"Wherever I go / language precedes me / like a lover preparing the way / like an empire I cannot escape." — Diane di Prima. Not only language: gestures, too, precede us. Barely have we begun the process of socialization when we are already folded into their systems of favors and reciprocities, their economies of give-and-take. We are born, as Adrienne Rich wrote, “into the difficult movement, / already sounding when we are born” — into codes that carry at once the desire for contact and the violence of their forms, the dream of a common language and the impossibility that it might reach another without first having been launched by someone, from somewhere, in the name of something. The hat tipped in respect was already there. The handshake was already there. The farewell wave, the heart carved into the trunk of a tree — already there. It is within this condition — not despite it — that I Missile, the new creation by Improvável Produções, takes shape.

A project-projectile: echoing the wordplay proposed by artist Linn da Quebrada, the title I Missile overlays the English phrase I miss you with the image of a missile. Longing and violence carried within the same message. The paradox is not a pun; it is the work’s very structure. And the projectile, like a love letter, has both a sender and a recipient.

Since at least the fifth century BCE, Greek and Roman soldiers inscribed messages on sling bullets before hurling them into battle — sarcastic insults, invocations of victory, obscene dedications. One second-century BCE projectile from the southern Levant bears the word MATHOY — “learn,” in the Greek imperative: learn your lesson. Another, launched against enemies in the Mediterranean, reads simply: “Catch!” In August 1945, soldiers and technicians of the Manhattan Project covered the nose, sides, and tail of Fat Man — the bomb that would destroy Nagasaki — with signatures, hometowns, and handwritten messages. A soldier from Chicago wrote: Here’s to you! In 2006, residents of Kiryat Shmona, after days spent in air-raid shelters, emerged into the open air and wrote messages and drew little flags on artillery shells about to be fired into Lebanon.

I Missile situates itself precisely within this zone of address and friction. Onstage, three performers — Clara Alves, Lucas Fonseca, and Martim Gueller — inhabit a space that is simultaneously archive and minefield. The gestures possess the immediate legibility of convention: removing a hat, waving with an open palm, inclining the torso in recognition of another. Yet these gestures arrive in the present carrying the strangeness of the anachronistic, revealing, through the physical intensity proposed by the work, forms of sociability that contemporary life has rendered obsolete, replacing them with other repertoires no less coded.

The creative process led the choreographers toward NPCs — the non-playable characters of videogames — those figures suspended in standby mode, without gravity, agency, and often without shadow, trapped within predetermined scripts. They emerge from that latency only when someone interacts with them or sends digital tokens — roses, animals, hearts — prompting them to perform emoji-gestures that briefly rupture their floating state. The logic is the same: the gesture of tipping one’s hat no longer has anyone animating it from within; the NPC hovers robotically, awaiting an external trigger. In both cases, the gesture precedes the subject — or replaces it. This articulation between gamification and the performers’ bodies becomes one of the hypnotic dimensions of the piece, inviting us to participate in this new dance of image-bodies.

The three bodies onstage rarely touch. At first they seem to inhabit a kind of relational non-relation: present within the same space, performing gestures that are ostensibly gestures of contact and communication, yet without any of them reaching another body as they would in an actual encounter. These bodies perhaps enact the condition of many contemporary exchanges: presence without contact, communication without touch, relation mediated by protocols that keep bodies and affects safe from the most radical idiosyncrasies and singularities of others.

Sweat is where the piece stages a crucial contrast. On the bodies of Clara Alves, Lucas Fonseca, and Martim Gueller, sweat and saliva are not by-products of exertion; they are almost a fourth body onstage, that which, in its fluidity and formlessness, cannot be contained within an emoji.

One of the process’s declared references is Ursula K. Le Guin’s essay “The Carrier Bag Theory of Fiction,” in which she proposes the bottle — the container, that which holds, carries, preserves — as an alternative to the hero-projectile that dominates Western narrative. For Le Guin, the history of humanity did not begin with the spear; it began with the basket, the bag, the place where what is precious is gathered and carried forward. Dominant narrative has obscured this object, preferring instead the taut bow, the virile launch. It is precisely this tension — between the bottle and the missile of longing, between what contains and what explodes — that I Missile refuses to resolve. The work is both things at once: it launches itself as a projectile while containing, within its floating gestural weave, a multiplicity of references, affects, and questions with no single way out.

Rich’s dream of a common language is not fulfilled; it would be dishonest to claim otherwise. Yet the piece inhabits that dream. It settles into the zone of friction between what conventions prescribe long before our arrival and what bodies, in their irreducible presence, insist on overflowing.

Laura Erber
March 2026

Concept and Direction: Marcela Levi & Lucía Russo
Performance and Co-Creation: Clara Alves, Lucas Fonseca e Martim Gueller
Assistant: Lucas Fonseca
Lighting Design and Technical Direction: Laura Salerno
Sound Design: Levi, Russo e Gueller
Sound Engineering: Eduardo Joly e Felipe Arantes
Set Design: Camila Schmidt
Assistant Lighting Designers: Léo Sousa e Andressa Pacheco
Technical Scenography: Paulo Miguel de Souza Filho
Technical Assistant: Matias Arce
Production Assistant: Morgana Olívia Manfrin
Support: Centro Coreográfico da Cidade do Rio de Janeiro / Secretaria Municipal de Cultura
Production and Artistic Realization: Improvável Produções


I Míssil, the latest creation by Improvável Produções, premiered in April 2026 at Sesc Pinheiros in São Paulo.