About Flying Low
From breaking to stage, screen, and learning, Flying Low creates collectively from São Paulo’s peripheries.
Research
Grupo Flying Low’s artistic research begins with breaking as a scenic, political, and poetic language, developing bodily dramaturgies that emerge from peripheral and collective experiences. Through shared group experience and direction, and through the meeting of urban and contemporary dances, the collective creates works shaped by collaborative practices, care, and urgencies lived by its members, always attentive to the questions that run through their bodies and territories. The group’s works and projects unfold these investigations across different languages and media.
The stage creations engage themes including the body’s symbolic confinement, ancestry, the precarity of work, and the imagining of other possible futures.
In “Menino Assum Preto,” they evoke the image of the marginalised worker in a caged body. In “As Pegadas do Kurupyra,” they deepen their relationship with ancestry and imagination, drawing inspiration from the enchanted beings of cultural inheritances from Indigenous peoples and the African diaspora.
Beyond stage creation, the research expands into education and screen work, notably through the learning project “Voando com Flying Low” and the documentary series “Em Formação.”
The group affirms a dance of encounter between margins, memory, and imagination — building sensitive, communal paths for creation and transformation.
Onstage, on camera, or in learning processes, Flying Low continues to transform peripheral experience into critical and sensitive artistic work.
- 01Breaking and authorship
- 02Peripheral memory
- 03Collective creation
- 04Stage and screen
Who they are
A collective of artists from São Paulo’s peripheries that researches breaking as a performance language, bringing urban dances into dialogue with dramaturgies of the body and collaborative creative practices. Founded in 2016 at Núcleo Luz by Lee Anderson and Eddie Guedes, Flying Low emerged from the research that would become the performance “Menino Assum Preto”, which received support from the VAI Programme in 2018. It marked the beginning of the collective’s authorial trajectory and of a choreographic approach centred on peripheral aesthetics and collective modes of creation, hallmarks of Flying Low.
Since then, the group has developed projects that connect stage, screen, and learning: “Cantigas do Meu Matulão” (Aldir Blanc Award – 2020), a dance-film creation project; “Na Manha com Flying Low” (PROAC 31/2021), with educational actions and the documentary series “Em Formação”; and “Circula Assum” (PROAC 04/2023), which brought “Menino Assum Preto” to seven cities across the state of São Paulo with support from Converse.
In 2022, it premiered its second performance, “As Pegadas do Kurupyra,” bringing breaking into dialogue with stories of enchanted beings from Brazil’s Indigenous peoples and the African diaspora. Alongside its performances, since 2021 the group has led workshops and residencies through “Voando com Flying Low,” sharing its research and teaching methods for breaking.
In 2026, it premieres its newest stage work, with seven additional artists onstage and co-direction by Marina Esteves, within “Flying Low em Revoada,” supported by the 38th Fomento à Dança para a Cidade de São Paulo.
It is currently made up of Lee Anderson (Turtle Lee), Jeff dos Santos Rodrigues (Fioot), Manuel Victor, Emerson Silva (Emersu), Ricardo Ura (Koide), with Lai Machado in production.