Animation dance: hip-hop’s living cartoon marvels

Maybe once or twice a decade a new style or practice is identified within contemporary dance – postmodern dance, release technique, dance theatre, conceptual dance. But it’s a slow process compared to the vivid reinvention and renaming that goes on in hip-hop dance.

Even though I can’t keep pace with the speed of its evolution, I have to love a dance form that can morph into krumping, waacking, flexing and tutting (a genius reference to King Tut and the vaguely Egyptian angularity of the dancers’ poses). Last week, I also discovered animation dance – a sub-category of popping that combines a range of skills like strobing, robotics and gliding, and claims inspiration from film animation in its use of splashy dramatic poses and jerky, freeze-frame dynamic.

I’m guessing that the proliferation of hip-hop styles has a lot to do with the fact that many practitioners focus on developing and perfecting a particular spectrum of skills. They can name themselves a popper, b-boy or krumper, while a contemporary dancer is usually just a contemporary dancer.

But there’s still a richness within these skill spectrums, as animation dancers like Cyrus “Glitch” Spencer, a finalist in the American 2012 season of So You Think You Can Dance, and Javonte Crooks (“Introspect”) demonstrates. Both men are masters of contrast – breaking out of introvert minimalism into swooping, full-bodied waves of dance; punctuating edgy angular moves with melodramatic cinematic gestures; throwing up their arms in a cartoony panic or covering their faces with their hands. Of the two, Crooks moves with a special quality of concentration, both in the small, zigzagging detail he distils into his dancing and in the boneless fluency of his control.

Animation seems to be a style that inspires variety and invention. In this footage of American crew Dragon House, all four dancers have strikingly individual moves. Nonstop (in blue) is a master of controlled and balanced glides – he almost seems to levitate into the slow, poised turn at 0.56; Android (in grey) is all about the fabulously strange and twitchy angles of the arms (2.00-2.10); and Blueprint (in black) has developed a kind of cranking action I’ve never seen before, (2.02-4 and 2.50-55) levering his body through poses that are impressively fast and finessed but also impressively weird.

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