Category: Dance

Why do some people put their bodies through extreme acts? Why cross the Seine on a wire or climb a mountain during a thunderstorm? The reasons are probably the opposite of what you imagine: Peace. Calm. Serenity.

In his evening-length “Corps Extrêmes,” the choreographer Rachid Ouramdane works with acrobats, a climber and a modern tightrope walker, or highliner, to explore what lies behind the quest for thrills in such activities — and the on-the-spot mental clarity that comes with it.

When the body is pushed to its limits, when fear really sinks in, you must deal with every part of yourself, including “your vulnerability, your fragility,” Ouramdane said in a video interview from France. “The notion of risk is always present. But it’s not a risk that you don’t consider. It’s almost the opposite, a risk that becomes your partner; a risk that you are used to dealing with.”

Risk, in essence, becomes an accomplice, creating a hyper alertness or sensitivity to the present moment. As the highliner Nathan Paulin says in a voice-over in the production, “To keep my balance on this thin moving wire, I need to be 100 percent focused on everything that happens, on my body and everything around me, so I feel everything more intensely.”

For all of its action, a meditative quality runs through “Corps Extrêmes,” a melding of performance and spoken word that opens at the Brooklyn Academy of Music on Oct. 27 as part of Dance Reflections, a festival sponsored by Van Cleef & Arpels.

During the production, performed by Compagnie de Chaillot, a film of mountainous landscapes, shot from many daunting angles, is projected on the back of the stage, which is also a white climbing wall. In the film, we see the climber Nina Caprez and Paulin, who holds his balance in the wind while on a highline between cliffs; both are rendered diminutive against the natural world.

Performing live, Paulin — a world-record-holding highliner — crosses the stage on a wire as the eight acrobats balance on one another’s shoulders and scramble up the climbing wall. Essentially, they stretch the stage from horizontal to vertical as a dreamy guitar score by Jean-Baptiste Julien plays; we also hear spoken testimonies by Paulin and Caprez about the freedom they find in exposing their bodies to nature. Watching it all unfold is almost like floating.

Ouramdane, a French-Algerian choreographer who, in 2021, became the director of the Chaillot-Théâtre National de la Danse in Paris, has created something not only to watch, but also to feel. This is a choreography, not just of bodies, but of awareness. “When you see the show,” he said, “it’s super soft.”

For New Yorkers, it is a chance to see a different kind of work from Ouramdane, whose American debut, in 2006, was the masterly “Les Morts Pudiques” (“Discreet Deaths”), a solo exploring the death fixation among young people. Ouramdane often focuses on vulnerable populations, exploring the way identity affects people using a combination of movement and text, which is generated from interviews he conducts. He creates portraits that consider both the physicality of his subjects and what’s going on in their minds — work that he continues with the cast of “Corps Extrêmes.”

“You realize that they are not supermen or superwomen,” Ouramdane said, speaking of participants in extreme sports. “They are just very confident with their fragility, with their vulnerability. And that’s what allows them to do those totally unexpected things”; for them fragility can “be a strength.”

Ouramdane first started thinking about extreme sports and outdoor activities after being approached by the French acrobatic collective Compagnie XY to make a work. Compagnie XY knew that Ouramdane had experience working with a diverse range of bodies — older people, athletes, children. And Ouramdane knew that the acrobats’ practice was virtuosic.

“What really touched me was not so much the crazy things they were doing in the air, but the special attention they have to each other,” Ouramdane said. “How they have to take care of each other and the softness of their touch, the knowledge of how to receive a body, how to support a body, and the ways they watch each other. I wanted to zoom in on this sensibility.”

They created “Möbius,” a production exploring murmuration, or the way large groups of birds soar together in a flock, changing direction as one. Their exploration has influenced Ouramdane in his work with large repertory companies, he said, in which he structures moving groups like flocks, incorporating “this kind of blurring composition.” It also influenced his decision to use acrobats in “Corps Extrêmes.”

