Dance has many faces, from the perfection and control of ballet,
to the energy and daring of parkour,
to the worldwide enjoyment of ballroom dancing.
I'm fascinated by the connections
between different forms of choreography and agility,
as I enjoyed everything from gymnastics to tap
before I joined the Royal Ballet School.
SYNC by DakinPEx SUBSCENE
In this programme, I've chosen two stunning new works
from artists who also enjoy breaking conventions
and exploring new territories.
Later on, the ice dancers getting as far away from sequins
as it is possible to be.
But first, the team who have taken hip-hop from the streets
to this stage at London's Barbican,
and from here, out to the nation's classrooms.
Oscar-winner Danny Boyle
and Olivier Award winners Boy Blue Entertainment
first worked together on the opening ceremony
of the London Olympic Games.
Really drag and slide, yeah?
Somebody said, "You should go and see this guy - Kenrick Sandy.
"He runs a workshop in Stratford."
So, when you go, tap, tap, toe... # Da-da-da, da. #
I remember walking into it and the smell of work
was, like, palpable.
You could taste it. And there were people from everywhere.
I mean, all shapes and sizes. They were there to work for him.
And he introduced me to Mikey...
..his music guy. And they introduced me
to the concept of Boy Blue, what they were about,
which was entirely in keeping with what we were hoping to inject
into this massive thing - the Olympics -
which is a feeling that the people who were going to really build it
and represent it were the volunteers, were the community.
Now they've reunited to film Boy Blue Entertainment's
Emancipation Of Expressionism,
a piece that has its roots in street dance and hip-hop,
which has been selected as a set work
to be studied on the GCSE dance curriculum.
I think it's amazing times, in the sense that
the style of hip-hop, you know, it never had this as an intention.
When it started up in Brooklyn, New York,
it was a form of self-expression.
Hip-hop is definitely about freestyle.
You're just structuring it, you're putting something around it
in order for someone else to be able to take on your vision
and your interpretation
towards the music.
He sent me the show -
an earlier version of it done at Sadler's Wells -
and it was just like I feel about all his work.
I was just dazzled by it.
By the precision, the discipline, the group dynamic,
the individuality of it within that group.
And so I said yes.
Five, six, seven, and...
I've learned a lot by doing it, actually.
It's been really great to be up close to it, as well.
Some of the propulsive nature of what they've done
is staggering to watch,
but it's actually the beauty of him and Skittles,
what I call the pas de deux.
I have no idea whether that's the right expression,
but it is this beautiful piece with exchange energy between them.
That's a beautiful piece of work, I think.
That's worthy of any kind of choreography
in any kind of context, really. I love that.
Kenrick's choreography draws inspiration from Mikey's music
and a wide range of other sources,
from a stylised rugby scrum,
to the mechanical movement of a Rubik's Cube.
There's a section where eight of the dancers,
and there's always one gap missing,
and that one gap missing is for someone to slot in.
So, as they're slotting in, they're moving in a particular way,
just like a Rubik's Cube.
Drama does not tend to deal in groups, really,
and that's one of the liberating things I find about dance,
and particularly about Ken's work,
is that the group dynamic is so powerful.
It's such an extraordinary force that you experience.
And it doesn't matter whether you know anything about dance.
Probably, if someone says to you, "Do you like modern dance?"
you'd probably go, "Ooh, do I?"
You don't need to... Don't even think of it as like that.
Just watch it. It's an amazing experience,
feeling what the body is capable of, you know?
ELECTRONIC MUSIC PLAYS
# Let, let, let the heat pop
# Oh!
# Let the heat, let the heat, let the heat pop
# Oh!
# Let the heat, let the heat, let the heat pop
# Let the heat pop, let the heat pop
# I feel you're the one, one, one
# One, one, one, one, one, one, one, one, one
# I feel you're the one, one, one
# One, one, one, one, one, one, one, one, one
# The one, one, one, one, one, one, one, one, one
# One, one, one
# The one, one, one, one, one, one, one, one, one
# One, one, one... #
MUSIC STOPS
RAIN POURS
LONG HIGH NOTES
VIOLIN PLAYS RAPIDLY
MUSIC BUILDS
MUSIC STOPS
PIANO PLAYS SLOWLY
ELECTRONIC BEAT
VIOLIN PLAYS
ELECTRONIC BEAT RESUMES
It is brilliant to see such a range of emotions and ideas
expressed through a form that started out
as a pure expression of individuality.
For our next piece, I've travelled across London
to Alexandra Palace Ice Rink.
Here, as the fun skaters head home, Quebec-based group Le Patin Libre
are preparing to film Vertical - a radical piece of ice dancing
developed from a daring new perspective.
Figure skating is so rigid in its rules
and in the public imagination
that we had to break a mould to achieve what we wanted.
So, we break this wall between show and audience,
and we break the wall between what the audience thinks
figure skating or ice dancing or whatever should be
and what it can be through the show that we offer.
At the beginning, it was me hiring figure skaters
for gigs on frozen ponds for winter carnivals in Quebec.
We skated on rock music and we did stunts mostly.
And the five skaters who are now in the group
slowly joined and stayed.
This is what allowed Le Patin Libre
to grow into something more sophisticated, I think.
I did a lot of ice dance competition,
and it takes tangos and waltzes and...
..translates them, mimics them, on the ice.
The contrast of what we do is
we spent time deciding what made skating,
and that movement on the ice, unique and interesting for us.
I use traditional skating because that's how I can jump
and spin and do all these tricks,
but I have to, let's say, uncondition myself,
and free my mind to find other ways of moving on the ice.
We explore together, and it's very as a collective,
and it's a democratic thing.
You have to defend your point sometimes, but it's as a group.
How do we succeed to skate well together?
It's by spending a lot, a lot of time jamming together,
gathering, improvising on some music and getting to feel each other.
And this, along many years of doing it,
created, like, magic between us.
I composed the music for the show.
So, I like to let
a lot of space, also, for breathing, for sounds - skate sounds.
SKATES SCRAPE ON ICE
You can make sounds with the boots. You can sounds with the picks.
So, sometimes, it's just nice to have, like, a little moment
just to let the sound play its role.
Because we collaborate collectively, build our choreography,
and don't have an external eye,
the only way to see that was with a video camera,
placed at the end of the ice.
We found this new perspective and we thought, "That's it!
"That's how we can play with an audience.
"We'll put them where the camera is."
SMASHING
OMINOUS MUSIC PLAYS
SKATES SCRAPE ON ICE
LOUD SCRAPE
PULSING BEAT
LOUD SCRAPE
PERCUSSIVE MUSIC
ELECTRONIC BEAT PLAYS
MUSIC STOPS, SKATES SCRAPE
SOFT, LONG TONES
TWINKLING MUSIC
PULSING BEAT
MUSIC STOPS
SKATES SCRAPE ON ICE
RATTLING
Shh!
CLICKING TONGUE IN TIME
MUSIC RESUMES
MUSIC FADES
The traditional set pieces of ice dancing reworked and reimagined
to make something that feels both coordinated
and much more spontaneous. Really beautiful.
Each of tonight's companies have an important lesson for us all
when it comes to creativity -
rules are there to be broken.