Installation by Ula Sickle (Belgium/Poland) – Looping the Loop – From African Dance to American Hip Hop and Back Again @ National Ancient Art Museum (Lisbon) in the scope of 3rd edition InShadow - International Festival of Video, Performance and Technologies.Synopsis:In Looping the Loop, Dinozord, a young Hip Hop dancer from Kinshasa (DR Congo) traces the roots of this transhistorical and trans-national dance form. Starting from traditional African dance, and appropriating material from youtube clips, he references forms of entertainment dancing, including early Broadway, jazz, the New York Hip Hop scene of the 1970's and 80's, to more contemporary styles, ending with Krump, an LA based dance style also very popular in Kinshasa. Filmed during several full-length takes, where the dancer performed the sequence of styles one after another without stopping, the material is edited in such a way as to communicate the mounting energy and effort of the performer.The sound suggests the solid proximity of a body, the dancers movements and breathing; all elements that are usually dominated by the music, are here made audible. You would expect the amplification of these sounds to bring the dance closer, but it also has the opposite effect. Because the dance no longer identifies with music, a sense of alienation arises. This form – a dance that has alienated itself from the music and which puts the dancer centre-stage – may also reveal an emancipatory power: the hope of old and new forms of freedom, expressed through the bodies of young people. In this presentation in the National Museum of Ancient Arts, the video installation resonates, both in terms of the time span covered by the dances being performed as well as the colonial history which has accompanied it.
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