‘You have to add the flavour, the butter, the jam’: Boy Blue on bringing hip hop energy to the dance world
Sunday afternoon in Tower Hamlets, east London, and the room is full of teenagers hammering out a hip-hop routine, their trainers squeaking rhythmically on the floor. It looks pretty good, but Kenrick Sandy steps in. He’s a powerful presence, with a stillness about him and eyes that you feel are looking into your soul. “I’m listening to the weight distribution,” he tells the dancers, the implication being he’s not hearing what he wants. “Feel the move in your body, don’t just copy the steps.” He quizzes them about exactly what the energy of a step is, the difference between sharp, punchy or explosive. And he’s a stickler for the details: are the fingers together or apart? In a fist, is the thumb on top? In the space of 15 minutes they are transformed.
This is how Sandy’s company Boy Blue got so good. Founded in 2001 with composer Michael “Mikey J” Asante, both not long out of school, the company came out of an earlier incarnation, Matrix, a handful of dancers who’d battle against other crews from all over the capital at streetdance events in south London. But while other groups disbanded, or went off to get “proper” jobs, Boy Blue soared. They were soon training a cohort of 50 young dancers; they won an Olivier award in 2007; became an associate company at the Barbican centre; choreographed for the 2012 Olympic opening ceremony; and were reunited with the ceremony’s director Danny Boyle last year on the opening of Manchester’s shiny new Aviva Studios with an ambitious show, Free Your Mind, that mixed The Matrix with Alan Turing and Mancunian pop culture.
In works such as Redd, Blak Whyte Gray and Emancipation of Expressionism (which is on the GCSE dance syllabus), Sandy’s choreography uses impactful and tightly drilled formations, drawing on hip-hop styles, popping, breaking, krump and animation. It is soundtracked by pulsating bass-driven loops from Asante, who is also well known as a music producer for artists including Kano, as well as being the composer for TV’s Top Boy.
The pair have their different roles in Boy Blue, but they are co-directors, and the sunny and chatty Asante is the one who explains the vision for their latest piece, Cycles. It’s something of a return to their hip-hop roots, with much of their recent work being narrative-based, delving into deep subject matter or emotional states. “The notion of Black trauma has been front and centre of a lot of our work,” says Asante. Cycles, by contrast, is really about movement, perpetual motion and the cycles of life. Asante got into reading about ensō, the Japanese Zen symbol of enlightenment that represents eternity and circularity, but also presence in the moment.
When we catch up a few days later, in a rehearsal studio next to the O2 arena in south-east London, it’s two weeks into an eight-week creation process and they don’t yet know what the final piece will look like. “It’s starting to reveal itself,” says Jade Hackett, the associate choreographer on the show. Boy Blue has a real family vibe – Hackett was a dancer in the company back when it won its Olivier. She’s cuddling Asante’s 10-month-old son on her knee. Meanwhile, Sandy describes how choreography comes about: sometimes deliberately, based on ideas about form and structure; other times more subconsciously, just through listening deeply to the music and seeing what emerges in his own body. Now he’s thinking about what makes a move truly hip-hop and not just another dance step: the bounce, the head nod, the groove.
“You’re not just doing the dry biscuit bop,” he says. “You’re having to add the flavour, add the butter, add the jam. Asking, ‘What is funk? What is swag?’ And taking all those different energies.” While hip-hop is originally an American form, this is the genre from a UK point of view, and the influences of UK garage, grime, jungle, carnival and Caribbean music have all gone in the pot to make something distinctly British.
Music is at the heart of Boy Blue’s creations, and their friendship too. Aged 12, at school in Ilford, east London, Sandy was introduced to Asante with the words: “This guy can beatbox!” At 14, Asante was growing a goatee to try to get into renowned UK garage club Twice As Nice and they’d both go “raving in Ilford”. A sporty kid, Sandy only seriously started dancing at 18. He joined a breaking class at a youth centre, and the teacher said he could do some freestyling in a show at east London’s Hackney Empire as long as he learned the finale routine, too. An 11-year-old girl taught him the routine. “That was humbling,” he admits, but it was a revelation. “After doing that one show everything changed: my whole focus, my whole life. I was like: what is this feeling?”
Sandy started choreographing soon after, and he and Asante set up their first group, Matrix, in 1999, which morphed into Boy Blue a few years later. They’ve always done other jobs on the side – a magnetic performer, Sandy danced in music videos, including the original video for Murder on the Dancefloor. “He didn’t tell me about it!” laughs Asante. “Thought it was too cheesy or whatever. You’re part of British music history, bro!” And over the years Sandy has choreographed for the likes of FKA twigs and Rita Ora and for big-brand commercials and musical theatre.
Teaching has also been a huge part of their work. Boy Blue has trained hundreds, maybe thousands, of young people in the last two decades, setting forth an army of dancers – some of whom have gone on to be professionals themselves – and has had a huge influence on London’s streetdance scene. There’s an almost moral underpinning to Sandy’s mission, a sense of duty to the community: “If we had the keys to certain doors that we could open, why not have them wide open?” he says.
Unlike when Sandy and Asante were young, travelling miles across London to learn from other dancers, the teens who come to classes now have seen it all on YouTube and TikTok. And while they can film their 30-second routines for the camera, they’ve got no stamina, Sandy and Asante say. Here their students learn to be athletes, too. “We’re training them in perfection,” says Hackett. There’s warmth and humour, but Sandy treats everyone like a professional. “I’m not trying to feed your ego, I’m trying to feed your mindset, your creativity,” he says. And the dancers rise to it.
There’s lots coming up for Sandy and Asante. They’ll be guest artistic directors of the National Youth Dance Company later this year. As well as Cycles, some of Boy Blue’s youth dancers are performing at Brighton festival in May and there are other things in the pipeline they can’t talk about. Asante, meanwhile, is also busy outside the company. Last year he wrote TV scores for African Queens on Netflix, and Criminal Record starring Peter Capaldi and Cush Jumbo, and he’s about to start work on Jamie Lloyd’s Romeo and Juliet, starring Tom Holland. He tells me the rapper Ghetts recently called him about collaborating, but he just hasn’t had time.
You genuinely get the sense, though, that for the pair, the Sundays spent teaching – “Entertainment, education, enlightenment” is Boy Blue’s motto – are just as important as any A-list hobnobbing. “It’s super-rewarding watching other people flourish and grow,” says Sandy. “It’s beautiful.”
Boy Blue’s Cycles is at the Barbican theatre, London, 30 April to 4 May.
