17-03-2025
- Entertainment
- New York Times
Boy Blue Brings British Hip-Hop to Lincoln Center
The dancers of Boy Blue, a London hip-hop dance company, move with extraordinary precision. When they hit a beat, they hit it as one. Between beats, they can seem to speed up or skip ahead, as if someone were dragging a video scroll bar. The effect is digital-age in appearance, but it's the result of an age-old practice: the painstaking, detail-obsessed pursuit of perfect synchronization, body with body, and dance with music.
That tight relationship between sound and motion can be traced to the tight relationship between the company's directors: the choreographer Kenrick Sandy (also known as H20) and the DJ and electronic composer Michael Asante (who goes by Mikey J). They met when they were teenagers, and they weren't much older than that when they founded Boy Blue at an East London youth center. Since that day, in 2001, they have built it into one of the most influential companies in British hip-hop dance-theater.
The dance part of that equation is a mix of styles: the snap, bounce and stop-motion articulations of popping and locking, the in-your-face aggression of krump. The theater part has tilted dark and dramatic, with an aesthetic on the dystopian end of Afrofuturism and an emphasis on the trauma experienced by Black people. In 'Black, Whyte, Gray,' which the company performed at Lincoln Center in 2018 and 2019, the precision suggested trapped robots and gang activity out of a 'Mad Max' movie. 'Free Your Mind,' a recent stage collaboration with the director Danny Boyle, updated 'The Matrix.'
But Boy Blue's newest creation, 'Cycles,' is something of a return to roots. A co-production of the Barbican Center in London, where Sandy and Asante have been associate artists since 2009, and Lincoln Center, where it will have its New York premiere on March 27, the hourlong work is dense with dance. From left, Corey Owens, Nicey Belgrave and Jimmy Allan in 'Cycles.' The dancers need to execute intricate choreography with precision and also need to be able to show off individual style and virtuosity in freestyle fashion. Credit... Camilla Greenwell
'Let's put narrative aside,' Asante said on a recent video call, recalling his idea for the work. 'Let's be totally uncompromising about the sonics, and let's just make this pure dance, top to bottom.'
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