It will quickly be 50 years since hip-hop emerged from the Bronx to grow to be the dominant dance type of the trendy world. And it’s 23 years since Kenrick “H20” Sandy and Michael “Mikey J” Asante based Boy Blue in east London. Over that comparatively brief interval, hip-hop has grow to be as virtuosic as ballet, demanding that its adherents hone physique and thoughts to managed perfection in pursuit of a demanding self-discipline.
Boy Blue’s newest creation, Cycles, an summary exploration of the act of dancing itself, has the serenity and purity of a chunk by Balanchine. To doubters that will sound daft, however there’s one thing in regards to the precision of the motion and the pleasure the dancers show that lifts the guts.
Choreographed by Sandy and Asante, with Jade Hackett as affiliate choreographer, it begins and closes with a single dancer, Nicey Belgrave, strolling right into a circle outlined on stage by Lee Curran’s clear white mild. The opposite eight dancers sit round, watching. It’s as if she is stepping on to a turntable, and as Asante’s rating soars, she’s joined by the complete group, taking huge relaxed strides as they carve their means by way of air and light-weight.
Their actions are precisely synchronised, with each other and with the music, choosing up half-hidden rhythms and beats. There’s a relentless sense of circulation inside the group, with people breaking away to select just a little element with the arms, or the pinnacle. Their sheer talent is all the time apparent however in some way held again; the pyrotechnics (an astonishing horizontal triple flip, a soft-footed slide, a excessive leap) are there however built-in into this fixed shifting sense of unified motion.
Over two components, separated by an interval, there’s a way of a group, of individuals shifting away however all the time coming again. There are ripples of greetings, of conversations, of jokes, little punctuation marks within the stream of motion. At one level, a second golden circle of sunshine opens on the stage, and because the dancers leap into it their steps grow to be extra vigorous and swaggering, show-off turns to hunt – and get – applause.
Later the dancers collect like girls going to church, arms flapping in tiny conversational gestures; they fold into one another’s shoulders, making parallel traces by way of a cone of sunshine, or bend bonelessly backwards by way of one another’s arms. Evion Hackett is immediately spotlit in an astonishing solo second, rising from the ground with every bone of the arm articulating the rise. However then he vanishes again into the group.
All of it appears to be like sensational, with layered costumes by Matthew Josephs and Seeing Crimson that add to the pervasive sense of pictures which are remoted and sharply marked, but additionally clean and mild. Later, they add padded hoods that flip the dancers into so many ghosts, stepping loose-limbed, slowly swirling to the bottom.
Cycles by no means shouts its function, and its ending is as quiet as its starting, but its complexity and dedication compels and repays shut viewing. It’s a fantastic factor.
