It will soon be 50 years since hip-hop emerged from the Bronx to become the dominant dance form of the modern world. And it’s 23 years since Kenrick “H20” Sandy and Michael “Mikey J” Asante founded Boy Blue in east London. Over that relatively short period, hip-hop has become as virtuosic as ballet, demanding that its adherents hone body and mind to controlled perfection in pursuit of a demanding discipline.
Boy Blue’s latest creation, Cycles, an abstract exploration of the act of dancing itself, has the serenity and purity of a piece by Balanchine. To doubters that may sound daft, but there’s something about the precision of the movement and the pleasure the dancers display that lifts the heart.
Choreographed by Sandy and Asante, with Jade Hackett as associate choreographer, it begins and closes with a single dancer, Nicey Belgrave, strolling into a circle defined on stage by Lee Curran’s clear white light. The other eight dancers sit around, watching. It’s as if she is stepping on to a turntable, and as Asante’s score soars, she’s joined by the entire group, taking big relaxed strides as they carve their way through air and light.
Their movements are exactly synchronised, with one another and with the music, picking up half-hidden rhythms and beats. There’s a constant sense of flow within the group, with individuals breaking away to pick out a little detail with the hands, or the head. Their sheer skill is always obvious but somehow held back; the pyrotechnics (an astonishing horizontal triple turn, a soft-footed slide, a high jump) are there but integrated into this constant shifting sense of unified movement.
Over two parts, separated by an interval, there’s a sense of a community, of people moving away but always coming back. There are ripples of greetings, of conversations, of jokes, little punctuation marks in the stream of movement. At one point, a second golden circle of light opens on the stage, and as the dancers jump into it their steps become more vigorous and swaggering, show-off turns to seek – and get – applause.
Later the dancers gather like women going to church, hands flapping in tiny conversational gestures; they fold into each other’s shoulders, making parallel lines through a cone of light, or bend bonelessly backwards through each other’s arms. Evion Hackett is suddenly spotlit in an astonishing solo moment, rising from the floor with each bone of the arm articulating the rise. But then he vanishes back into the group.
It all looks sensational, with layered costumes by Matthew Josephs and Seeing Red that add to the pervasive sense of images that are isolated and sharply marked, yet also smooth and gentle. Later, they add padded hoods that turn the dancers into so many ghosts, stepping loose-limbed, slowly swirling to the ground.
Cycles never shouts its purpose, and its ending is as quiet as its beginning, yet its complexity and commitment compels and repays close viewing. It’s a beautiful thing.
