence to Latin rhythm describes Passinho’s rootedness in music, the fervour is diluted by longer passages of silence. Unlike hip-hop, (another urban dance form also aligned with a music tradition), with its many sub-genres including crunking, krumping and body popping, Passinho doesn’t appear to have a broad physical vocabulary for Ripoll to either draw upon, reimagine or push against. Leaving Puff, despite Fantástico's endless elegance, looking compositionally poor and choreographically lightweight. Less an urban dance so much as a rehearsal for a block party in the privacy of your bedroom. The dance equivalent of singing by yourself in the shower.

Puff, choreography by Alice Ripoll, danced by Hiltinho Fantástico, ran as part of Dublin Dance Festival 2026 at The Project Arts Centre, May 15 & 16.

For more information visit Dublin Dance Festival 2026