ADDITIONAL INFORMATION

For her tenth production, Anne Nguyen continues her deconstruction of hip-hop body language, focusing on her preferred discipline of breakdance.

“I am long practiced in the martial arts, especially capoeira and Brazilian jiu jitsu, as well as Viet Vo Dao and Wing Chun. One of the features of these practices is the relationship to the partner, which is one that involves physical contact. However, while contact with the floor is one of the basic principles in breakdance, personal contact with others is very under-exploited by hip hop dancers in general, the latter creating an empty space around them in which to dance within their “vital circle”. The contact with the floor, the relationship with the Earth, is one of the factors that prompted me to practice breakdance rather than any other dance style. Nevertheless, I greatly missed that contact with, and relationship to, a partner when I decided to stop martial arts to concentrate on dance. That’s why I now make it one of my main research goals as a choreographer. I developed a series of technical exercises aimed at introducing contact into the dance moves, which are inspired by martial arts and mechanical principles. I try to bring together, confront arms, legs and bodies in a dynamic, circular fashion within a reduced space. It’s by means of this process that I create combinations of moves for several dancers.

My capoeira teacher one day asked me to choose between capoeira and breakdance: I was improvising by adding weak or pointless moves to my fights. A strong urge to break the rules and seek beyond efficient, effective movement naturally propelled me towards dance. With Kata, I wanted to do the reverse: to start out with a dance form made of seemingly “useless” dance movements, i.e. breakdance, and discover the usefulness in every gesture, as if every breakdance sequence were merely a series of kata in training for combat. In Kata, I break down the centrifugal movements of breakdance into sequences of isolated gestures, and combine them with “useful” concepts within the meaning of the battle and the relationship to the other. The eight breakdancers, either individually or within perfectly ordered formations, execute sequences of dance gestures aimed at imaginary adversaries, or confront one another in the form of danced battles. Attaques, blocages, esquives, intricate, complex battle scenarios are played out to the ebbing and flowing rhythm of the “fighters” on stage, channelling the warlike energy of breakdance.

I also attempt, in Kata, to sublimate the martial arts aspect of breakdance. For me, breakdance is a truly contemporary martial art, it was created by human beings in a bid to cope with a hostile urban environment that had broken all ties with the animal kingdom and the relationship to the Earth, and transformed the human body through the violence of its shapes and constraints. Without enemies to oppose, without physical accomplishments to achieve in the everyday living environment, the fighting spirit that gives shape to the living world seeks to express itself in breakdance, in response to the oppression we are under from our environment. It is a spontaneous movement of resistance on the part of the living, a form of discipline and ritual that allows the dancer to reconnect with his/her innermost instincts, such as the quest for physical power and territory.”

Read more Anne Nguyen