Photo: Anne Nguyen instructing the dancers at the Andrew Freedman Home in Harlem. (Credit: Christian Erin-Madsen)

By Christian Erin-Madsen

Twenty young dancers quickly shifted positions and mixed with the crowd at Times Square on a Sunday afternoon to get everyone dancing instead of just watching the show. The mission of the dancers' choreographer, the French breakdancer Anne Nguyen, was clear.

“It’s all about breaking the codes,” she explained in an interview six days before the Times Square event, sitting at a round table in the corner of a ballroom suitable for a flashback to the Flashdance motion picture. Nguyen, a former world champion breakdancer and, since 2005, the owner of the French dance company, Compagnie Par Terre, specializes in the unexpected.

The dancers met for the first time with her on that same Monday at the Andrew Freedman Home in the Bronx, the area where hip-hop dance was born in the 1970′s, and just a bit more than three miles from the area of Club Harlem World at 116th street and Lenox Avenue where breakdancing broke out of the streets and into the public spotlight in the 1980's. The Graphic Cyphers Project, as Anne Nguyen’s choreography is called, consisted of three consecutive breakdance happenings on September 23rd -25th in New York as a part of the tenth edition of the Crossing the Line Festival.

“Breakdancing is like the city. It’s right angles, it’s mechanical movements, like slow-motion, but fast,” she starts. “It’s also very tribal and very human, because there’s this kind of bounce. So I don’t see why a festival like Crossing the line, which should be on the edge, shouldn’t focus on breakdancing.”

She underlines that the dance form and the moves have developed a lot since the 80’s. Not only in America, but also in France - one of the few places where breakdance has developed to be a dance performed on stage. That might be the reason why she does not conceive of breakdancing as a historical form.

“It’s like a contemporary martial art. It helps you fight the situation that you live in,” she says. “I am trying to make people feel closer to dancing. Normally breakdance is danced in circles with the audience surrounding you. My first show was solo doing only breakdance moves, but in lines and other patterns, not facing the audience.”

In the classic breakdance moves, “the feet keeps moving, there’s a low center of mass and it is about changing your balance all the time,” Anne Nguyen tells me. But she would mix that with the moves of popping: A funk and street style dance, in which the dancer quickly jerks the muscles, hence the name “pop”, in order to make it look like a wave or a robot.

“Popping is another hip-hop dance that is very frontal. Otherwise you can’t see what I’m doing. But I have been working on creating it facing sideways,” she says. “The idea with Graphic Cyphers is people in a public space watching hip-hop dance. Usually when there is a circle of spectators, you are trying to catch glimpses of the dance. But I am going to change that.”

Anne Nguyen will split the dancers into two groups and give them two sets of directions. One group will be distracting attention, while the other will move around one or several spectators and dance around that person. “The whole idea of Graphic Cyphers is to shift and do cyphers in circles in many different situations. Sometimes people are central, sometimes it is just a bunch of people. It has to be unexpected.”

That, according to Anne Nguyen, fits the purpose of breakdancing, which is development. “I don’t think something stays itself because it stays the same," she says. "Breakdance stays itself because it keeps its principles, like bounce, shifts of energy, lines, but also broken angles. It’s about attitude. So if you understand this concept, you are doing it.”

About Graphic Cyphers: The Graphic Cyphers Project, consisted of three consecutive breakdance happenings in New York.

The public would experience modern breakdance choreography that “challenges the spectators for no less than 15 minutes, but maybe up to 30,” as Anne Nguyen put it prior to the shows. This was the first time ever for her to bring her breakdance performances from France to New York.