Urban Ballet

Committed to virtuosity and the hybridisation of genres, with Urban Ballet, Anthony Egéa offers us an urban dance that “combines hip-hop techniques and classical touches”. »

This urban ballet opens with the solo of one dancer, performing to Vivaldi’s Stabat Mater. The second tableau unites on stage a hip-hop corps de ballet: 9 interpreters on the floor, breaking down hip-hop movements to Ravel’s Boléro. A trio then enters the stage to a score by Iannis Xenakis.

In the last tableau, an ensemble of 10 dancers emerges to an orchestral composition by Franck II Louise.

“Hip-hop dancers are both curious and passionate. Always eager to learn, over the past twenty years they have tried, tested and incorporated all dance forms: contemporary, traditional Indian, flamenco…

Today, their target is classical dance, its codes, its vocabulary, its repertoire pieces. In recent years they have stated all they have in common with ballet: the same love for feats, virtuosity. Today they deliver the result, with pieces frankly inspired by the academic repertoire.

[…] Anthony Egéa’s Urban Ballet, a piece for 10 dancers, is the result of 15 years’ passion for classical dance that he discovered at a very young age, in the early 1990s, thanks to scholarships and the Cannes dance school.

5 years ago, he fulfilled his dream: that of opening a school, the two basic teachings of which are hip-hop and classical dance. Its first graduates are the Urban Ballet dancers. “I want to give a classical touch to hip-hop”, he explains.

I also try to invent hybrid gestures, by combining, for example, classical dance’s aerial movements with work on the floor. Compared with hip-hop’s solitary dance style, the corps de ballet is also a means of inventing a sharing of movement. United, Urban Ballet, to Ravel’s Boléro, takes up the challenge of the community. »

Rosita Boisseau, « Quand le hip hop et ses danseurs s’entichent de la danse classique »,  [“When hip-hop and its dancers become infatuated with classical dance”], Le Monde, January 12th, 2008.