“I would like to make people understand that hip-hop dance is not just a form of dance, it is a way of being, it is a culture, it is something positive, it is a state of mind”. Speaking is Régis Truchy, with Hakim Maïche, Karim Barouche, Ibrahim Dembele and DJ TAL, member of the French hip-hop group M.B.D.T. A phenomenon that absorbs rap music, street dance and graffiti on the wall, hip-hop was born in the black ghettos of America in the 70s. It was the rapper DJ Africa Bambaataa who founded the pacifist movement Zulu Nation in the Bronx, still felt today as one of the key phenomena for the subsequent development of hip-hop culture. In the 80s, hip-hop arrived in Europe as an underground phenomenon. Unrecognized for years by official culture, hip-hop was born as a response to a reality of marginalization, however, from the first explosion of the phenomenon to today, assuming, in its three basic expressions of music, dance and graffiti, the contours of a true art form. In the 90s, the Théâtre Contemporaine de la Danse in Paris in France intuited its expressive potential and in 1991 began to open its programming to hip-hop dance. Three years later, the Parisian structure commissioned a collective show, “Sobedo, un conte hip-hop”, from about twenty dancers from various French hip-hop groups. Successfully received at its debut, “Sobedo” was then programmed in numerous French cities. This year, the Théâtre Contemporaine de la Danse gave a further boost to the spread of street dance, hosting “Les rencontres nationales de danses urbaines” in April. Among the forty guest groups, the French organization has chosen some companies to which it has commissioned new creations. The group If and the aforementioned M.B.D.T. arrive in Rovereto with the program presented in Paris in April and composed of “Si… reurs, d’un jour” (If), “Sequence d’une vie” (M.B.D.T.) and a short collective novelty known from the collaboration of the two groups. In “Si… reurs, d’un jour” the group If, founded in 1995 by three dancers from the Macadam company, tells the imaginary story of three shoe shiners who live in an invented city, in which the Paris of the 50s and the New York of today coexist. “Sèquence d’une vie” instead has as its guiding theme the everyday world of hip-hop in its social motivations and in its experimentation with movement. Arriving from the United States under the name of be-boying, better known as break dance, the street dance technique has gradually been enriched with further terminology and specialties. If break dance indicates above all the most famous performances anchored to the ground - balancing spins on the head, fast rotations balanced on the back, smurt, voguing, hype respectively shift the attention to the oscillations of the pelvis, to the mechanical movement born from imitations of the poses of the Vogue mannequins, to the elaboration of the steps performed standing. Truchy also declares: "I really love mimes, illusion, magic, making a person believe that the movement is complicated, when it is simple ... Control your body, be master of the spirit ... When you love something you can live by, waouh!".
