6th Annual San Francisco Hip Hop DanceFest
Nov 19, 2004
By
ALLAN ULRICH
allan@voiceofdance.com
New Style Motherlode. Photo courtesy of http://sfhiphopdancefest.com/.
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The most unnecessary advisory of the evening? "Please turn off all cell phones and pagers - if you still use them." Ferget it! Nobody could possibly have heard these beeping electronic devices amid the pounding beat and the constant applause and screams during the opening concert of the sixth annual San Francisco Hip Hop DanceFest, which opened Thursday (Nov. 18) at the Palace of Fine Arts Theater. The audience was youngish, exuberant and substantial in size, belying the dance community's dreary assertion that nobody comes to dance events during the week. They will come if they want to see you. And hip hop, street moves rising cautiously to the level of art, is where it's at these days.
The mood was sweet and joyful Thursday and why not? In six years, producer Micaya has built an institution on the Bay Area dance scene; I can't believe any local dance festival attracts as much interest or as many paying customers as this one. Hip hop is definitely a growth industry; have kids deserted ballet for breaking, one wondered. The festival started with a couple of nights of dancing at now shuttered Theater Artaud and featured only Bay Area talent. This weekend, the festival should fill PFA four times over, with different performers; lectures and master classes have been added for Saturday and Sunday afternoons and the talent this time comes from all over the country. Tomorrow the world.
The festival's press material alerts us that hip hop has already advanced to its third generation and draws the distinction between Old School, New School and True School and we may expect to see representatives of all those schools this weekend. The festival promises a mix of headliners, youth groups and professional hip hop and dance companies. A group jam opened the evening on a casual note, but Thursday's entertainment was definitely slanted towards youth. The 12 groups included Destiny Arts Youth Performance Company, Generation 2, Traci Bartlow/StarChild!, SoulForce Dance Company, Funkanometry SF Dance Company (love that name!), Culture Shock Oakland, City Shock, The Living Word Project, Chain Reaction Dance Crew, Moptop Music & Movement, The Flavor Group and New Style Motherlode.
Performances throughout radiated enormous conviction and enthusiasm, but not every presentation worked as choreography. At this point, one expects an evolution in hip hop. One expects dancers to use hip hop, not merely for the pleasures of the vocabulary, but as a language through which other issues may be explored. We saw a beautiful example of that at the top of the program with Rennie HarrisThe Day Before Hip Hop, performed by Oakland's Destiny Arts Youth Performance Company. Harris, a leader in the field, runs the Puremovement Company out of Philadelphia, and what he seems to have proposed here is a doomsday scenario about a politically committed, but religiously devout society done in by a horrible event; 9/11 ran through my mind. The implication was that goodness has nothing to do with it; prayer will only get you so far. Generation 2 offered more conventional fare, arms slicing through air, big smiles and unisons inflected with little kicks. In Testimony, Micaya's own troupe, SoulForce Dance Company, exploited the possibilities of silhouette and spiced the piece with interludes of spectacular break dancing.
Chain Reaction Dance Crew. Photo courtesy of http://sfhiphopdancefest.com/.
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For pure sensation, there was the technical pizzazz of Onsome, from the Chain Reaction Dance Crew - 10 men in identical black and white duds, fanning out from a straight line into a series of dazzling unisons, tempered by satirical machismo gestures; I could have sat through this one again. Worth seeing, too, were Buddha Stretch and Tweetie (of Moptop Music and Movement); their Buddha & the Bird emerged a delightful essay in robotics, timed down to a millisecond. In the irresistible category: The Flavor Group. Prem Kumta's Capoeiristas and B-Boys - A Tribute to the Circle, a demonstration of martial arts that yielded some of the most viscerally appealing moments on any dance stage this season.
Earlier, Marc Bamuthi Joseph, backed by a 1960s rock combo, warned us that "when a culture evolves, it becomes an industry," and in a sense, he was right. I thought of all those sweat suits and fancy shoes on stage; tutus and pointe shoes never cost this much. Oakland's Traci Bartlow never quite made a statement in her Water solo. In The Toy Store, Culture Shock Oakland presented an ambitious, but only partially successful dream structure, involving a huge cast popping and locking through the night. Ambition also felled New Style Motherlode whose Lightyears was a mishmash of outlandish, Geoffrey Holder-like costumes, sinuous Asian posturing and Broadway mechanics, something like The Small House of Uncle ZZ.
Nevertheless, the San Francisco Hip Hop Dance Fest 2004 provides at least three thrills for every disappointment. I don't know any other dance festival that can make a similar claim.
Performances continue Friday and Saturday at 8 p.m. and Sunday at 7 p.m. at the Palace of Fine Arts, 3301 Lyon St., San Francisco.
