Barbican, London
Hip-hop and dance have not always mixed well, but injecting manga and martial arts proves a masterstroke by Boy Blue
Hip-hop has been around at least 40 years, one of the most creative forces on the dance scene. Yet it still has problems adapting to mainstream dance theatre, with its body language apparently suited to only a limited range of storytelling and characterisation.
Boy Blue have thus been very smart in raiding the narrative richness of Manga for their latest production, The Five and the Prophecy of Prana. As a genre, Manga is a perfect fit for hip-hop, delivering plot and characters through a explosive scattershot imagery. But its eclectic visuals and narrative devices also provide a whole new palette for the form to play with.
The Five is about a group of delinquents, who are trained up by a sensai, Wang Tang, to become warriors in the fight against evil. The characterisation is sharp and sweet, from the hard-girl swagger of Max and Michelle, to the spidery-limbed menace of Soo Lin, and Kendrick Sandy's kung-fu inflected choreography is by far the best I've seen from him. Better yet with designs based on images by Manga artist Akio Tanaka the stage is often fabulous to look at, with comic-book graphics framing the action scenes, and classical Japanese landscapes evoking Wang Tang's spiritual world. The animation team Yeast Culture also amplify the narrative pace, with the imagery of certain scenes animated into dream sequence, slow-motion monologues, a nightclub that physically shakes under the onslaught of a fight.
The Five has all the ingredients of a superb show, but it's unfortunate that Sandy and his co-director Michael Asante have overloaded it a complicated, near-unstageable backstory of universal forces out of joint and crooked superheroes. Parts of the work flounder through a mess of choppy back-flashes that confuse rather than illuminate: the dialogue is often inaudible or worse, disastrously out of synch with the performers who mime it.
Some of these issues may hopefully be resolved before the show's UK tour. What needs no fixing are the cast. Most of them are terrific, and Tommy Franzén as Wang Tang is outstanding. As an actor Franzén is delightful, convincing both as maudlin drunk and wise seer. As a dancer he's mesmerising, not only in the virtuoso hip-hop routines but in the silken lyricism of his t'ai chi-inspired solos. In his performance alone, you can see a whole new future for hip-hop.
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