The capitulation to the temptations of lust versus the fierce and uncompromising fight against the pleasures of the flesh. The tension between the two extremes that marked the earthly existence of the philosopher and religious figure Aurelius Augustine (354 – 430), Saint Augustine of the Catholic pantheon, served as a starting point for composer Tom Zé to create the original music for the Grupo Corpo ballet – Santagustin, from 2002.

The friction produced by the confrontation between opposing forces interested Rodrigo Pederneiras, who adopted Love as the central theme for his choreographic construction, with all the contradictions it encompasses, its sublimity and its ridiculousness. The result is a work full of humor and eroticism, which juxtaposes attraction and repulsion, fragility and strength, pleasure and pity, brusqueness and delicacy, sinuosity and angularity, consonance and dissonance, acoustic and electronic, in a dizzying succession of pas de deux, performed alone or in groups.

The ballet marks the beginning of a collaboration between a dance group from Minas Gerais and the designer Ronaldo Fraga, who finds in the coexistence of citrus green and shocking pink a chromatic synthesis for this whole rosary of contrasts, while Paulo Pederneiras places at the center of the stage a gigantic plush heart, five meters high, a scenographic translation of the hyperbolic nature of the most cultivated of human feelings.