Highly Recommend!
One of the UK’s most exciting, politically engaged and thought provoking dance artists. Botis and company create visceral and daring dance theatre that makes many other companies/artists look stagnant and absolutely out of touch with contemporary issues. Forget placing Botis and company into tiny, lazy, and restrictive press categorisations such as Hip Hop or Hip Hop Dance Theatre. The labelling of great work such as this as Hip Hop or Hip Hop Dance Theatre is highly simplistic and encompasses a continual compromise imposed by the Hip Hop Dance Theatre brand and its financial and cultural capital values (Bourdieu, 2010).
Choreographer –Botis Seva Creative
Producer –Far From The Norm -Lee Griffiths
Music Composer –Torben Lars Sylvest
Lighting Designer–Tom Visser
Costume Designer–Ryan Dawson Laight
Dancers –Far From The Norm -Victoria Shulungu, Naïma Souhaïr, Hayleigh Sellors, Jordan Douglas, Joshua Nash, Shangomola Edunjobi and Ezra Owen.
I look forward to the day when unique and innovative companies and artists such as Botis and Far From The Norm find the space(s) to (and are encouraged to) step out of the theatrical boxes they inevitably inherit as a part of the commercially (and governmentally) funded dance/theatre performance and touring environment of the UK. Given enough unfettered support and spatial freedom they might define a new landscape for performance that is more suited to the precarity and turbulence of the subject matter which they engage with.
Gentrifying City - Cultural Capital - Gentrifying Arts
Important questions arise regarding what artistic, political and cultural compromises are demanded from and made for artists to remain in a funding and mentorship cycle that is dictated by the financialisation of culture in London. This appraisal of artistic work based on economically driven outcomes bears out Jen Harvie’s suggestion that the industrialisation of the arts compromises democratic expression’ (2005: 9). As UK hip hop theatre pioneer Benji Reid observes, this policy essentially means that artistic work ‘is now seen as a product, and you have to have something that sells […] it must be packaged and marketed within a box that an audience recognises’ (interview with the author, 25 June 2015).
(Sadot, 2019)
A note on reviews/reviewers and the insignificance of the UK Star rating system.
Mainstream media reviews are almost unanimously eulogistic and superficial in tone, lacking what critic Lyn Gardner (2011) describes as ‘restraint, consideration, contextualisation and enough space to write meaningfully and thoughtfully about a show’ (Sadot, 2019).
Citations
Bourdieu, P. (2010). Distinction, Oxon: Routledge Classics.
Gardner, L. (2011). When Every Edinburgh Show Gets Five Stars, Rating System Inflation Has Won, Guardian. Available at: https://www.theguardian.com/culture/2011/aug/21/critics-notebook-lyn-gardner [accessed 10 June 2016].
Sadot, P. (2019) Unsteady State: hip hop dance artists in the space(s) of UK dance theatre. University of Chichester.