Photo: Supplied: IDCO
Blink and you’ll miss it. That’s how insanely fast Kiwi choreographer Josh Cesan’s moves are. He’s sought after to teach masterclasses in a style he’s become recognised for, called ‘glitching’.
As the name of suggests, ‘glitching’ moves are so co-ordinated and detailed that even counting steps isn’t possible sometimes, the Identity Dance Company (IDCO) director says.
“When there’s just not numbers for how fast something is, there’s not numbers,” Cesan told Nine to Noon.
“It’s almost looks unbelievable. I think if people were to come in and watch how talented these kids are, replicating these fast movements, I honestly think people would be just as shocked at watching the performance as they would at watching it being created.”
After an online video of one of his dances racked up millions of views online, his ID Co crew got invited to the World of Dance for a showcase where he managed to co-ordinate about 44 dancers to be in complete sync, he says.
“Working with numbers is definitely something you’ve got to train towards as a choreographer, holding a lot of people in a room, a lot of energy, and over the years we’ve refined ourselves not only as choreographers but as coaches and how to teach even better and how to hold a space.”
That opportunity opened doors for him to other communities of dancers in Europe and Asia, he says. The dance crew has won multiple gold, silver and bronze medals at the The World Hip Hop Dance championships.
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His passion grew from a young age as he was taken to tap, jazz and ballet classes along with his brothers by their mum. But they faced stigma as boys who danced and felt discouraged. So their mum Jacqui started Boyzdance2, a programme especially for boys to dance, he says.
“That all got male tutors and just boys, just for the first few years before she created the studio, and it really like took the stigma away and all of a sudden we felt really empowered and really cool to dance.”
Cesan believes his mother’s programme was instrumental in cultivating that talent in New Zealand. They began to perform at gigs around Auckland, including the Aotea Centre.
His two older brothers, Andrew and Richie, saw success. Andrew was the lead choreographer and dancer for X Factor NZ and won silver twice at Hip Hop International, while Richie is a director at his mum’s studio, co-founder of the TMC Dance Crew and winner of TEMPO Dance Festival Young Choreographer of the Year.
While looking up to his brothers as his biggest inspiration, Cesan says he felt a bit like the “black sheep” in the family before he found his true calling with the rise of dubstep and electronic music.
“I was a bit uncoordinated, like you’d watch me and you’d be like ‘oh yeah…’. [It was] something about me when I was dancing, and I think these weird crazy sounds that were coming out were exactly what I needed and I just immersed myself late at night, just downstairs in my mum’s house, I would just kind of throw my limbs around to these intense kinds of music.
“I was talking to some of my OG kind of people that I looked up to … and they said it’s crazy that it’s not just you who can completely do this dance.”
The New Zealand dance crews who represented the country on the world stage at competitions – like ReQuest, Sweet & Sour, and TMC – in the 2000s were pivotal in paving the way, he says.
“I think we saw that someone from a little country could go and make an impact at quite a big international event, and from there we just had so many incredible crews pave the way.”
While his sub-genre might be a bit niche, he still feels privileged to get to teach after having been “the weirdest dancer in the room”.
“I can teach the hardest most crazy dance ever and, you know, we’ll all have a blast. … but, at the end of the day, I think all the greatest choreographers when they go teach a class, they’ll have something within their class that’ll teach you something about life that’s bigger than dance.
“The thing I try and communicate is that I felt like the black sheep of the family, but I just went head first into diving into the weirdest way of moving, that I got laughed at initially, and I did it until it was something quite great.”
Josh Cesan will be performing live in The Identity Projekt on 19 and 20 October at Q Theatre as part of Tempo Dance Festival.
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