"I would like to make it clear that hip-hop dance, it 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". The speaker is Régis Truchy, with Hakim Maïche, Karim Barouche, Ibrahim Dembele and DJ TAL, a 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 originated in American black ghettos in the 1970s. It was the rapper DJ Africa Bambaataa who founded the pacifist Zulu nation movement in the Bronx, which is still seen as one of the key phenomena for the later development of hip-hop culture. In the 1980s, hip-hop arrived in Europe as an underground phenomenon. Disavowed for years by official culture, hip-hop was born as a response to a reality of marginalisation, yet, from the first explosion of the phenomenon to the present day, it has taken on, in its three basic expressions of music, dance and graffiti, the contours of a true art form. In the 1990s, it was the Théâtre Contemporaine de la Danse in Paris that realised its expressive potential and began to open up its programming to hip-hop dance in 1991. Three years later, the Parisian organisation commissioned a collective performance, 'Sobedo, un conte hip-hop', from some twenty dancers from various French hip-hop formations. Successful at its debut, 'Sobedo' was then performed in numerous French cities. This year, the Thèâtre Contemporaine de la Danse gave a further boost to the dissemination of street dance by hosting 'Les rencontres nationales de danses urbaines' in April. Among the forty or so guest ensembles, the French organisation chose a few companies from which it commissioned new creations. The If group and the aforementioned M.B.D.T. arrive in Rovereto with the programme presented in Paris in April and consisting of 'Si... reurs, d'un jour' (If), 'Sequence d'une vie' (M.B.D.T.) and a short new collective known from the collaboration of the two ensembles. In "Si... reurs, d'un jour" the If group, founded in 1995 by three dancers from the Macadam company, tells the imaginary story of three shoeshiners living in an invented city, in which 1950s Paris and present-day New York coexist. 'Sèquence d'une vie', on the other hand, has as its guiding theme the everyday world of hip-hop in its social motivations and experiments with movement. Originating in the United States under the name of be-boying, better known as break dancing, the street dance technique has gradually been enriched with additional terminologies and specialities. If break dance indicates above all the best-known performances anchored to the ground - spins balanced on the head, fast spins balanced on the back - smurt, voguing, hype respectively shift the focus to pelvic oscillations, mechanical movement born on imitations of the poses of Vogue mannequins, and elaborate steps performed standing up. Truchy again declares: 'I really love mimes, illusion, magic, making a person believe that movement is complicated, when it is simple... Controlling one's body, being master of the spirit... When you love something you can live off of, waouh!
