Globally popular hip-hop may be but, as practised by Grupo de Rua de Niterói from Brazil, it makes for a daring start to this year’s Edinburgh International Festival dance programme. The choreographer Bruno Beltrão’s brand of street dance will not be to all tastes. Forget crowd-pleasing routines and killer beats.
This is highly disciplined but deconstructivist hip-hop, shot through with dead-pan humour and playfully encoded meanings. The first-night audience didn’t know what to make of it.
From Popping to Pop or Vice-Versa, one of three possible curtain-raisers, was a good indication of what was in store. It featured two bare-chested young men — one a fast, mimetically gifted thug, the other a disaffected body popper — whose precison-cut dancing, mostly executed in silence, came in sudden spurts. This stark, subtle exercise in isolation, tension and slow-dawning consciousness was not standard entertainment. Sitting still as the lights faded, the dancers’ faces betrayed the slightest flickerings of change. My sense is that who they are, not what they do, is what interests Beltrão most.
The all-male quintet Telesquat (a term once used to describe television addiction) upped the experimental ante. Here four neutral-faced dancers carried on in a variety of familiar styles, from locking to funk. But text, projected on a downstage screen or rattled off live by a fifth performer planted in the audience, altered our perception of them and their actions.
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Identities shifted inside fractured narratives encompassing pulpy, war-torn science fiction and wacky conceptualist abstractions. Eventually, with much flashing of lights, the piece intensified into high-pitched, orchestrated chaos involving bodies transported on and off six screens hung on each side of the seating area.
The piece’s barrage of tickling confusions and clever, episodic semiotics was fuelled by a refreshing, questioning intelligence. Clearly Beltrão is using the tools of hip-hop to examine our hyperactive, overloaded society. His latest piece, H2, is at the Edinburgh Playhouse on August 22 and 23.
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