Festival Dance

Blak Whyte Gray

Royal Lyceum

Mary Brennan

four stars

HIP HOP hasn’t exactly been a regular fixture on the Festival’s dance programming. Bruno Beltrao and his Grupo de Rua de Niteroi (from Brazil) did make an appearance in the EIF lists, but that was in 2006, a year before before London’s Blue Boy Entertainment (BBE) caught the public’s attention with their clever, street-wise update of Robert Browning’s Pied Piper of Hamelin. A decade on and BBE are, you might say, picking up where Beltrao left off in delivering blisteringly fierce, rigorously honed dance that goes way beyond the familiar, crowd-pleasing power moves, and extends hip hop energies into a visceral engagement with the forces that shape, or indeed threaten, identity.

Though the three sections of Blak Whyte Gray share discernible themes, choreographer Kenrick Sandy and composer Michael Asante avoid linear narrative. Instead, each part explores uniformity as a means of social control, the different group behaviours and outcomes enhanced by nuanced lighting and design elements. In the opening section, Whyte, three dancers are corralled in a tight square of light, their unisex whites – like their spasming robotic moves – blanking out individuality, rendering them part of some faceless machine. Gray, with its floor like a chess board, has a militaristic feel, and here the unit of eight dancers has aggro in every focussed action, bodies ratcheting into fighting formations where the springy, acrobatic edge within hip hop signals combat readiness. Finally Blak, and an awakening of tribal/African roots that fosters courage within a community, uses dance as a bonding ritual that cherishes heritage in the face of homogenising change. All shades of hip hop run, like an electric current, through this superbly danced triple bill. Catch it if you can.