H3: Bruno Beltrão and Grupo de Rua
Sadler’s Wells Theatre
Regardless of the unbearable media hype surrounding the few highs and many lows of Britain’s Got Talent, I am pleased that Diversity, an exciting street dance group, won the competition. The award somehow gives public recognition to an art form that has long struggled to establish itself outside the boundaries of an urban phenomenon by entering, though not always successfully, the theatre arts arena. Within the past ten years there have been many examples of ‘theatricalised’ street dance, and a number of good performances too. Yet the social, cultural and political imprint associated with that dance form has frequently prevented a full integration within other traditional and well-established theatre dance idioms — often in the name of the obsolete, but still ongoing low-art-versus-high-art debate. Most performances seen and reviewed in these pages consist of a mere transferral of the urban dance pyrotechnics on stage, rechoreographed in line with the constraints and possibilities offered by the missing fourth wall.
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