If the kids in your neighborhood are trading their pointe shoes for high tops, or abandoning tutus for Tupac, or jettisoning tiaras for hoodies, perhaps Micaya is to blame. The single-named choreographer last weekend produced the 10th anniversary of her San Francisco Hip Hop DanceFest at the Palace of Fine Arts, and at the opening Friday evening (Nov. 21), the full audience and voluble audience response suggested that there may be one kind of dance attraction that remains impervious to a recession. When crowds linger in a lobby after a show, you know you’ve got a hit.
Whether you consider it a genuine American folk art or a synthetic media fabrication, hip hop is not going away anytime soon. Like any performing art, its general acceptance in our cultural matrix generates all kinds of variations on a theme and a vocabulary. The 11 companies on view during this fast-paced, exceptionally well-produced pageant approached their craft with so much imagination that the break dancing one recalls from two decades ago can now look as ancient as the gavotte. One sign of coming of age: the festival now offers master classes with visiting artists. Believe it: there’s a hip hop tradition ’abuilding.
The heady weekend was not without its disappointments. In recent years, companies from abroad have provided some of the more fascinating festival experiences, but, as the ever ebullient Micaya told Friday’s crowd, groups from the Netherlands and Russia were forced to cancel this season, “because of visa problems” (one hopes most of those “problems” will vanish after Jan. 20). The folks who showed Friday made handsome amends.
First, as a replacement for the absentees, Micaya snagged the services of Indiana’s incredible Breaksk8Dance Crew, finalists in the 2007 edition of the touring America’s Best Dance Crews. These five fellows do things on roller skates most of us could never accomplish on our feet, and the sheer nonchalance with which they flew around the PFA stage was never less than disarming. To watch this quintet do something like entrechats on skates is to have seen almost everything.
Soul Sector. Photo courtesy of San Francisco Hip Hop DanceFest.
The very young were everywhere Friday. Approximately four dozen of them, members of San Francisco-based Sunset, animated The Toonz, in which beloved cartoon characters come to life from a television set, floppy ears and all, filling the stage with charm. The choreography by Darnell Carroll and Mario Ponce favored easy, exuberant moves, which threatened to dissolve in chaos, but never did. Later, San Francisco’s Mind Over Matter triumphed over its jungle trappings in Allan Frias’ creepy-crawly And Then There Was Dance.
Small groups made sterling appearances. From New York’s Electric Boogaloos came Popin Pete, who delivered an illuminating and vastly diverting illustrated lecture on the history of hip hop; his retro moonwalk was nothing short of hilarious. Dripping in gold and top hats, two blokes from United Kingdom who go by the name of Flawless, offered a generous episode of physical comedy. Dressed in zoot suits and tiered dresses, Philadelphia’s MopTop Music & Movement introduced a smooth retrospective of Beebop. The connection to hip hop seemed something of a stretch, yet the two couples proved eminently watchable in their own right. The only thing missing was the bathtub hooch.
Garbed in militaristic grays and greens, San Francisco’s all-male Soul Sector provided glossy break dancing moves which, for this viewer, emerged one of the highlights of the evening. In Full Circle Symphony, Micaya’s own group, SoulForce Dance Company favored rhythmic vivacity over unison precision, but the throw-everything-in-the pot style (yes, that was a quote from Nutcracker) abounded in this choreographer’s eclectic wit. The 11 guys of San Diego’s FORMALity radiated health in their testosterone-laden routine. The street cred of Oakland’s Neopolitan was reaffirmed by the company’s 10 dancers in Royal Flush.
Production values throughout were top of the line; the music, mercifully, was not amplified to the pain threshold. But, with the PFA plunged into darkness between acts, it would be a great help, if Micaya announced each group on the p.a. system before they performed.
What was missing in the festival (and, admittedly, I did not see the second bill) was any suggestion of the dark side. True, the country feels that it is in a good place this month, but hip hop is rooted in political and socio-economic realities that are not always pretty or celebrity. Micaya’s fantasy pageant was impressive, but was this the whole story about an urban folk art? Maybe, we’ll get the rest during the second decade of the SF Hip Hop DanceFest.
