'They want to put everything on the line. In Western Europe, that desire is stupidly lacking': Algerian B-Boyz vulnerable and unyielding in Nya

Choreographer Sofiane Abou Lagraa, who grew up in the Ardèche and made his mark in French modern dance, was encouraged by his wife Nawal to do something in Algeria, the country of his parents. This eventually led to the task of reviving Algeria's National Ballet. The Abou Lagraa couple decided not to work with the existing, classically trained cast, but to add a contemporary section to the Ballet and recruit the dancers for it from the Algerian hip-hop-scene. Now he visits the Holland Festival With the French-Algerian co-production Nya , combining achievements of modern and classical dance with hip-hop and, in addition, the Bolero by Ravel sounds alongside Houria Aïchi's Algerian evergreens.

As unimaginably spectacular as the moves of the men in Nya are, so uninhibited are the hip-hoppers on stage as dancers. Which is not surprising, considering that not so long ago, they were displaying their skills on street corners and squares. Hip hop, thanks to Youtube has become the dance language of choice for young people all over the world. It is do-it-yourself dance that does not require an academic degree and where virtuosity and joy go hand in hand. In battles, ridicule and collective experience encourage mutual competition and personal handwriting. Especially when combined with lyrics and music, hip-hop gives a voice, a stage and an audience to people around the world to whom little else is asked.

That is located in Algeria, which is far from having recovered from years of civil war. 'Les années noires' officially lasted from 1991 to 2001. The terror robbed Algeria of any public life. At least 150,000 people died in the violence between government forces and Islamists, while the West skillfully looked the other way. 21st-century Algeria, after a decade of peace, still offers bitterly few prospects, especially to the youngest generations. No sweet spring seems to be able to do anything about this, for now.

Abou Lagraa held an audition in 2009 in Algiers and chose ten young men from as many as four hundred applicants. Shoe salesman, florist, hairdresser, street hawker or system administrator, all were offered a year's salary in exchange for a tough training programme of classical and modern techniques and yoga. "All my life I have wanted to open up and change the classical side of my mother," says Boussouf Mokhtar, the only dancer with roots in theatre dance.

It is cutting edge if you want to make contemporary dance in Algeria. A bared upper body, a man and a woman together on stage: what is taken for granted on the northern side of the Mediterranean still causes scandal in Algiers. "The fact that I come from a Muslim family and Nawal is a Moroccan Berber sometimes already causes a stir," says Sofiane Abou Lagraa after a performance in Rouen, earlier this year.

He looks cheerful, but is aware of the role he has taken on: bridge-builder between France and Algeria, elite and people, theatre and street, the delicacy of his art and the raw reality of hard life in Algeria. "The crazy thing is that I would never have been able to make this work in France. In Algeria, there is a huge hunger, a deep need to finally do something again. People are willing to go very far, to take risks, to risk everything. In France or any other Western European country, that need, that desire is stupidly lacking."

Although hip-hop seems typically a sport for tough individuals, the B-Boyz from Algeria found it difficult to dance solo, so without their mates around them. "It is the community that carries these people, shapes and nurtures them. They survive on that. Demanding and getting attention all alone on such a big stage frightened the men. It seemed so inappropriate."

And why only men? Abou Lagraa: "I don't want to overturn too many sacred cows at once. I didn't want to make a "j'accuse", but neither did I want to be endlessly restricted by all kinds of taboos. So starting with men, I also try to show them from a vulnerable or sensual side. I want to tempt people to take their own bodies and their individual experiences more seriously. The women I just do next time."

The hard work and diplomatic wrangling has not been in vain. The premiere of Nya, in the summer of 2010 in Algiers, was national news for days and the play received a more than enthusiastic reception, including in France, where the play is not infrequently played in front of auditoriums of 1,000 people.

Abou Lagraa's modernism, which echoes the work of choreographers such as Limon, Graham and Cunningham, puts pure movement first. But instead of modern, disciplined dancers, it features Nya the race improvisers of the street on stage. They are not used to piling movement on movement, deconstructing or being neutral with an expansive face to produce pure dance, and certainly not over classical diagonals, to Ravel's Bolero or with sung Quranic verses ringing in their ears.

Very subtly, Abou Lagraa links different pasts and traditions: North and South, coloniser and colonised. He connects the cosmopolitan Algiers of the past, where Béjart passed by, with the everyday world. Béjart's eroticising men's ballets (Ravel's Bolero was the last international play at the National Theatre of Algiers in 1985) flow together with Houria Aïchi's nostalgic songs and sung Koranic verses that offer another form of revival and comfort today.

The show is a great example of 'the best of both worlds'. With their attitude and background, the dancers' personal engagement and idiosyncratic, powerhouse movement language refresh the purist aesthetic of modern dance. Conversely, Abou Lagraa, who chopped with the axe more often, has managed to transform the frontal and socially focused, direct dancing of the men into more subtle, vulnerable and poetic gestures, for which there is probably no room on a street corner or square in Algiers.

Through it all shines the recent history of violence and death, deprivation of liberty, neglect and hopelessness. Physical virtuosity helps, as an antidote. In this, ballet, hip-hop and circus are similar. Ultimately, it is the tradition of modern dance that offers a solution here: nowhere is pain made explicit, but when the men occasionally give in to gravity and not only manage to resist it deftly, the many forms of falling, lying down and getting up become moments to take quite literally.

website: www.aboulagraa.com

The show plays Wednesday 8 and Thursday 9 June at Stadsschouwburg Amsterdam, Grote zaal. Commencement 20:30. Booking