Grupo de Rua: H3

Dance Theater Workshop

Feb 20 – 23 at 7:30pm

The concept of “moving beyond hip-hop,” probably intended as a clever dance slogan, carries a loaded message that isn’t really evident in H3—a 50-minute occasion of aerobic, athletic dancing by Bruno Beltrão and his 9-member all male company Grupo de Rua.

These racist undertones surge in language used to describe the work of the young Rio de Janeiro based choreographer, who is marking Black History Month with his company’s first US tour. There’s also a lot of hyperbole, which sets the artist up for failure: presenters touting the “international sensation” for “using hip hop to construct something totally new and fresh.” [Translation: He isn't black the way African-Americans are black.] Everyone, except the junketeers, will feel misled by this claim upon seeing the work, which is a contemporary dance piece incorporating street dance elements; that is to say, it’s not revolutionary. There are many artists in the US, Africa, Canada, and Europe who have been working in this vein.

In her review of the performance at Sadler’s Wells in London in June of 2009, Judith Mackrell of The Guardian writes:

“now with Brazilian choreographer Bruno Beltrão, hip-hop is retreating from its image of macho virtuosity, perhaps to discover a more intellectual, enduring logic for itself. In H3 we’re given hip-hop without a note of rap music or one cocky moonwalk.”

And while it’s mostly true that the work “dispenses with heavy beats and macho posturing,” it’s peculiar that even in the marketing language the focus is on what the dance isn’t, instead of what it is. The language is supposed to pass as post-racial, but the tone is more supremacist, tagging hip-hop as “low” or, as “not art.”

There’s so much fear of the black male body, it’s tough to talk about it except within the prescribed binaries. Having a black President has made it easier to deal for some, and for others it has literally pushed them over the edge. With everything that’s going on, it’s disappointing that artists from Brazil with European talking points and knowledge about hip-hop codes has to be imported here to remind us how far we still have to go with our own internal race relations.