At Kata, the latest work by the French breaker and choreographer Anne Nguyen, hip-hop men transcend the clichés of hip-hop. Toughness, untouchability and the usual frontal relationship with the audience are exchanged for indirect gestures, delayed effects, diagonals and laterals, double entendres and irony.
Nguyen, himself an adept practitioner of capoeira, ming chun and breakdance, challenges her dancers to transform their battle mode and stop approaching each other purely as rivals. She also extremely subtly manages to link the function of untouchability in combat - making sure you don't get caught - with the unapproachability that comes from surviving in the big city.
Thirteenth century
Anne Nguyen is a petite, super-friendly woman. With her still very young baby on her lap, she gives interviews at a coffee shop in Paris in late March. The night before, fellow journalist Fritz de Jong and I saw Kata in the multifunctional community centre of Jouy-le-Moutier, a 13th-century village, a dormitory town under the smoke of Paris since the 1960s.
By Dutch standards, it is fairly inconceivable for a work selected for the Holland Festival to visit a not very prestigious venue like Jouy-le-Moutier. At least France has its cultural distribution in order. The auditorium is not full, but the audience is nicely diverse with parents and children of all ages and backgrounds.
Vulnerable
A couple of adolescent boys react violently to the performance at times. They cannot stay in their seats and restlessly wander among the empty rows at the back of the auditorium. Not that they are excited because of the heavy beats or fierce lyrics. Rhythms on small drums and other Asian percussion replace what usually comes from the subwoofer. Sometimes even a deafening silence is our part. It makes everyone vulnerable, on stage and in the room.
When I ask Anne Nguyen about the boys' agitation, she has to guess. She was not there the night before.
"There are several things going on. First, I feel we live in prudish times. When dancers do hip movements, an adolescent audience in particular nervously freaks out. But it also has to do with breaking and capoeira, both important sources in my work. You don't touch each other. Being touched is a sign of weakness. You are losing the fight."
Principles
Kata is still full of cruel moves, but they are tapped out of the set pattern of impressing with fast songs in a hip show. Kata is austere and abstract. It makes dancing personal, existential almost. And with a subdued sense of humour, Nguyen puts the machismo so characteristic of hip-hop into perspective. Kata dives deep into breaking and, compared to the average hip-hop show, really demands something different from both dancers and audience.
"Kata" in Japanese means, among other things, form. Katas are performed by martial artists, by masters of combat, used to store and pass on knowledge. Catas express principles, are a formalisation of the practice of fighting. Kata's do not reveal their secrets lightly. Often only by doing them very often can you penetrate to the deeper meaning, really understand the principles."
Not feminine enough
Anne Nguyen (b. 1978) grew up in a family where sports and martial arts was done. She herself was very good at capoeira until she switched to hip-hop and became a b-girl around the age of 20. As a girl, Nguyen never wanted to dance. She had to force herself when friends asked her to join. She associated dancing with having to be seductive and sexy in front of others. And in competitive gymnastics, she invariably got point deductions for not moving 'femininely' enough.
"Breakdance was a really important discovery. I was a tomboy, didn't like dancing while looking someone in the eye, dancing to please and seduce men or an audience. Like you have something to prove about your femininity, can't do without that attention, seek affirmation. In breakdance, as in martial arts, you challenge each other. There is competition and rivalry and a certain equality in going into battle. My capoeira teacher was less happy. He felt I was polluting my fighting style with embellishments, unfunctional movement. In the end, I had to choose and it became breakdance."
At Kata transforms the battle to other forms of contact, to longer, individual lines and to group work. Nguyen rewrites the spectacular of the break to a form that is no less virtuosic but extremely restrained. The toughness of hip-hop is coupled with the zen and self-control of martial arts, and combined with strategies from contemporary theatre and dance.
Video games
"I start the performance with katas that are martial arts and breakdance combine. Then I shift focus to more daily battles, solitary struggles with yourself, with friends, or people on the street, over things that are real or imagined, with people who are very close or just far away. In the last part, we let go of fighting, it really becomes a game. I was inspired by old video games. Of course, most people only fight in video games, or maybe as a sport, but not on the streets, not for their lives."
