Eveoke Dance Theatre's new “Lyrics, Beats, & Bricks” pulses with the thrusting joints and explosive power of hip-hop. To a driving beat, dancers at a recent rehearsal whipped through a unison sequence of precisely cocked elbows and stop-on-a-dime turns.
“Lyrics, Beats, & Bricks,” which opens Friday at the Tenth Avenue Theatre, is hip-hop dance, emphatically so. In fact, for choreographer Ericka Aisha Moore, a central question of the evening-length work is, “What can I give to hip-hop?”
Yet, by building her new piece around that question – which might translate to, “What can I give to my community?” – Moore is stretching beyond the typical range of hip-hop dance. She's using hip-hop vocabulary with its visceral appeal, but taking it out of the entertainment or team-competition arenas; instead, she's following the modern-dance model of using movement to develop complex ideas and make an artistic statement.
A similar engagement between hip-hop and modern dance marks the work of grace shinhae jun, who's also presenting new dances next weekend, in “Fall for Dance: True Possessions” at UCSD.
The concert by UCSD student dancers features work by jun (who prefers not to capitalize her name) and Terry Wilson. Both choreographers are exploring a common theme, which jun describes as “thinking about the things we have that mean much more than material possessions.”
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Eveoke Dance Theatre
“Lyrics, Beats, & Bricks”
When: 8 p.m. Fridays and Saturdays, 2 p.m. Sundays through Dec. 14
Where: Tenth Avenue Theatre, 930 10th Ave., downtown
Tickets: $15 to $20 (pay what you can, walk-up, one hour before show)
Phone: (619) 238-1153
Online: eveoke.org
Dancer and choreographer grace shinhae jun
“Fall for Dance: True Possessions”
When: 8 p.m. Friday and Saturday, 7 p.m. Sunday, Nov. 23
Where: UCSD's Molli & Arthur Wagner Dance Building, Studio III
Tickets: $4-$5
Phone: (858) 534-4574
Online: theatre.ucsd.edu/season/fallfordance
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The intersection between hip-hop and modern dance promises to bring greater depth to hip-hop and fresh passion to concert dance. Fresh passion and fresh audiences, to judge from the enthusiastic young crowd for Rubberbandance, a hip-hop-based troupe from Montreal that performed at UCSD last February.
For Moore and jun, the meeting of dance forms opens juicy artistic territory.
Moore helped Eveoke forge its hip-hop/modern identity with “Fingers N the Hood” (2000) and “Funkalosophy” (2002), dances she co-choreographed with company founder Gina Angelique that became critical as well as popular hits.
More than that, “Funkalosophy” was a phenomenon. The show, which celebrated hip-hop's life-force but challenged the misogyny of the commercial hip-hop world, was restaged in 2003 and 2004, and the 2004 edition became the longest-running dance-theater production in San Diego, with six shows a week for nine weeks.
Angelique left San Diego two years ago, and Moore – who's also choreographed for several other dance and theater companies – has emerged as one of Eveoke's major artistic voices.
Initially, when she approached the project that evolved into “Lyrics, Beats, & Bricks,” she was thinking of making a Christmas show, a hip-hop alternative to “The Nutcracker.” But as she immersed herself in Christmas movies, watching characters like the Grinch took her in a different direction.
“It ended up being a show about the weight of our past and how we deal with that weight, whether it's positive or negative,” Moore says. “And how we need the two to form who we are. If we have too much negative, we become like the Grinch. People can perceive us as evil. And with too much positive, we have no depth and no heart. The show is about finding the balance.”
Dancers in “Lyrics, Beats, & Bricks” symbolically carry their pasts by lugging around real bricks, while the beats of the title are the rhythm of music and dance. As for the lyrics, they come from Moore's collaborator, poet Kendrick Dial, who recently published his first book of poetry, “Da JOurneY NoT Withstanding.”
Dial often sat in the corner of Eveoke's North Park dance studio observing a rehearsal for inspiration (while his 2-year-old daughter was inspired to imitate the dancers' moves), and his original poetry will weave in recorded form through the sound score. (Several poems also came from his fellow artists in the performance poetry group Collective Purpose.)
For Dial, “Hip-hop is probably one of the rawest forms of artistry in terms of telling the truth, how a particular group may look at life and society.”
In “Lyrics, Beats, & Bricks,” Moore draws on the classic four elements of hip-hop emceeing (spoken word), rap music, b-boying (dance), and graffiti, which will cover the set.
Yet she resists pinning a purely hip-hop label on her choreography. “It's hip-hop, but it's my hip-hop, the way I move. I do have a strong modern influence.”
That's how jun feels, as well. “It doesn't serve me to try to divide myself – am I a modern-dance choreographer or a hip-hop choreographer?” she says.
“I have a trio (in this show) that a person that's more familiar with concert dance might categorize as a modern dance,” says jun, who founded the hip-hop performance group bkSoul and often works with Collective Purpose. “But the music is by Ursula Rucker, who's a hip-hop artist.”
A graduate student at UCSD, jun is grappling with such issues not only as an artist but as a scholar. She's working on a Ph.D. with a focus on hip-hop theater, a term she's finding slippery to pin down.
“As I try to create a definition, it's almost impossible, because hip-hop is constantly changing,” she says. “It ranges from underground to very commercial, from things that are directed by the market to things that are people speaking from the real social conditions they're living in.”
She's encountered the idea that hip-hop is simply anything relevant to the hip-hop generation, but that opens up a further problem of definition. Hip-hop started 30 years ago, and it permeates popular culture more and more, so before too long, the hip-hop generation might include everyone living on the planet.
As jun and Moore see it, that might not be such a bad idea. For Moore, “Hip-hop helps me with finding people I can relate to and know I'm not alone in my pursuit of love, in my pursuit of understanding and wanting someone to understand who I am.”
And jun finds an inspiring metaphor in the use of unison in hip-hop dance. “Visually, when you've got 20 people doing the same thing and it's very precise, it has a different quality than if one person is doing the movement. All of them doing such a precise movement at the same time creates such an energy and feeling of power. And hip-hop really is about community.”
Janice Steinberg is a San Diego dance critic.
