Asphalt Festival Düsseldorf: Premiere of "2 Legit"

Asphalt Festival shows “2 Legit”
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Dance to the global summer sound

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Dancer Patrick Williams in the production “2 Legit”
Photo: Eva Berten

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Successful Asphalt Festival premiere of “2 Legit”: The piece by choreographer Baba Takao is a festival of cultural diversity. On the stage in the Schwanenspiegel, dancers and musicians demonstrated how bridges can be effortlessly built between poetry and hip-hop.

With “2 Legit” a very special world premiere celebrated its premiere at the Asphalt Festival. Two dancers with roots in hip-hop connect with world musicians. And suddenly there is this peaceful atmosphere that fits nowhere better than on the floating stage in the Schwanenspiegel, which fortunately is there again this year. Of course, this global summer sound is also the artistic concept of the makers of “2 Legit”, which in the hip-hop scene means something like “real” or “authentic”. They are concerned with the values of a youth culture that surfs through the channels of social media on a wave of self-expression. Hip-hoppers have elevated posing and reviling to an art form that has its dark side in ego rap, because it often glorifies violence, sexism and racism.

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On the floating stage there is at best an indication of this. The dancers and musicians, who come from different cultural backgrounds, rather sound out where and how one fits together and whether new artistic freedom can arise in the interplay.

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In the first half of the hour-long premiere, choreographer and dancer Baba Takao creates a scene full of poetry. Patrick Williams sits on the floor and lets his fingers dance as if they belonged to themselves. As if they had a life of their own, which is solely committed to the rhythm, which is sometimes subtle, sometimes expressive. The name of these complex movements is “Tutting”. This is a style of street dance, which, among other things, the two-dimensional representations of people in ancient Egyptian scripts serve as a model.

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Williams fingers follow the music of the Japanese Shingo Masuda. He plays on a Kanun that comes from the Middle East and has become known in Europe as the Oriental Shiver. The Kanun has a wide range of pitches. Musada elicits a sublime sound from the instrument, into which Williams’ artistry, although it comes from the rough hip-hop genre, blends in without being alien. This scene contains a lot of the basic idea of the play: It is a celebration of equality, of building bridges between the artistic disciplines on the one hand and the diversity of cultures on the other.

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In addition, you should know who we are dealing with here in this mixture of urban dance, Arabic and Japanese harmonies, rich electro beats and the fascinating percussion play of the Kraków artist Peter Somos. Baba Takao, who choreographed “2 Legit” and also appears as a dancer in it, grew up in hip-hop. Today the man from Düsseldorf works primarily as a choreographer. He is attracted to work on an interdisciplinary basis in large productions, for example for the Schauspielhaus Düsseldorf. The piece for the Asphalt Festival is a joint project with Mischa Tangian. The composer, violinist and pianist from Moscow, who studied with Manfred Trojahn at the Robert Schumann University, founded the Babylon Orchester in 2016. At that time he was looking for a “personal answer as a reaction to a changing world in connection with the Syrian crisis”. “With the help of music and an orchestra that unites artists from all over the world, they want to build a bridge between cultures . This is “an affair of the heart” for him and his partner Sofia Surgotschowa. You can take his word for it when you see in “2 Legit” how he suddenly lets his violin, which was just sighing pitifully, ride a humorous attack.

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Patrick Williams is a dancer in Sidi Larbi Cherkoui’s “Eastman” company, where he must have learned that a universal dance aesthetic such as Cherkoui represents is also an attitude. That it is the statement of a global citizen. Cherkoui has Moroccan roots and comes from hip hop. He will soon take over the ballet company at the Grand Théatre de Genève. Patrick Williams also breathed this undogmatic spirit.

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“2 Legit” conjures up diversity, but leaves no doubt that this fragile structure can also crash. More generosity, more humor and less self-reference would be nice, it seems to echo from the stage. The audience thinks that’s great.

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Asphalt Festival Düsseldorf: Premiere of “2 Legit”

Asphalt Festival shows “2 Legit”
:
Dance to the global summer sound

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