“You start to see forms, shapes.” he said. “As soon as it appears, it disappears. It’s a kind of permanent morphing.”

He got to know practitioners of extreme sports because of where he lives: in the French Alps where he has been able to observe the world of climbers and base jumpers. “In such sports, many practitioners are considered crazy people,” he said, “people who like to play with death. But they pay special attention to everything that is alive around them: landscape, nature. Their practice is possible because they know how to deal with a cliff, with the texture of a rock, with the modulation of the wind.”

Some of the athletes spoke to him about how in school, “no one teaches you how to enjoy the rain or your face or the wind in your back,” Ouramdane said. “It is a bit romantic when they say that, but those are really the things they work with.”

Of course, in “Corps Extrêmes,” there is no wind or rain for the performers to contend with. Nor are the distance and height of Paulin’s onstage journey anything like what he has experienced outdoors. At first, Paulin said, being in the theater was hard for him: His practice is inextricably linked to the immensity of the landscape and the unpredictability of nature. He has crossed 2.2 kilometers (about 1.4 miles) of slackline at Mont-Saint-Michel in Normandy, a world record; in comparison, a theater is like a playground.

“Normally, I’m on really long lines,” he said. “In the theater, it’s about 20 or 30 meters maximum,” or about 65 to 100 feet.

Replacing a mountain with a stage has been meaningful in other ways, too. Ouramdane asked Paulin to slow down his movement for the production. “When you have to do it slower, you have to be really precise,” Paulin said. “I do what I’m used to doing outside, but Rachid asked me to do it really slowly so that the audience can see every small detail. My job is pretty easy. For the acrobats, it’s really hard. At the end, they run in every direction.”

The presence of acrobats in “Corps Extrêmes” changes the atmosphere, he said; it anchors him. For once, he is not alone. And while there is no wind — which he refers to in a voice-over as “as much a friend as an enemy” — Paulin can tap into something else: the audience.

“It’s strange, everything is flat, but I can feel the people,” he said. “When I’m outside, I do it for me. Like to grab something from the outside, to take something for me. And when I do a show, I try to give it back to the audience.”

Ouramdane is thinking more about audiences, too — or attracting different kinds — especially with his leadership role at Chaillot, one of five national theaters in France, and the first to be focused on dance. Exploring, even further, the relationship between art and sports, he will create several projects related to the Olympic Games being held this summer in Paris, for which the Chaillot Theater is an official site. He hasn’t abandoned creating dances, but, increasingly, his approach isn’t limited to the stage.

“That’s what brings me to dance: It’s to see how dance meets people, how dance faces social subjects, how dance meets all fields, actually — not only in the dance world, but how dance has an impact,” he said, referring to its potential for healing, education and pleasure. “Dance is in all the layers of our society, from weddings to parties or leisure or care. We see dance everywhere now.”

Body and dance practices aren’t just for dancers. They, too, are for everyone. “You know, a lot of people recently asked me, ‘Can you still do a project being in Chaillot, being in charge of such an important institution?’” he said. “I always answer ‘that makes me even more of an artist.’”

There are many ways for dance to have an impact. “You can find a lot of creativity by organizing a festival, by organizing an artistic camp for teenagers — and suddenly you realize that through dance you give the possibility to those teenagers to really improve their childhoods,” he said. “I think that is an art attitude. It’s an art action.”

The thumping music died to a whisper upon Alien Ness’s request. As the veteran breaker — never “break dancer” — stalked and snaked around the room, his many rings caught the spotlight that illuminated the dance floor.

Ness coached a few dozen amateurs — men, women, Black, white, Asian — during his footwork class before Red Bull BC One’s USA National Final, one of America’s biggest breaking competitions, held in August at the Fillmore Philadelphia.

“They say dance is a vocabulary,” Alien Ness said, exhorting the dancers to contort and pretzel their bodies to spell their names. He added, “If it feels like the letter, if it moves like the letter, then it is the letter.”

