For eighty minutes, Avant Garde Dance immerses the audience in a future where an oppressive regime has banned all artistic expression. Dancers and images evoke a tension between order and chaos, security and freedom, and individualism and free will.
Not without reason, Avant Garde Dance Company occupies a prominent place in London's innovative hip-hop and contemporary dance circuit. Founded in 2001 by choreographer and artistic director Tony Adigun, the company boasts a unique style that seamlessly fuses dance, music, literature, circus, and digital art. The group's creations are groundbreaking, often tinged with a magical quality that leaves the audience enchanted.
After gaining considerable experience in the commercial realm—choreographing for artists such as Janet Jackson, Usher, and Ashanti—Adigun assembled a group of hip-hop dancers to form Avant Garde Dance, aiming to create provocative contemporary dance performances. This endeavor resulted in an individual, unconventional yet artistically sophisticated language.
Dutch debut
Following tremendous success in the United Kingdom and beyond, Avant Garde Dance is making its debut in the Netherlands during the nineteenth edition of the Holland Dance Festival. With Illegal Dance, the group offers a complete sensory experience of dance and theater. The performance narrates a story set in a future where artistic expression is globally prohibited by oppressive regimes. Paranoid leaders criminalize art in the vain hope of suppressing subversive ideas and dangerous collective expressions. By seamlessly combining dynamic contemporary choreography with inventive technical staging, Tony Adigun presents a society in which everyone's life is defined by an insurmountable tension between the desire for free expression and the longing for safety.
Illegal Dance is a collection of stories, people, and places, portrayed through various media and art forms, fueled by an overarching belief in the power of artistic expression in times of division.
