The dancers of Boy Blue, a London hip-hop dance company, move with extraordinary precision. When they hit a beat, they hit it as one. Between beats, they can seem to speed up or skip ahead, as if someone were dragging a video scroll bar. The effect is digital-age in appearance, but it’s the result of an age-old practice: the painstaking, detail-obsessed pursuit of perfect synchronization, body with body, and dance with music.
That tight relationship between sound and motion can be traced to the tight relationship between the company’s directors: the choreographer Kenrick Sandy (also known as H20) and the DJ and electronic composer Michael Asante (who goes by Mikey J). They met when they were teenagers, and they weren’t much older than that when they founded Boy Blue at an East London youth center. Since that day, in 2001, they have built it into one of the most influential companies in British hip-hop dance-theater.
The dance part of that equation is a mix of styles: the snap, bounce and stop-motion articulations of popping and locking, the in-your-face aggression of krump. The theater part has tilted dark and dramatic, with an aesthetic on the dystopian end of Afrofuturism and an emphasis on the trauma experienced by Black people. In “Black, Whyte, Gray,” which the company performed at Lincoln Center in 2018 and 2019, the precision suggested trapped robots and gang activity out of a “Mad Max” movie. “Free Your Mind,” a recent stage collaboration with the director Danny Boyle, updated “The Matrix.”
But Boy Blue’s newest creation, “Cycles,” is something of a return to roots. A co-production of the Barbican Center in London, where Sandy and Asante have been associate artists since 2009, and Lincoln Center, where it will have its New York premiere on March 27, the hourlong work is dense with dance.
“Let’s put narrative aside,” Asante said on a recent video call, recalling his idea for the work. “Let’s be totally uncompromising about the sonics, and let’s just make this pure dance, top to bottom.”
As a title, “Cycles” alludes to a structural idea, a loose scaffolding of passing seasons. But the word has a deeper resonance with the company’s history.
In rehearsals this time, there was another voice in the room — an associate choreographer, Jade Hackett. Hackett was new to the role but not to the company. She got her start around 20 years ago as a dancer with Boy Blue.
“Before that I was dancing on a community level,” she said on the video call, which also included Sandy. “In hip-hop, you need that experience, that spirit of taking part in social gatherings, parks, people’s houses. But when I joined Boy Blue, it felt like if I went to study at Juilliard. There was an expectation of being professional.”
When Hackett, who grew up in East London, performed in Boy Blue’s production of “Pied Piper,” an Olivier Award-winning hip-hop take on the fable, in 2006, it was her first experience in a theater apart from school trips.
“I never went to the theater as a kid,” Hackett said. “That’s not an activity that people in my community did.” Being onstage, she said, made her think “‘What is this? This is yummy.’”
She became accustomed to the taste, and because her experience with Boy Blue exposed her to fancy spaces like the Barbican, she doesn’t feel intimidated by them, she said. (Her next project is choreographing a Royal Shakespeare Company production of “Titus Andronicus.”) Dancing with Boy Blue required learning how to act, and in rehearsals, the opportunity to watch Asante build music from scratch and break it down had the impact of an advanced music course, she said.
“I’ve been given so many strings to my bow, almost without knowing it,” she said. “That’s the kind of training you can’t pay for, love.”
For Hackett to return to Boy Blue and, in her words, “pour into a company that poured into me,” is the completion of a cycle. Such cycles are part of Boy Blue’s larger aims.
The company grew out of a battle-dance crew that had fallen apart. At the beginning, Sandy said, the ambition was less to create a conventional dance company than to share a love for dance and, in his case, the ways it had boosted confidence and self-esteem.
Asante said that he and Sandy were “young people leading young people.” They wanted to create opportunities — classes, chances to perform — for youth in their community.
“And then it just grew,” Asante said. More and more people started coming to their Sunday classes in East London, some as young as 5. As Boy Blue hired dancers on a project-to-project basis and its work gained more and more attention — a lot of it when the group helped Boyle with the opening ceremony of the 2012 London Olympics — the weekly classes remained a constant.
In the decades since, hundreds have trained with Asante and Sandy and the teachers they’ve taught, with many of them going on to careers in dance. The classes are a pipeline not just into the Boy Blue company but also into several youth ensembles. Asante and Sandy developed a mission and a motto: “Educate, Entertain, Enlighten.”
So training artists like Hackett has been a Boy Blue goal all along. Having one return as a choreographer, though, was a first. Hackett had to insert herself into the two men’s creative process, into conversations that were themselves cyclical.
“We started with the music,” Asante said. He wanted it to be more directly connected to what he called “the root of hip-hop.” He didn’t mean James Brown samples and Run-DMC. He meant British offshoots, like grime, garage and jungle. Although one track for “Cycles” samples the American producer Timbaland, most of the sound loops are decidedly British.
“Probably in a great way but also in a bad way,” Asante said, he decided to give Sandy the stems, or building blocks, of all the many tracks he had created for the show. “So I would walk into rehearsal and discover that a track I gave him is now a few counts longer,” he said, making Sandy laugh.
“I’ve learned so much from Mikey,” Sandy said. Now Sandy can look at a music file on a computer and “see the waves, see when the beat is coming.” Now he’s “not just making a move for the sake of it,” Sandy said; he’s choreographing to the bass, to the snare, to different slivers of the beat. “You tailor the choreography,” he said, and these days he also tailors the music.
Hackett entered this process too. (As did the group’s longtime rehearsal director, Nathaniel SB Impraim-Jones.) “Jade and I were bouncing off each other,” Sandy said. At one point in rehearsal, he had created a hand-gesture combination, while Hackett had made a footwork sequence. Sandy proposed that hands and feet should join, then left the room. When he returned the next day and saw the result, “I was like, ‘Yeah,” he said, nodding his head.
And so it went, round and round. Sandy and Hackett would alter a track, and Asante would say, “No, it doesn’t sound right.” Asante would fix the track to his liking and give it back to the choreographers, who would apply it to their movement and say, “No, it doesn’t feel right.”
Eventually, they would hit upon combinations that satisfied everyone, hard-won discoveries that made all three sigh with the satisfaction of finding something that’s identifiable only when it appears. Then everyone said, “Yeah.”
The creative process involved others, of course, most crucially the show’s nine dancers. One challenge in casting was that “Cycles” requires dancers who can execute intricate choreography with Boy Blue’s signature precision, but also, because the work includes many spots of improvisation, show off individual style and virtuosity in freestyle fashion.
Those two modes require different skill sets, Hackett said: “It can take a lifetime to really get brilliant at one.” While Boy Blue usually casts with auditions, the “Cycles” dancers were handpicked for this dual competency. Almost all the dancers, Hackett said, were “homegrown,” having come up through the Boy Blue system. “This company grows people who are brilliant in choreography and can hold their own in freestyle,” she said.
Boy Blue, however, is no longer the young leading the young. Asante and Sandy are over 40, Hackett just under. Ask them about how hip-hop has changed during their careers, and you’ll hear a lot of back-in-the-day talk about technology — about exchanging CDs, not digital stems, about legendary moments before camera phones and YouTube, when if you weren’t present, you missed out.
“We have to understand that that time is gone,” Asante said. “The energy was so different.”
But wasn’t that the aim of “Cycles,” to try to cycle back to that original energy? When the collaborators finally found what they were looking for, wasn’t it that feeling from their younger days?
“Fact,” Asante said. “Fact.”
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