Overseen by Breakin’ Convention’s artistic director Jonzi D and Athony Ekundayo Lennon as assistant director of the workshops, the Open Art Surgery artists worked together for a week to produce short pieces of work to present in front of a live audience allowing them to feed back directly.
Some of the pieces shown were works in progress, rough around the edges and even a little off tangent (or “requiring minor surgery” to continue with the medical puns) as ten performances that embody the spirit of hip hop theatre - that is using hip hop elements such as spoken word, beatboxing, dance and a live DJ - were performed.
Across the night we had a dancehall piece in complete Jamaican patois (a first in hip hop theatre y’nuh?) by Cindy Claes (Spread Expression) in Di Breeded Pickney, a fusion of beatboxing and samba by Element Dance Company to the prerecorded beatboxing by Marv-Ill and the repeated scenario of teachers telling you to put your hands down to stop asking questions by Andrea Queens.
Touching on a dark nerve Realitie performed a spoken word piece about the ghetto mentality embedded within young men and Jane Sekonya explored how sin is sold to us every way, every day through marketing messages and pre-conceived ideas of how we should be. B-Boy Unique, Crazy Popper and Rik the Most finally managed to say what they had to say in their piece If Only, a trialogue between the three of them about the feeling you get when not being able to find the right words to say something.
For the first time in their history as a company since being founded in 2010 Project G used live vocals for the first time mixed with female boxing in The Fight, inspired by their work opening matches at the 2012 Olympics. B-Girl Candy confronted her coming of age as a breaker, slipping into a red dress and donning heels after the realisation that since growing up life isn't about top-to-toe wearing polyester outfits all the time. Sticking with femininity, Spoken Movement explored female insecurities - an interesting subject when their choreographer is a guy... while GREEdS looked up to another woman, his mother, who was also present and very proud sat in the audience.
The prognosis after this weekend’s Open Art Surgery? More great work! Audience feedback came thick and fast with plenty of insightful words exchanged between artist and spectator.
What’s next for these pieces of work? Each of the artists will have taken on board feedback and will use it to broaden and develop each piece of work - who knows, we might see some of these great pieces in a future Breakin’ Convention or on an even bigger stage in the future!
Check out tweets from the artists as they went through the Surgery process!
Note: If the tweets don’t display automatically (you will need JavaScript enabled - it may not work on mobile devices and some browsers) click here to read them on Storify!
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