Newcastle-based Southpaw Dance Company are part of a very 21st-century trend exploring the theatrical and choreographic potential of street dance. Director Robby Graham creates works for indoor and outdoor stages, both for Southpaw and with other directors. He and Bradley Hemmings are collaborating on the forthcoming open-air production of Jonathan Harvey’s Beautiful Thing for the finale of this year’s Greenwich and Docklands festival.
Before that, visitors to the same festival got a chance to see Graham’s open-air Icarus, a more purely dance-based work in which you sense hip-hop more as a spirit than a style: in the combative prowess of its performers (five men and one woman), in its punchily rhythmic dynamics and the feline twists of its somersaults and handsprings.
It opens with an arcane collective ritual in which the men – Icarus in white, four accomplices in black, all smeared with shamanic face paint – jab their arms upwards, then brandish white flags, as if to invoke some higher power. Icarus (Samuel Baxter) is bestowed an impressively mythic pair of wings – echoes of Angels in America (Graham was movement director for the 2017 National Theatre production) – and lifted skywards into a hurtling encounter with Laura Vanhulle as an imperious, gold-painted sun goddess.
For the most part this is a well-made, technically very proficient performance, artistically straightforward but certainly effective for its free-festival setting. The ending takes it up a level: Icarus slowly and spectacularly self-combusts into pungent clouds of smoke that disperse to reveal the sun goddess standing proud on a ground littered with bodies. It’s awesome.