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Regardless of the unbearable media hype surrounding the few highs and many lows of Britain’s Got Talent, I am pleased that Diversity, an exciting street dance group, won the competition. The award somehow gives public recognition to an art form that has long struggled to establish itself outside the boundaries of an urban phenomenon by entering, though not always successfully, the theatre arts arena. Within the past ten years there have been many examples of ‘theatricalised’ street dance, and a number of good performances too. Yet the social, cultural and political imprint associated with that dance form has frequently prevented a full integration within other traditional and well-established theatre dance idioms — often in the name of the obsolete, but still ongoing low-art-versus-high-art debate. Most performances seen and reviewed in these pages consist of a mere transferral of the urban dance pyrotechnics on stage, rechoreographed in line with the constraints and possibilities offered by the missing fourth wall. Among the few exceptions is Brazilian-born dance-maker Bruno Beltrão, one of the first to have initiated an artistically captivating process of fluid fusion between street dance and modern/postmodern choreography. Created in 2008, H3 is, arguably, a milestone in the history of such process, disconcerting as it may be for pure hip-hop die-hards.
At the centre of the work is a notion similar to the one used in the early 1960s by the forerunners of American postmodern dance. In the same way as they deconstructed pedestrian movements and activities, Beltrão draws upon an urban dance language of rebellion, and extrapolates signature moves and places them in a context that is artistically, culturally and politically at the opposite end of the spectrum, namely abstract art. The result is dramatic, as the nine male dancers, all coming from the street, engage in a seamless game of interaction between each other and, most significantly, the space — whether it be the whole of the empty stage or sections of it, using lighting and a fluorescent, mobile tube.
Despite the intentional lack of bravura numbers — a feature of street dance, hip hop and break dance — there are many visually breathtaking moments, constructed cogently in a crescendo of heightened tension that can be read in myriad different ways. Moments of extreme physicality are masterly interwoven with more intimate sections, in which the dancers shed the traditional ‘macho/thug’ cool image to allow glimpses of more soft-toned feelings. The mix of silence, urban noises and effectively obsessive music, together with the now highly theatrical, now totally everyday lighting ideas, add greatly to the overall feeling of postmodern alienation. In my view H3 can be read as a powerful statement about art and anger, which explores, demystifies and challenges beliefs and tenets of our culture by using a movement vocabulary that is both popular and unusual.
As mentioned earlier, such use of street dance can be highly disconcerting for those who prefer it to be an entertaining display of bravura. Indeed, Beltrão and the powerful artists of his Grupo de Rua have moved a long, long way from what remains for many a carefree, immediate form of pure entertainment. And in that lies their success, for they bring something truly new to the stage. As for those who like their street dance to be less challenging and provocative, I strongly recommend tuning in to one of the many repeats of Britain’s Got Talent in order to enjoy the different, yet superb performances of both Diversity and their rivals, the equally splendid Flawless.
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