Review: Raphael Xavier, Breaking the Boxes, Barely


As choreographer Rennie Harris revealed decades ago, hip-hop’s dance language, developed in the streets and in battle, can be as broad and profoundly expressive as any other dance form. It showed that it can be transferred to the stage, it can also be transformed into a metaphor.

Raphael Xavier, a former member of Harris’ company Puremovement, is following in his footsteps. Xavier has something to say about and about B-boying in “The Musician & the Mover,” which premiered Thursday at New York Live Arts. He just couldn’t find the strongest way to say it.

There are multiple carriers in the show. Xavier, 51, is accompanied by two talented young dancers, Joshua Culbreath and Martha Bernabel. And instead of one musician, there are four: essentially a quartet of accomplished jazz artists playing in the post-bop vein. Xavier is also a poet, and the cryptic, highly concentrated poetry he reads is the dominant voice of the production.

Although Xavier starts talking about a musician, mover, and an addiction to the arts, he soon shifts to his primary preoccupation: what gets in his way (critical voices in the head, the weight and wounds of history). The box introduces the metaphors of the auction and the boxing ring.

Alongside poetry, these metaphors take a physical form. Dancers carry boxes and push them across the stage. They dance briefly to the voice of an auctioneer. They act as if they are fighting an invisible opponent. The dynamic is Sisyphean in every mode: Push the boxes to one side and then back again. Get up to fall to the ground and fight again. And over and over again.

But these choreographic concepts are bare frames and what’s inside them is largely undeveloped and uninteresting. The dance is strangely vague, contrived, juice-free. The phrase B-boy itself seems boxed up, blocked. There isn’t a lot of music on the movers, and the music – even if percussionist Kimpedro Rodriguez is heavy on the kick drum – doesn’t help much. The moments when dance and music need to be in sync aren’t quite there, and the fit points seem to just reveal how Xavier couldn’t keep up.

If all of this was conceived as a representation of frustrated art, it’s very successful. Similarly, Xavier’s poetry seems to dance around an obscure topic – something to do with his own struggle, or perhaps the patterns of exploitation and neglect in B-boying history. Generalization and abstraction diffuse the impact of its message.

“The Musician & the Mover,” a dance production, begins in a late solo for Culbreath, during which he emerges from a light-defined box and blasts some B-boy power moves—head turns and glides. otherwise avoided in choreography. But the strongest part of the one-hour show is the trailing solo for Xavier.

Here, finally, B-boying’s language begins to speak, and through the body of a man who has been doing it for almost 40 years. He freezes on the ground, weight on his elbows and head, legs in the air. Slowness and prudence, apparent effort become expressive. As she rolls on her shoulders and back, her legs draw shapes on the floor, her movements leaving sweaty shapes. Those shapes are not boxes. They are circles.

Raphael Xavier
Saturday at New York Live Arts; newyorklivearts.org.



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