Alien Ness, a pioneering B-boy born Luis Martinez, joined the Mighty Zulu Kingz in the early 1980s when breaking, along with lyricism, turntablism and graffiti, were among the distinct elements that coalesced to form hip-hop.

In the decades since, breaking has mostly faded from hip-hop’s forefront in the United States, while achieving a modest popularity in countries including Japan, Australia and France thanks to demonstrations from originating dance crews and the popularity of TV dance competition shows. It has largely been left out of the giant block party commemorating hip-hop’s 50th anniversary. Domestically, regional scenes and pockets still flourish, but the biggest convergence points are the corporate-sponsored competitions, like the one Alien Ness patrolled.

Now breaking, born in New York City, is preparing for its biggest international spotlight yet when it bows as an Olympic sport at the Paris Games in 2024. “It changes everything,” Alien Ness said. “Now it’s an Olympic gold medal. Now it’s a box of Wheaties. Now it’s your own Nike shoe. It’s everything that comes with that.”

The new platform has left pioneers and younger breakers to grapple with issues of authenticity that some of hip-hop’s other tenets have already confronted.

‘I don’t think it’s an accurate representation of what breaking is.’

If D.J.s founded hip-hop, B-boys and B-girls offered it pulsating vibrancy and staying power during a period of economic and social unrest in the Bronx. They eagerly anticipated a snippet from James Brown or an Incredible Bongo Band break at block parties and jams presided over by foundational D.J.s like Kool Herc and Grandmaster Flash.

Circles formed. Dancers hit the ground performing dizzying, athletic, explosive moves that were also influenced by the martial arts talents of Bruce Lee. “We were walking around with bald spots on our heads when we were kids,” said Chino Lopez, who took the name Action. “That’s how you knew a kid was awesome in head spins.”

Early groups like Rock Steady Crew, Dynamic Rockers, Zulu Kingz and New York City Breakers exported breaking globally, appearing in movies like “Flashdance” and “Beat Street.” They performed before presidents and royalty. New York City Breakers participated in a 1984 NBC television special, “The Stars Salute the U.S. Olympic Team,” where Lopez even challenged the gymnastics team.

By the 1990s, breaking was surging in popularity abroad. In America, its reach became increasingly regional throughout the decade, leading to Red Bull’s sponsorship of the first Lords of the Floor competition in 2001, and global competitions.

A cash prize of $4,000 attracted top talent. Red Bull sponsored the event again the next year before it evolved into its popular BC One competition, an annual international breaking showdown.

The lure of cash and elite competition drew top breakers, but to many the style practiced at organized competitions, and soon at the Olympics, is distinct from breaking as an art.

“I don’t think it’s an accurate representation of what breaking is,” said Odylle Beder, a B-girl from Brooklyn known as Mantis. “Breaking is a lot more organic, and the way that we do it in the Olympics is, like, ‘Do a round. Stop, look at what your score is. Now do another round.’

“It doesn’t feel real because when someone goes into the circle and they finish your round, you want to go right after to respond,” she said.

The World DanceSport Federation, recognized by the International Olympic Committee during the organization’s efforts to introduce ballroom dancing to the Olympics, is breaking’s governing body. “They really have no clue what we’re doing,” said the longtime breaker Gabriel “Kwikstep” Dionisio. In 2017, more than 2,000 people signed an online petition titled “Get the W.D.S.F.’s Hands Off Hip-Hop.”

Where early B-boys and B-Girls spun windmills and threw out freezes to the funk and soul breaks used by pioneering D.J.s, the large competitions are bound by copyright laws and use nondescript music designed for breaking.

“The music is what drove us,” said Chino Lopez. “These kids just took what we did, and they’re just copying it. And it evolved. Don’t get me wrong. They’re doing crazy stuff now compared to what we were doing, but I see that they’re not living through the music, and that’s very, very important.”

