“Daddy, can you read me a story?”
The voice is a child’s, but instead of a comforting father, we see squatting figures wearing padded hoods. In near darkness, they shake and convulse. All of a sudden, they topple like ducks in a shooting gallery and huddle over the fallen as at a crime scene. Sometimes, they scuttle across the floor like insects on the move.
These unsettling images appear in “BLKDOG,” a dance performance by the rising British choreographer Botis Seva. The winner of an Olivier Award, it is the breakout work of Far From the Norm, Seva’s London hip-hop dance theater company. On Wednesday, it arrives in New York, as Far From the Norm makes its United States debut at the Joyce Theater.
On a recent video call from The Hague, where he was making a piece for Nederlands Dans Theater, Seva, 33, traced the origins of “BLKDOG” to the birth of his son in 2017.
“I started thinking about how I was raised and how I was going to raise a child in this world,” he said. “When I’ve gone through so much craziness, how can I do this?”
“The work is about the frustration of that,” he continued, “and of being a child trying to deal with your emotions. I’m still trying to find my healing through forgiving and letting go.”
Seva’s childhood began in South London, where he was born to Congolese parents. He was raised, mostly by his mother, in Dagenham, an East London working-class town where many Africans have settled in recent decades. He fell into hip-hop dance in secondary school, rehearsing for talent shows “because it got you out of trouble,” he said. The music drew him in. The audience response kept him coming back.
A youth club near his home offered free space. “I spent pretty much every day there,” he said — making up dances and filming himself. With friends he met at the club and in a youth company, he formed a crew and started entering street dance competitions. Then he attended Breakin’ Convention, an annual hip-hop theater festival at Sadler’s Wells, London’s leading theater devoted to dance.
“I thought, ‘Wow, this is what I want to make,’” Seva said. “It wasn’t just the moves. It was people telling stories and evoking emotion through theater.”
He began applying to choreography development workshops. In Back to the Lab, a workshop run by Breakin’ Convention, he was mentored by the contemporary choreographer Jasmin Vardimon.
“I think that helped bridge the language and help me find different ways of telling stories,” Seva said. “I was influenced by contemporary stuff and all kinds of street dance. I was watching and copying and taking as much as I could.”
His crew coalesced into a company. One of the first to join was Victoria Shulungu, a street dancer with competition experience. Early on, she recalled, Seva showed her a photo and asked her how it made her feel. She told him that it disturbed her, that it made her itch. He asked her to express that feeling through movement.
“I had never done something like that,” Shulungu said, “but the moment I tried it, it opened up a new world of communication. That’s when I realized that this world of movement is far bigger than I expected.”
Alistair Spalding, the artistic director of Sadler’s Wells, which recently added Seva to its starry group of associate artists, said that he saw Seva in Breakin’ Convention performances, but that he really started paying attention when Seva participated in Wild Card, a series that allows young artists to curate an evening in the theater’s studio space.
“It was hip-hop, but he was taking it to a more theatrical place,” Spalding said. “It’s more interior. It’s not pandering to us, but you can’t miss the power of what’s going on.”
In 2018, Seva was one of three choreographers commissioned for a Sadler’s Wells anniversary program on its main stage. His contribution — a 30-minute first draft of “BLKDOG” — won Best New Dance Production at the prestigious Olivier Awards, beating out a work by the illustrious choreographer William Forsythe. Among those most surprised was Seva, who had not heard of the awards before learning that he was nominated.
All this sounds like a happy tale of talent finding support and a path. But about the darker parts of his past, Seva was more circumspect, alluding only vaguely to childhood trauma, which informs “BLKDOG.”
“Not growing up with my father was troubling,” he said. “That child voice that says ‘Daddy, can you read me a story?,’ that’s me thinking, ‘Man, I wish I was my son, who has me.’”
The full 65-minute work is fragmentary and atmospherically cinematic, image after image flashing in the darkness. Seva, who doesn’t perform in the work anymore, said that the title isn’t, as many people assume, a reference to the “black dog” of depression, a phrase commonly associated with Winston Churchill. Seva was thinking more of underdogs, dark horses, black sheep.
The dancers make gun shapes with their fingers and wield a baseball bat. They simulate sex and sexual abuse. This violence and sex, expressed through the muscle isolations of popping and locking and the explosive aggression of krump, is continually mixed with suggestions of childhood. The dancers’ costumes acquire the floppy dragon scales and crown of Max in “Where the Wild Things Are.” In their creepy insect walk, there’s something tender, or comic, about the way their knees piston — like those of adults riding tricycles, or mini-BMX bikes, as the dancers eventually do.
Performing the work, Shulungu said, is like being inside a physical and emotional washing machine. “You’re tackling very dark subjects that maybe you haven’t even shared with close family members,” she said. “It’s like you’re bleeding.”
For audience members, she continued, “it’s almost like a scary movie, where you’re on the edge of your seat waiting for something to happen, but that moment never lands.”
Titillation, though, isn’t Seva’s aim, he said: “If there’s one person in the theater that goes, ‘Oh, man, I need to go to therapy’ or ‘I need to talk to my dad or someone I haven’t seen in a long time,’ that’s the goal.” A voice at the end of “BLKDOG” says, “It’s OK.”
Making the work, he said, was itself a form of therapy — as audiences might infer from a therapist’s voice in the show that says: “Maybe we should start with how you’re feeling,” and, later, “What happened that day wasn’t your fault.”
Partly because of the pandemic, it took a while for Far From the Norm to make a follow-up. “Until We Sleep” debuted early this year and will tour Europe just after the group’s North American tour of “BLKDOG.” Between productions, the company has been making short films. The language of film, Seva said, is a big part of how he tells stories onstage.
In those films, parenthood and childhood are also fraught themes. “Can’t Kill Us All,” which he made during the lockdown period of the pandemic, juxtaposes images of him playing with his infant son against solo moments in which he looks as though he’s trying to break out of the straitjacket of his own body. An earlier film, “Reach,” cuts between his son in a crib and himself running away, his dancing expressing his turmoil.
“Children are the heart of my work and the heart of my life,” he said. In addition to their 7-year-old son, he and his partner, Lee Griffiths, who is Far From the Norm’s executive producer, now have twins.
“Sometimes I have to explain to people without children that I have to take the kids to school and make their lunches,” he said. “Even if I’m rehearsing, if I get a call from the nursery, I have to go and pick them up.”
Not all artists who are parents put that experience into their work, but Seva says he feels compelled to. “I also like to put it in,” he said, “because it shows people that my life isn’t just dance.”
Still, dance is a lot of his life. And he hasn’t given up performing just yet. His next project is a solo show.
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