The seven men and one woman (Yanis Bouregba, Santiago Codon Gras, Fabrice Mahicka, Jean-Baptiste Matondo, Antonio Mvuani Gaston, Hugo de Vathaire, Konh-Ming Xiong and Valentine Nagata-Ramos) have each developed their own background and ditto form as dancers. Kata takes those individual abilities as its starting point, without ever becoming private or explicit. Solos, duets, sometimes even trios pass as if in an endlessly flowing, casually arranged parade. The dancers often look like casual passers-by in a square or other public place, with some acting very purposefully, and others wandering.
Empathy
"All the men are new to my work. Some were familiar with it, others are still youngsters in the break scene. I asked them during auditions, for example, to do footwork without spinning with it, as they are used to. Or to experiment with their intentions, to feel something other than the usual machismo, having to be dominant. Working with empathy, making yourself vulnerable, is really the most difficult thing for the dancers. As is mutual physical contact, touching each other."
Actually quite valuable, that machismo. Many dancers have so instrumentalised their bodies that it hardly matters how they are touched and where, whether they have to spread their legs or perform naked.
"Some dancers didn't even come to the auditions because they knew I would ask of them to touch each other, I mean: with feeling, with empathy. But during the creation process, that changed very quickly. Everyone was allowed to make proposals from their own movement background. We did some contact improvisations. It was really a process of collective learning. Now they no longer think they look gay when they touch each other."
Superpowers
"The last scene, which refers to old video games and superpowers, is also a metaphor for me for the idiocy of keeping fighting all the time. Often a fight overshoots its goal. It becomes a fight for the sake of a fight, in a way very comical, but it also has a tragic side."
Anne Nguyen had already worked for Autarcie (....) (2013) together with composer and percussionist Sébastien Lété. For Kata they assumed the spirit of breaking.
"The spirit of breaking is for me tribal. It's about going to the ground, hitting the floor, earth. With a strong rhythm. Percussion really responds to how break feels. But it didn't have to sound like rock, nor too Asian or Japanese. We wanted a combination of all kinds of percussion traditions, Taiko drums is one of them, coming from everywhere and not immediately, like traditional music, recognisable. And I also wanted urban sound, urbanism, industrial, and trance and heartbeat. And it contains references to 90s rap, such as Wu-Tang. I want the music not to impose one specific feeling or identity, but to create a free space, universal."
Gender
Clear lines and real emptiness, explosiveness and modesty, fixed choreography and improvisation, seriousness and irony - showing the strength and vulnerability of each dancer does not prevent Nguyen from also playing with expectations about identity and social engineering, so associated with hip-hop and the urban scene. Both playing with gender clichés and ethnicity are deployed extremely subtly.
How do you feel about performing as a black group in front of a white audience?
"In France, the suburbs are very mixed, not as segregated, white and black, as in America. Asian, Arab and black children are not only in school together, but also spend their free time together. The French hip-hop scene is mixed, really different from American ones. Hip-hop is an idealistic subculture, a free community, where differences in background do not matter."
"It's not the same everywhere. I worked in New York last year, in Brooklyn and the Bronx, with 20 young people, all black. There they really had a very different idea. They said they wanted to prove with hip-hop that black people can also contribute something good, something positive. A French black hip-hopper would never say that. I am so proud and happy that I was raised with many different horizons around me."
Texts
"I don't know how it is exactly in the Netherlands. But it feels a bit like France. Although you speak better English and therefore in the Netherlands there is a better relationship with the old school hip-hop tradition. French hip-hop is freer in that respect, people just very often don't understand the lyrics."
With Kata break your taboos. Did you set any taboos yourself, things that absolutely could not be in this performance?
"Well, the frontal. And the music, of course. I definitely didn't want hip-hop beats. I do that in all my work. I have a lot of battles done. Those are always with the same kind of beats, the same bpm. In my opinion, that limits dancers in their expression, in their freedom of movement, in what they can do with their vocabulary. You always have to move super fast and efficiently to relate to those beats. It leads to a certain uniformity. I believe that breaking is an independent form of movement that you don't necessarily have to do to hip-hop music or with the hip-hop dress code. In fact, I think it's good to pull the two apart. You can break on any music."
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