Boy Blue: Cycles review – dazzling hip-hop dance alchemy

Founded in 2001, Boy Blue is a close and enduring partnership between choreographer Kenrick “H2O” Sandy and composer Michael “Mikey J” Asante, and has been a major player in the 21st-century ascendance of hip-hop dance theatre. Their latest piece returns the duo – here joined by Jade Hackett as associate choreographer – to their own roots, focusing intensely on those two alchemical elements that, when put together, can produce choreographic gold: dance and music. The framework for Cycles is deceptively simple, a kind of tracklist of separate numbers, each initiated by a change of music, each developing distinct dance moods and motifs, and each lit by spotlights and searchlights that might here suggest a turntable, there a distant star. The costumes are strange hybrids of sci-fi, streetwear and desert robes, transmuting under the lights from ice-white to space-grey to burnished yellow. View image in fullscreen But the work’s principal pleasures lie in the flickering, almost synaptic connections between sound and movement. It opens with one woman circling then stepping into a spotlight, where she is gradually joined by eight other dancers in a round, each taking solo turns in the centre (a classic hip-hop formation), the group’s ragged rocksteps tethered...