When breaking was included at the 2018 Summer Youth Olympic Games in Buenos Aires, more than 50,000 people attended events that garnered more than 2.5 million social media views, according to the I.O.C.

Kit McConnell, the I.O.C.’s sports director, cited breaking’s diverse global communities as a major factor in the decision to add it as an Olympic sport. Breaking, like the music that inspired it, had been successfully exported beyond the poor Black and Hispanic communities that birthed it.

“Breaking is the lost leader of hip-hop culture,” said Michael Holman, the founder of the New York City Breakers and a conduit in bridging the Bronx and uptown’s nascent hip-hop scene to downtown Manhattan. “Breaking was the thing that brought in people who had no idea about hip-hop culture, and very little understanding of even urban culture.”

Holman, who submitted a proclamation for breaking’s Olympic inclusion 40 years ago, says it is a natural evolution of its competitive origins.

Of course, hip-hop is no monolith and there is no consensus about its corporate embrace. Some breakers are concerned that the Olympics will strip the soul from the struggle that breaking sprung from and contend that breaking is an art form, not a sport.

Others argue that hip-hop is already overly commodified, commercialized and disfigured, its authenticity distilled in fragmented pockets.

And New York, breaking’s birthplace, is left to ponder its place as it preps for its largest audience. “There’s not many moves that you could say that did not come out of New York City,” said Tony Lopez, who went by Powerful Pexster as a member of the Breakers.

“You can be a kid from the suburbs and just see breaking and go to a dance studio and learn it or go to YouTube,” said Oren Michaeli, a longtime breaker known as Flea Rock. “The soul of it, the pain in the dance, the struggle, the funk, you don’t see it too much in these breakers now.”

“It’s dying here,” said Chino Lopez, who’s also a founding member of the New York City Breakers. “These New York kids have no clue. They can’t compete. As far as us having a United States team to go against Japan, Korea, France, we don’t stand a chance. And it’s a shame because we’re the ones that started this.”

Sunny Choi is New York’s Olympic hopeful.

New York City’s best hope of reaching the Olympic breaking stage resides with Sunny Choi, a 34-year-old whose path in breaking reflects the dance form’s expansion beyond the Bronx.

Choi, the only Team USA breaker who currently calls breaking’s birthplace home, was born in Tennessee, the daughter of first-generation Korean Americans who raised her in Kentucky. She had just started the Wharton School at the University of Pennsylvania, reluctantly accepting that a torn knee ligament had ended her lifelong gymnastics pursuit, when a friend invited her to a breaking class. The breakers, Choi found, moved freely and powerfully, outside the rigidity of gymnastics.

She began frequenting the Rotunda, a West Philadelphia church-turned-cultural center where hip-hop showcases taught Choi the art form and its history.

“Breaking allowed me to explore parts of me that I couldn’t do in my everyday life,” Choi said, adding: “I never really had a core group in my life either. So it’s also helped me to appreciate what it’s like to be in a community.”

Still, Choi pursued straight jobs when she moved to New York after graduation, eventually nabbing a lucrative corporate role as Estée Lauder’s director of global creative operations. She said other breakers of her generation had been similarly dissuaded from pursuing dance full time. “The fact is that you can’t make a living off of breaking really in New York,” she said. “So a lot of people just had to move on. People got families.”

It wasn’t until Choi won silver at the 2022 World Games in Birmingham, Ala., that she went all in on breaking, quitting her job to focus on the Paris Games, where 16 B-boys and 16 B-girls will compete in head-to-head competitions. The matchups will be assessed by five judges using six metrics: creativity, personality, technique, variety, performativity and musicality.

Choi is known for breaking with a sly smile. In battles, she usually hopes to hit a planned combination move or two. The majority of her performances are freestyled.

“So many people are choreographing, and it’s all about who can do the most difficult move stronger, higher, faster than everybody else,” she said. “That was always part of breaking, but breaking was also about just self-expression and getting out there and having fun and freestyle was such a big part of it for so many people.”

Breaking will be an unpredictable guest in Paris.

