Photo©CédricSintes
Old wine in new bottles: “My Milk is Better than Yours”, the old story of mother love in hip-hop style by Valentine Nagata-Ramos
Hip-hop does a lot more than popularize, re-energize, enable and reference today's dance. The genre’s popularity and ability to generate esthetic energy is a translation of the primary and universal values of the liberal age: liberty, equality and solidarity.
Is there still break-dancing in front of (the shell of) Notre Dame? If not, you can always find it in front of the Grande Halle de la Villette. Sometimes there are kids there who are so good it makes you cry to realize just how good a body in movement can be…
Remember those “find stuff” puzzles for kids where they have to look for a person or thing hidden in a picture? The idea is to broaden and hone the visual imagination, I guess. I’m going to spend my summer (and Fall) doing broadening and honing my dance theory imagination, looking for hip hop in contemporary, modern and classic dance and dance performance and … in performance tout court.
It might not be so easy to discern the hip-hop element in the Opéra Comique’s take on Manon – though, come to think of it, Puff Daddy and 50 Cent could easily have written the story of social anomie, megalomania, brutality and shallow avarice.
However, as a first step, it will be child’s play, I think, to see hip-hop’s – esthetic, cultural and social – universality in the program of Festival XX sur 20 (“Twenty on 20- 100%- Festival). Child’s play, too, to see in Valentine Nagata-Ramos’ lively and lovely My Milk is Better than Yours just how good hip-hop is at the essential human itch to tell stories.
FESTIVAL XX SUR 20 • 2019 • François Lamargot & cie XXème Tribu • Day-long • Maison de la culture et de la jeunesse (MJC) Hauts de Belleville, Friday and Saturday, 28 & 29 June, 2019
"Twenty/20" is dancer and choreographer François Lamargot’s tribute to the Hauts de Belleville neighborhood and to the Maison de jeunesse et de la culture (MJC).
Hauts de Belleville, which is a part of the bigger Belleville neighborhood, is in the 20th arrondissement and, mostly, still a place where ordinary folk can afford to live, at least if they’ve already got a roof over their heads.
The Hauts de Belleville MJC in particular and MJCs in general are a type of secular YMCA, present throughout France, town and country together, an outgrowth of the movement for popular and youth education, which began at the beginning of the 20th century. Children in my own 11th arrondissement neighborhood use their local MJC for activities ranging from ballet to fencing to karate to singing to fun-tilted science and arts education. Hauts de Belleville is where François Lamargot grew up and its MJC is where he learned to dance hip-hop. Also where he and his friends founded their performance troupe cie XXème Tribu.
Lamargot, who’s now worked with people like Anthony Egéa, a very early hip-hop adopter (1984), the very heterodox dance performer Blanca Li and urban dance popularizer and current director of the hip-hop oriented MAC Créteil, Mourad Merzouki, has developed his own form of contact dance based on hip-hop principles. He now advises, teaches and performs across the world – doing dance workshops in francophone places such a New Caledonia or Haiti.
MY MILK IS BETTER THAN YOURS • 2018 • Valentine Nagata-Ramos & cie Uzumaki • 60 minutes • Théâtre du Fil de l’eau, Pantin, 7 June 2019, 20h
My Milk is Better than Yours©CédricSintes
While Festival XX sur 20 shows off hip-hop’s social universality and cultural relevance, next door in the near suburb of Pantin, choreographer and performer Valentine Nagata-Ramos – product of a father from Japan and a mother from Spain who elected domicile in France – shows how apt an instrument hip-hop is for telling our old and new stories. Here’s hoping she one day gets a crack at Manon Lescaut!
Keep in mind that, in my opinion, anyhow, the mind-blowing variety of “styles” of this dance genre actually represent aspects of the myriad human concerns more than any esthetic ideology.
These styles go from expressionistic psychotherapy – for example, Nach’s – Anne-Marie Van’s – take on the “Krump” style of hip-hop – to esthetic development as social movement (Nagata-Ramos has herself talked to me of Voguing: developing dance gesture out of modeling poses) to getting ahead (say, any old Hollywood dance entertainment shtick for entertainment’s sake), to doing necessary updating of our fairy-tale repertory.
Nagata-Ramos’ My Milk is Better than Yours is a fine example of fairy tale informed by psychotherapy, a sophisticated little jewel of a contemporary-old story of mother love and motive, told with pure b-boy brio. It’s all danced to a t, by the way, by Fanny Bouddavong, Santiago Codon-Gras and Yanis Khelifa.
My Milk is Better than Yours premiered last year at La Villette as a new creation by the region-wide Kalypso festival set afoot by Mourad Merzouki.
So, whether you get to walk up to the Festival XX sur 20 or walk across the périph’ to see My Milk is Better than Yours, and whether you’re lucky enough to visit Paris or whether you’re in Tokyo or Shanghai or Lagos or Moscow, as you watch those boys and girls in baggies and baseball caps springing and gyrating in front of the local tourist attraction, ask yourself where it all came from and where it tends toward. Also, give ‘em some spare change.