Fashion
Dancing in an Emotional Washing Machine
Botis Seva, a rising British choreographer who mixes hip-hop and contemporary dance, brings his Olivier Award-winning “BLKDOG” to New York.
“Daddy, can you read me a story?”
The voice is a child’s, but instead of a comforting father, we see squatting figures wearing padded hoods. In near darkness, they shake and convulse. All of a sudden, they topple like ducks in a shooting gallery and huddle over the fallen as at a crime scene. Sometimes, they scuttle across the floor like insects on the move.
These unsettling images appear in “BLKDOG,” a dance performance by the rising British choreographer Botis Seva. The winner of an Olivier Award, it is the breakout work of Far From the Norm, Seva’s London hip-hop dance theater company. On Wednesday, it arrives in New York, as Far From the Norm makes its United States debut at the Joyce Theater.
On a recent video call from The Hague, where he was making a piece for Nederlands Dans Theater, Seva, 33, traced the origins of “BLKDOG” to the birth of his son in 2017.
“I started thinking about how I was raised and how I was going to raise a child in this world,” he said. “When I’ve gone through so much craziness, how can I do this?”
“The work is about the frustration of that,” he continued, “and of being a child trying to deal with your emotions. I’m still trying to find my healing through forgiving and letting go.”
