By chance, at age 22, Frenchwoman Anne-Marie Van - aka Nach - came in contact with “krump,” the very free and energetic hip-hop style that emerged at the beginning of this century after the race riots in Los Angeles. In highly expressive ways, African-American youth express the rawest emotions through this dance style. After Nach's discovery, the streets became her learning ground: in her hometown of Lyon, she found a community that taught her the knowledge and fundamentals of this urban “Gospel dance. Meetings with Algerian choreographer Heddy Maalem and French hip-hop pioneer Bintou Dembélé, among others, then encouraged her to feed krump with influences from other dance and art forms. She took lessons in the traditional Indian dance kathakali, immersed herself in flamenco, photography, poetry, audiovisual arts, experimental film and music, among other things, and thus developed a totally unique style, gradually exchanging the street for the theater.
Kaleidoscopic metamorphosis
In this edition of the Holland Dance Festival, Nach makes her debut in the Netherlands with her first solo, Cellule, which she created in 2017. Starting from the krump idiom, in it the young choreographer gives space to the different characters bubbling under her skin with a rare intensity. She invites you to enter her body, as it were, and witness the kaleidoscopic metamorphosis of her androgynous body. Cellule is the danced self-portrait of a woman longing for femininity and authenticity, exploring the energies of desire, excess, suffering, fear and pleasure, among others. With her solo, Nach presents a very personal vision of krump, liberated from the past but true to the (physical and Black Lives Matter) movement and its founders.
