Boy Blue: Cycles review – dazzling hip-hop dance alchemy | Stage

Wellopened in 2001, Boy blue is a close and enduring partnership between choreographer Kenrick “H2O” Sandy and composer Michael “Mikey J” Asante, and is a major player in the rise of hip-hop dance theater in the 21st century. Their latest work takes the duo—here joined by Jade Hackett as associate choreographer—back to their roots, focusing intensely on those two alchemical elements that, when combined, can produce choreographic gold: dance and music.

The framework for Cycles is deceptively simple, a sort of playlist of individual numbers, each initiated by a change in the music, each developing different dance moods and motifs, and each illuminated by spotlights and spotlights that might suggest a record player here, a distant star there. The costumes are strange hybrids of sci-fi, streetwear and desert robes, transforming under the lights from icy white to space gray to glossy yellow.

But the main pleasure of the work lies in the flickering, almost synaptic connections between sound and movement. It begins with a woman walking around in a circle, then steps into the spotlight where she gradually joins eight other dancers in a circle, each taking turns on their own in the center (a classic hip-hop formation), the group’s choppy rock steps are associated with light music unusual. So far so good – but that’s just the setup. There is a scene where, triggered by the clattering rhythms of the Asante, the dancers splash and spring as if from the stretched skin of a drum. Elsewhere, an uncertain voice catches its counterpart in ricocheting gestures, or lo-fi reverb finds itself echoed in the aftershocks of the dancers’ snapping limbs. In one scene where the music loses its pulse and becomes dizzy, a woman seems to blur space and time around her.

It’s not just the dance that captivates: there are also the morphing but never jumbled group formations, sometimes serving as a kind of physical sequence of chords for the soloist to riff on, sometimes itself becoming an object of fascination as the bodies are caught in cross currents, unwind in lines, or jump vertically from a group like basketball players to hit a sudden high note.

Is Cycles ‘going’ anywhere? Maybe not, but with such fine-tuned dancing that makes the scene feel awake and alive, maybe it’s not necessary. What goes is good.