Dance of the city warriors

A path of interactive installations
Production 2016 – Duration of the visit: between 30 and 45 min

Dance of the city warriors is an immersive, participatory course of interactive installations centered on hip-hop dance. Guided from within the urban arena by a frieze of dancing figures, the spectator enters an intimate space and explores a series of interactive installations exploiting various video techniques such as live image capturing and animation, interactive editing, and virtual reality with – among other things – a 360-degree film, a virtual staging and devices to transform the spectator’s image… Tuts, bounce, battle, freestyle, jam, each installation is named after elements of hip-hop dance, which the audience is invited to experiment with, either by interacting with the video images and sounds they see and hear, or by playing around with their own image. The spectator is placed at the centre of this sensory experience. He can thus fully identify with the array of sensations impacting upon the hip-hop dancer and is prompted to adopt strange positions and improvise with his own dance movements. His image is captured, reworked and a link is forged with the human frieze guiding the audience, a process that allows him to enter into the virtual human network of city warriors.



Inspired by poems from the Manual of the City Warrior by Anne Nguyen, Dance of the city warriors conjures up the powerful concepts and aspirations of hip-hop dance: the desire to appropriate the forms and energies that surround the contemporary body, the need to reconnect with animal instincts and develop one’s physical exuberance, the search for balance between technical constraint and freedom… For Anne Nguyen, hip-hop dance is “a spontaneous resistance movement on the part of the living, a contemporary form of martial arts, created as a means of coping with a hostile urban environment, one that transforms the body through the violence of its shapes and constraints”. The path of interactive installations, Dance of the city warriors allows each and every one of us to develop a more personal understanding of the concepts that transform hip-hop dance, a dance that challenges the limits imposed by the human body and its surrounding environment, into a contemporary and universal art.