Boys don’t dance

We are all pop stars in our bedrooms at home. We feel so good through a filter, and every bored child quickly improvises the “Floss dance” – the dance move where the arms are quickly swept besides the hips – like flossing your teeth. 
Like the „Dab“, the „Fresh“ or the „Take the L“, the „Floss dance“ is a global sensation thanks to social media. In urban dance, moves like these have been common for quite some time.
Nowadays, new moves come from computer games or apps like TikTok. TikTok and youtube stars, via videos shot in their own homes, show a more diverse picture of young peoples’ movement vocabulary than what is expressed in the classroom or in public spaces. The “made at home” aesthetic and production form enables you to quickly enter a star-making career, but it also submits early artistic attempts to a direct feedback of likes and emoticons.
In “Boys don’t dance”, Düsseldorf dancer and choreographer Takao Baba and his company explore ways in which viral and urban dance moves may pave the way towards dance and the discovery of one’s own movement vocabulary. How much outside influence makes itself felt in body language? How does the gaze of others determine our course of movement? How does shame come into play? Three dancers and one musician analyse each other’s movement language with almost microscopic precision. By copying and variation, a new, appropriated version of the copies comes up every time. They collect an archive of movement, and in this manner, they provide inspiration for each other on stage as well as for the children watching them.

Duration: 60 min.