Deborah Colker: A real live wire

Dancing, choreography, running her own company, not to mention the piano, volleyball, psychology... Is there no end to Deborah Colker's energy? Nadine Meisner meets the Brazilian powerhouse

Deborah Colker has already done so much in her life, you wonder how she ever found time to sleep. She is so wired up, Brazilian voice bursting with enthusiasm, face alive with nervous energy, you wonder if she can sleep. At 41 years old, she has enough achievements on her CV for several people: classical pianist (emulating her late father, a violinist and conductor); former champion volleyball player (training four hours a day); psychology graduate (five years at university); dancer (ballet and contemporary); mother (two children) and pet-owner (five dogs). She does nothing by halves, not even interviews, engaging mind and body with reckless, calorie-burning commitment. After two hours with her, I'm so exhausted I need a lie-down.

Aged 17, Colker hit a crisis and, to her parents' distress, stopped her piano studies. "In one moment I was like this," she mimes total paralysis. "My mother asked me, 'What do you want to do?' And I answered, 'Nothing, anything, I don't know what's happening with me.' " She had pursued so many activities with talent and love, but the long, daily practising had become just too isolating. Dance saved her. "With dance I could join music, physical activity and art. I began to dance and didn't want to stop."

The course in psychology was for her parents, who were worried about the precariousness of a dance career. "But I can't say I lost my time with psychology. No!" She raps the table to underline the point. "It's very important for a director with different dancers and backgrounds."

She founded the Companhia de Dança Deborah Colker in 1994, since when she has had the tremendous good luck, given the condition of the Brazilian economy, to have generous sponsorship from the state oil company Petrobras. This has given her dancers a luxuriously equipped home in central Rio de Janeiro, full contracts (paid vacations and health insurance), a large staff of teachers and a physiotherapist.

She also has, as a choreographer, the luxury of elaborate ambition. Her pieces are not body-and-bare-floor reductions, cooked up in a couple of months. They are massive eccentricities, requiring years of preparation, design (by Gringo Cardia), engineering (by Batista de Souza) and heavy-duty carpentry. The result is hybrid art, a fusion of dance and gymnastics, sometimes set into moving patterns within interactive structures, like a game of snakes and ladders animated on stage.

She has already brought two of her five pieces to London. Mix (1996) combines Vulcão (1994) with Velox (1995), and ends at a vast climbing wall, where dancers dangle and swarm like drunken flies. "I was trying," she says, "to establish a new stage for my dancers, the opposite of horizontal space." The wall is static, whereas in Rota (1997), a piece inspired by a visit to Disneyland, a giant, two-story hamster wheel turns and turns, decorated with scurrying and hanging figures. "With the wall I join strength with the static," she explains. "With the wheel it is strength with dynamic."

Casa (1999) features a five-and-a-half ton wooden house on three floors, with walls and doors that shift and change "like origami", while the dancers scale up ladders, slide down poles, or flip from one level to another. Her "new baby", 4 x 4, premiered last May, is a collaboration with four different visual artists and their installations (including one with 90 vases). In it, she returns to piano playing, besides dancing (as she does in all her pieces).

The ideas she explores in one project lead to the next. But why equipment pieces in the first place? She insists that it is no gimmick, but a way of creating new spaces. "And to me it is very important to propose new spaces to find new movement, create new possibilities and new experiences." She moves her small hands airily. "Also important to me is the link between the contemporary dance and the contemporary world. So far I have brought the amusement park, sport and the daily life of a house to contemporary dance. Now, with 4 x 4 I bring modern visual art."

But back to Casa, which is her latest piece to come to London. She came up with it after a visit to the Bauhaus Museum in Weimar, Germany. "And I phoned Gringo and I said, 'Oh, I'm thinking of doing a house', and he said, 'WHAAAT?' " She also told him that she wanted a house that could mutate, so it would move along with the performers. "He said, 'OK, let's try, but it will be hard.' He had to think carefully about the construction because with 16 dancers it has to be very strong."

The house went through several versions before it arrived at the present one. She sees Casa as an exploration of the relationship between dance and architecture – "both build spaces" – and as a picture of everyday living. "What attracts me are the banalities," she says, "the prosaic domestic actions. Casa is about a day in your house: Nadine cooking and eating and sleeping a little and not being able to sleep and thinking and drinking whisky and the walls moving slightly because you're a little drunk." All this is done without props, just the house and dancers and their movements. There is the cat, arriving from the roof; there are adults and children. "And you can recognise your house and life and with this I'm dealing with emotion and personalities."

She likes dancers with a ballet background, because that makes their bodies more malleable. They then have to acquire gymnastic skills (with help from the company's Geraldin Miranda). Colker works them hard – eight hours a day of ballet, contemporary technique and rehearsals – although, unlike her, they don't do piano practice for an hour and a half. "Every day I talk to my dancers, and I say, focus!" Any lapse of focus in the gymnastic passages could cause injury. Any bad luck can cause the same, as happened to Alex Neoral, when his trousers got caught on a part of Rota's moving wheel, which then bashed his head.

But Colker's dancers must also have informed, enquiring, contributing minds that see outside dance. "I love the contemporary world, I love people. I say, let's talk – about, about what? Pliés?" Her thin, blonde face twists into a look of horror. "Aagh, no! Let's talk about movies, visual art, architecture."

As well as great conversationalists, they have to be fearless. "We can't have vertigo!" the three beautiful young people sitting in front of me laugh. "Sometimes we say, we can't do that. And she says, 'Oh, yes you can!' " Their colouring runs the gamut from blond to dark, a microcosm of the racial mix of Brazil. (Colker is of Jewish-Russian extraction.) They have open faces and a joyous vitality, but those qualities must come from being Brazilian, not from extreme youth, because Colker has the same.

'Casa' is at the Barbican Theatre, Silk Street, London EC2 (020-7638 8891) from tomorrow until Saturday