Thaindian News

New Delhi, Nov 7 (IANS) Contemporary dance guru Brahim Bouchelaghem from France and a bunch of teenaged boys from the Khirkee Extension slum near Saket in the capital have something in common: they all dance hip hop.

Bouchelaghem, a French dancer of Algerian origin, connected to the hip hop dancers in Khirkee when he taught them head-spins and few acrobatic body movements at a workshop in the capital this week. The boys in turn surprised Bouchelaghem Sunday at the fifth Delhi International Arts Festival with a spontaneous recital at the end of his stunning performance.

“Hip hop is becoming popular the world because of its freedom of movement and flexibility of style… But it is a difficult dance to sustain,” Bouchelaghem, who performed Sunday, told IANS.

“It has to be made more progressive so that the dance form can evolve or else it will be lost for forever… Not too many dancers take it seriously despite its popularity,” the dancer said.

For the group of 18 dancers from Khirkee, aged between 15 and 16 years, Bouchelaghem’s performance was a revelation that would help them develop “new body language”.

“His workshop was very educative,” Astik, the troupe leader, told IANS.

The group, which calls itself Slum Gods, dances “to beat stress for two hours at the end of each working day”.

The Slum Gods are associated with the NGO Tiny Drops. This allows them to use the Khoj International Artists’ Association studio premises in Khirkee for practice.

“Earlier, we danced to express ourselves creatively; but now we pursue hip hop as an art,” Kanhaiya, one of the dancers, told IANS.

They learn from their guru “Hira, a hip hop dancer of Indian origin who has returned home from New York”.

“And masters like Bouchelaghem expose us to the global trends in hip hop,” Astik said. Almost all the boys would like to make it to Hollywood as professional hip hop dancers.

Bouchelaghem, who is looking to fuse hip hop with traditional Indian dances in a choreography, is “keen to return to India next year to work on a new creation”.

“It might be my next project,” the dancer, who is on his maiden visit to India, said.

Bouchelaghem performed “Zahrbat (He Who Cannot Stand Still)”, a hip hop performance about an immigrant’s return to his Algerian roots to pay a tribute to his dead father.

Bouchelaghem included a combination of funk, break dance, acrobatics, ballet and free-style hip hop to enact the game through complex body language. He used enlarged playing cards and an empty suitcase that he remembered his father carrying back with him to Algeria.

“My father went back to Algeria in 1981. I visited Algeria (in north Africa) in 2003 and visited my father’s grave. I wanted to create a performance in his memory… And choreographed Zahrbat in 2004,” Bouchelaghem said.

Bouchelaghem, a self-taught hip hop dancer is known for perfecting the free style hip hop genre into an art. He has travelled with “Zahrbat”- his choreography - to Europe, China, Russia and Korea.

“French hip hop is a contemporary artistic dance genre; different from the old school hip hop that originated in the coloured neighbourhood of Bronx in New York in the late 1970s as an expression of freedom by free style teenage dancers on the streets,” the maestro, who has been dancing nearly for 30 years, said.

Call it a cross-cultural osmosis or melting of socio-cultural divides - performing arts are finally smashing the walls.