Founded in 2001, Boy Blue is a close and enduring partnership between choreographer Kenrick “H2O” Sandy and composer Michael “Mikey J” Asante, and has been a major player in the 21st-century ascendance of hip-hop dance theatre. Their latest piece returns the duo – here joined by Jade Hackett as associate choreographer – to their own roots, focusing intensely on those two alchemical elements that, when put together, can produce choreographic gold: dance and music.
The framework for Cycles is deceptively simple, a kind of tracklist of separate numbers, each initiated by a change of music, each developing distinct dance moods and motifs, and each lit by spotlights and searchlights that might here suggest a turntable, there a distant star. The costumes are strange hybrids of sci-fi, streetwear and desert robes, transmuting under the lights from ice-white to space-grey to burnished yellow.
But the work’s principal pleasures lie in the flickering, almost synaptic connections between sound and movement. It opens with one woman circling then stepping into a spotlight, where she is gradually joined by eight other dancers in a round, each taking solo turns in the centre (a classic hip-hop formation), the group’s ragged rocksteps tethered to the music’s easy offbeats. So far, so fine – but that’s just the setup. There’s a scene where, sparked by Asante’s rattling rhythms, the dancers sputter and spring as if from the taut skin of a snaredrum. Elsewhere, a glitched voice catches its counterpart in ricocheting gestures, or a lo-fi reverb finds itself echoed in the aftershocks of the dancers’ snapping limbs. In one scene, in which the music loses its pulse and grows woozy, one woman seems almost to smear the space and time around her.
It’s not just the dancing that captivates: there’s also the morphing yet never messy group formations, sometimes serving as a kind of physical chord sequence over which a soloist can riff, sometimes becoming an object of fascination in itself as bodies are caught in crosscurrents, unspool in lines, or jump vertically from a clump like basketball players, to hit a sudden high note.
Does Cycles “go” anywhere? Maybe not, but with such fine-tuned dancing making the stage feel alert and alive, maybe it doesn’t need to. It’s the going that’s good.
At the Barbican, London, until 4 May