Today, the heartbeat of New York City’s breaking pulsates within Dionisio and Ana “Rokafella” Garcia.

Dionisio was a foster child in New York in the 1980s. He timidly ventured into potentially treacherous neighborhoods as hip-hop spread throughout the city.

Along the way, he met Garcia, who grew up in Spanish Harlem and danced with crews including the Transformers and the Breeze Team.

Now married, the couple formed Full Circle Productions in 1992, running a dance crew through the company and developing educational programming on breaking’s cultural roots. They say they have instructed thousands throughout the years and currently teach invitation-only classes at the Bronx’s Sonia Sotomayor Community Center.

“The attraction of breaking is that it’s your own identity,” Dionisio said. He continued: “When you go to the Olympics, it’s a corporate atmosphere. You become their identity. You’re pushing the Olympics. You’re not pushing hip-hop culture — and hip-hop happens every day.”

Garcia said breaking’s Olympic introduction carried the nervousness and excitement of a drunk uncle’s appearance at a family dinner.

It could go great. Breaking, as she knows it, could be applauded on a global stage. It could also be misrepresented. If a bastardized version of breaking is what draws the plaudits, will it still be a victory for hip-hop?

Alien Ness said he’ll celebrate no matter who wins.

“The first B-boy crew comes out of Bronx River,” he said. “I still live there. I look out my window and I see the playground. I’m like, ‘We going to the Olympics, but this started right here in my backyard.’”

Audio produced by Sarah Diamond.

Watch a TikTok video by @dem_bruddaz, and you might feel a queasy mixture of recognition and disorientation.

You’ll see, say, a person running down a street. But wait — is it a person? Why does he turn at such precise 45-degree angles? Why are his gestures so oddly exaggerated? And is that a Grand Theft Auto theme song playing in the background? Maybe this is a clip from a video game. Or is it some A.I.-generated approximation of a video game?

Though select commenters refuse to believe it, @dem_bruddaz actually are people, the real-life brothers Orlando Murayire, Fernando Shami, Freddy Sheja and Aristide Shema. Based in western France, they’ve built a global following by imitating, with disquieting accuracy, the ambiguously human movements of characters from the video game Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas.

There’s a reason they’re so good at capturing the idiosyncrasies of the game’s animation: They’re dancers, accustomed to identifying and replicating subtle shadings of movement — the kinds of details that make their videos so unsettling.

However unreal the clips seem, making them “feels comfortable to us,” said Shema, who with his brothers grew up immersed in hip-hop, Afrobeat and dancehall. “They just feel like dancing.”

As our screen-filled world seems more like a video game, and sophisticated video games seem more like real life, social media savants have found success with content that deliberately confuses the two. Over the summer, the mainstream internet was both thrilled and flummoxed to discover NPC streamers, creators who earn very real money by repeating the formulaic phrases uttered by video games’ “non-player characters,” or NPCs (“Mmm, ice cream so good”).

But while NPC streaming highlights games’ unnatural speech, dancers are particularly adept at moving like a machine’s version of a human. That helps creators like Shema and his brothers — and the Polish dancers Nicole Hoff and Oskar Szymkowski, who create videos in which they move through the world as NPCs — capture more of what makes video games distinctive, weird and funny. NPC streaming content tends to provoke befuddlement among non-gamers. These dancers’ game parodies, which routinely earn millions of views, are easier for the average viewer to laugh and shudder along with.

Dance has always lived at the center of TikTok, which rode to mainstream popularity on a wave of dance challenges. The video game spoofs aren’t only on TikTok — they’re also found on Instagram and YouTube — and not all of their creators are professional dancers. But Dr. Jessica Maddox, an assistant professor at the University of Alabama who studies social media platforms, thinks that the way they use dancers’ skills ties into a recent shift in TikTok culture.

