THERE ARE few dance performances that leave you with your heart beating out of your chest and enthusiastic swear words in your mouth.
FlexN is a thunderbolt so concentrated with raw, free-wheeling passion it knocks you sideways and jolts you back up again. Whoops, hollers and unsolicited clapping from the audience is allowed here. You want to stand up and dance. You want to shout from your seat. Maybe grip the thigh of the person next to you when the bone-breakin’ gets particularly bendy (I did all of these things).
The Flexers look its audience directly in the eye (sometimes menacingly) as if to say ‘tonight, you feel what we feel’.
This is a Manchester International Festival stand-out.
Brooklyn-based dance crew The D.R.E.A.M Ring arrived in Manchester to communicate the language of FlexN - a dance style born out of the streets of New York and the dancehall clubs of Jamaica - to an audience illiterate to the experience. As a result its malleable-bodied dancers come with an extensive dance vocabulary. Think a high-octane combination of action verbs: 'Get Low', 'waving', pausin’, 'connecting' and the show-stopper, bone-breakin’. There's even nods to traditional ballet with well-executed fouettes and trainer clad bone-breakers en-pointe.
After a week of big budget performances and extravagant digital displays, FlexN commanded less from the Manchester International Festival money pot with a bare stage, casually-dressed dancers and no big Bjork style prestige. Yet with less to play with for their first European performances, the twenty enigmatic dancers are all the animation it needed. The Flexers look its audience directly in the eye (sometimes menacingly) as if to say ‘tonight, you feel what we feel’.
'Tonight, you feel what we feel' To echo FlexN’s celebrated pioneer and director Reggie Roc Gray ‘a FlexN performance is completely cinematic’.
The narrative is almost Shakespearean - almost. Staged with wild-eyed Machiavellian characters (bone-breaker Slicc portrays sinister believably), tempestuous love-triangles set to soft lyrical interludes and brutish gangs at war battling to a bass-laden hip-hop soundtrack (from old-school Justin Timberlake to Lil Wayne), the message eludes towards America’s current racial tensions; the mood dips and peaks but never loses its vitality.
A testament to FlexN's dancers, and in turn Festival Director Alex Poots who came across the dancers in New York, was the collaboration with the largely untrained Manchester based talent. The collaboration was completely unified; there was no ‘them and us’.
FlexN also provided a rare opportunity to read a street dance performance critically. Sure, it could have benefited from cleaner staging and more defined roles but anymore direction would have lost FlexN’s heart - the genre should never be lost to over-rehearsed technique. The success here was capturing the unbridled and unrestrained energy from ‘the streets’ and translating it into a stage-worthy performance.
To end, Flexers put on a freestyle before commanding Reggie to show the audience how it's done - a surprise of the entire show, he was excellent.
Go see this, Manchester. Challenge yourself to stay in your seat.
FLEXN continues at Old Granada Studios, Manchester.
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