FLEXN at Playhouse, QPAC

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2. FLEXN

In FLEXN, Reggie (Regg Roc) Gray, one of the flex pioneers, and Peter Sellars, perhaps America’s greatest living theatre and opera director, team up with a community of flex dancers from the very neighbourhoods where the movement first took shape along with top designers Ben Zamora (lighting), Gabriel Berry (costumes) and Garth MacAleavey (sound).

FLEXN was created in the era of unrest following rulings on Michael Brown in Ferguson, Missouri and Eric Garner in New York City. It confronts issues of social injustice, with the dancers exploring personal narratives and performing both as individuals and in groups, to choreography created by the ensemble itself. These artists utilize breathtakingly beautiful movement to tell deeply human stories that often transmute into joyful artistic expression.

Characterized by pausing, snapping, gliding, bone breaking, hat tricks, animation, and contortion, flex is a form of street dance that evolved from the Jamaican bruk-up found in dance halls and reggae clubs in Brooklyn over the last ten years.

From the pages of The New Yorker, to the small screen, to dance competitions and music videos and even on the big screen at the Tribeca Film Festival, flex culture has risen into the mainstream lexicon and created an entirely new movement vocabulary in post-modern dance.