“To me, these videos hearken back to the fun, silly earlier aesthetic of TikTok that many people seem eager to return to,” Maddox said. It’s a pushback against the once-freewheeling app’s slow march toward slickness and commercialism. “At the same time,” she said, “they obviously take a huge amount of skill and control.” They do silliness with a dancer’s finesse.

It was dance, not video games, that inspired Hoff and Szymkowski, who use the handle @loczniki, to create their first game parodies. As specialists in a style of popping called animation, which mimics the movements of characters from games, movies and cartoons, the duo has experience channeling digital avatars. Their most popular video series imagines what it would be like to have an NPC girlfriend, capturing the strange quirks of non-player characters from The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim. Hoff and Szymkowski discovered the game when it appeared in their YouTube searches for video game glitches.

“All the mistakes — the character getting stuck somewhere, or walking in one place because there’s a wall — we hadn’t played Skyrim, but we knew those would be funny to imitate,” Hoff said. (After their videos began to go viral, the pair did start playing Skyrim, searching for further inspiration.)

Why do video game avatars move so oddly? Sometimes the humor derives from the nature of gameplay. In most games, a limited animation system is trying to keep up with the input of a player mashing button after button on a control. That leads to characters doing things real people would never do: crouching suddenly, turning rapidly in different directions, continuing running motions after hitting a wall.

While animators can help those movements look smoother and more natural, doing so often makes playing the game harder. “Gameplay animation is a lot of jigsaw pieces,” said Melissa Shim, a senior animator at Riot Games. “In real life, when you stop moving, you gradually come to a stop. But in a game, that gradualness would take away from responsiveness, making the player feel less in control.”

Many video game characters also have a floaty quality to their movements, as if drifting underwater. That has partly to do with how animators use data from motion-capture sessions with human actors.

When motion-capture sensors record a person’s movements, “there’s something lost,” Shim said. “There are slight variations and gaps in the data that can make the movement feel softer and slower.” Or the issue might be more analog. Motion-capture artists sometimes have to wear bulky battery packs around their waists, which they avoid disturbing by floating their arms slightly away from their bodies — an NPC signature.

Animation and dance are linked in their close analysis of bodily movement, and some of these issues sound like problems dancers could help solve. Game studios do sometimes bring in dancers, as well as athletes and stunt professionals, for motion-capture sessions. Shim says she’ll frequently look at videos of dancers when choreographing complicated attack combinations.

The game-parody videos close a kind of loop: They feature dancers imitating digital avatars based on other talented human movers. (In a particularly surreal twist, earlier this year, Hoff and Szymkowski donned motion-capture suits to create digital NPCs based on their imitations of NPCs.)

Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas came out in 2004, and The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim in 2011. Over the last decade-plus, technological improvements have made it easier to address the glitches and peculiarities that made earlier game animation so strange. Rather than manually assembling combinations of motion-capture data to fit various scenarios, for example, animators can now use motion-matching algorithms to scan a large library of data for relevant movement sequences, which both speeds up the animation process and helps create a greater variety of movement.

Since today’s video game characters move more naturally, nostalgia — which TikTok trades in heavily — is part of the appeal of the Grand Theft Auto and Skyrim spoofs. Shema said he and his brothers deliberately chose to riff on Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas rather than the more recent Grand Theft Auto V. “We wanted more people to relate — older people who played the game as kids, younger ones who think it looks funny,” he said.

The success of these videos has led to notable opportunities for their creators. Shema and his brothers have made Grand Theft Auto-inspired ads for Kia and Gucci. Hoff and Szymkowski built an entire course that will teach you how to move like an NPC, and have appeared in a music video. They’re also working on longer scripted NPC films for YouTube.

And these creators continue to make game imitation videos that regularly rack up millions of views and hundreds of thousands of likes. The internet has an insatiable appetite for content that toes the increasingly blurry line between the real and the digital, and dancers are especially good at blurring that line.

“The best compliment we can get on our videos,” Hoff said, “is someone saying, ‘Oh, at first I thought these were real people. But now I see it’s fake. It’s from a game.’”