Botis Seva / Far From The Norm - BLKDOG

From the youth counterculture of rap music, graffiti and breakdance comes the hip-hop movement, which spread in the mid-1980s from the ghettos of American cities to Europe, becoming established as a new sensibility that could be structured into choreography and forcefully interrogate contemporary dance, invited to festivals and theatres with dedicated competitions and events. The hip-hop world and its young performers, gathered in multi-ethnic groups, speak out for a world dance driven by radical thinking, claims for equality and values of solidarity. From street dancers, the hip-hoppers became professionals of what is now considered a branch of contemporary dance. Since then, the challenge for hip-hop has been to gain recognition as an art form without losing sight of the social, political and racial motivations it sprang from. Thus Botis Seva, a leading figure of the new generation who is constantly striving to reinvent this discipline together with the community of artists – Far from the Norm – which he founded at the age of 19, comes to Italy for the first time with Blkdog, a “very black, very street, intensely theatrical and totally entrancing” show. Built around an original 25-minute core, which won the Olivier Award in 2019, Blkdog developed into its final version after a long multi-phase process in which the tragic events of those years – the murder of Ahmaud Arbery and of George Floyd, the Black Lives Matter movement, as well as the fire at Grenfell Tower and Covid itself –impacted the reinterpretation of the work. Originally inspired by the book Shoot the Damn Dog by Sally Brampton and a personal sense of loss and suffering, Blkdog expanded its gaze out onto the world and brought powerful content into the show. There is no room for doubt as the seven dancers, shrouded in their hoodies, surrounded by a fog that outlines their silhouettes as a low ceiling presses down over them, before slowly rising to liberate their energies to the hammering, dark and unsettling sounds by producer and musician Torben Lars Sylvest. This is not a show made to “change the world” but to bring you the viewer into “a world for you to deal with your suppressed past” (B. Seva).