Hip Hop’s Fantasy World-Building; Breakin’ Convention 2025
Saido Lehlouh Cast // Shot by Paul Hampartsoumian
Review | Miranne Watley
Story-telling and dance are inseparable. From classical ballet’s romantic fairy tales to more contemporary movies’ unforgettable motifs (think 1987 Dirty Dancing lift), dance has always been at the centre of stories.
The physicality of dance is especially good at building the world of a story. Choreography is able to simultaneously become a captivating visual and trigger a bodily response in viewers. As movement often doesn’t use words to explicitly tell you what is happening, the audience is forced to construct the plot and intuitively infer any narrative shifts through their gut instincts and existing cultural understanding. Hip hop, specifically, is so powerful in its world building as its style is rooted in the cultural world of the late twentieth century, as opposed to the dance studio.
While watching the performances at Breakin Convention 2025, I was particularly intrigued by the dance performances that constructed worlds of fantasy and, as the festival continued, I became increasingly convinced that hip hop was an ideal medium through which to construct this fantasy realm. Fantasy imagines the improbable. It uses supernatural and magical elements to conjure an alternative space and dissolves the boundary between possible and impossible. Dance perfectly embodies this boundary twisting genre as it is about pushing the limits of the human body and creating new shapes or patterns that were previously inconceivable. Hip hop’s origins in subversive countercultures also underscore its potential to create a world that defies the limits of our existing reality. A fantasy world, ironically, becomes real through hip hop performances.
For me, three performances from Breakin Convention 2025 perfectly embodied this fantasy world building: Max Revell’s five person depiction of loss, Ille Wild’s krump solo, and Tarantism’s experimental work featuring her brightly painted red hands.
Max Revell // Shot by Paul Hampartsoumian
Max Revell developed his piece through Breakin Convention’s own ‘Back to the Lab’ intensive. Back to the Lab houses four choreographers each year to develop a hip hop theatre piece and gives choreographers space and resources to develop their performance. Revell without a doubt made the most of this intensive through his captivating choreographed exploration of loss. The piece featured a headless suit - the missing face serving as a clear reminder of the set’s focus on absence. However, Revell was able to take this haunting image further than a poignant absence. The choreography included unusual motifs such as a duet with a coat rack and bowler hat and one dancer acting as a chair for another to sit on. Revell built a world in which inanimate and animate objects were merged.
Personally, I felt that the opening image of the headless suit sitting on a chair surrounded by four (notably headed) dancers perfectly summed up the magical sentience afforded to the props in the piece. It was also able to pull the audience into the fantasy world from the jump. This phenomenal opening continued to blur conventional boundaries of life when the four dancers started to make shapes above the headless suit, where a face would be, with their hands. By completing the figure of a human body with his dancers’ hands, Revell created a supernatural character to inhabit his fantasy world.
Ille Wild // Shot by Paul Hampartsoumian
Israel Ngashi, who goes by Ille Wild, constructed another fantastical set during Breakin Convention 2025 with his krump solo. The style’s emphasis on strength allowed Wild to display his striking physicality. The otherworldly freedom of krump was further highlighted through the silence in which the piece began
- untethering the performance from dance’s usual ties to music. Wild’s solo, and ridiculous control over his body, continuously thrust the audience into a space where physical limits were surpassed and an unnatural sense of freedom was in reach. The magic reached its peak when the lights blacked out during a jump - miraculously suspending Wild in the air.
Vasiliki Papostolou - Tarantism // Shot by Paul Hampartsoumian
A third piece at Breakin Convention 2025 that I felt constructed a fantasy world was created by Vasiliki Papapostolou (Tarantism). The piece began with her painted red hands over her eyes which immediately introduced her non-human character to the audience. I was particularly struck by the mechanical soundtrack and robotic dance movements and I remember audibly gasping when she wound up her leg to go behind her head. This depicted her as a machine/human hybrid. As she appeared to lose control of her hands, the audience was encouraged to reflect on the autonomy of this cyborg-esque character. The solo skillfully built an occult world where physical and mental control were called into question and brought up ideas of possession and self-governance. This idea is also mirrored in the title of the solo - ‘Tarantism’ - which refers to the manic impulse to dance.
However, fantasy was not the only world built in Breakin Convention 2025. While it did not strike me as specifically fantastical, I was instantly drawn into the world building of Mounia Nassangar’s waacking piece ‘STUCK’ - performed during the opening night of Breakin Convention. Nassangar’s accomplishments speak for themself and I went into the performance with high expectations - that were definitely met. Her choreographic debut featured five distinct dancers who brought their own unique flair to the style. Taking up the entire second act of Fierce Friday, Nassangar’s choreography made the most of this time through deliberate choices. The piece opened, for example, with one dancer shaving the head of another while they, seemingly undisturbed by this, read a newspaper. Instead of using this simply as a passing stunt to shock the audience, Nassangar afforded it the attention necessary to transform the opening into an authentic reflection on identity, everyday life, and personal freedoms. Nassangar’s choreography constructed a metropolitan world building on spaces such as the barbershop and the nightclub - both honoring waacking’s historical origins and throwing the audience into a dynamic reflection on achieving liberation within our, undeniably flawed, reality.
Mounia ‘Stuck’ cast // Shot by Paul Hampartsoumian
This piece stuck with me as it provided a fascinating balance to the fantasy realms of some of the other dances in the convention. The magic in Nassangar’s dance emerged from its ties to our world; the breathtaking release that the dancers displayed in their waacking was that much more extraordinary as it came from a world that the spectator knew all too well was rife with a ruthless realism.
Another piece that complicated my understanding of dance’s world-building was Saïdo Lehlouh’s. Similarly to STUCK, Lehlouh’s piece took up an entire act, however, unlike Nassangar’s piece, Lehlouh’s choreography seemed to entirely reject the need to root itself in our world or a fantasy world for that matter. The choreography manifested randomness with the dancers walking uncharted paths and unexpectedly breaking out into dance (which I must acknowledge was technically incredible). The only rule of this world seemed to be that there were no rules.
Saido Lehlouh Cast // Shot by Paul Hampartsoumian
While it was remarkable to watch, I personally think that there is still merit in building a distinguishable, and at times magical, world within a dance. Although easy to critique for visually appealing to the mainstream, I think that there is a real value in this more digestible imagery as it engages audiences with
complex themes and, at times, revolutionary rhetoric. The need to enjoy art can be questioned in more contemporary circles, however, I think the pieces of Breakin Convention highlighted the power of enchanting and enjoyable performances - is this not the point of a show?
Breakin Convention 2025, intentionally or not, undoubtably emphasised the fantasy world building potential of hip hop. Fantasy’s ability to imagine new conventions and push existing boundaries works perfectly in tandem with dance styles’ subversive cultural origins. The potential of this fantastical realm is undeniable as it reimagines the status quo with a captivating and digestible artform. Works from the festival have made clear the power and success of this fantasy world building on prominent dance stages. Breakin Convention weekend left me eagerly anticipating next year’s performances; I am truly excited to see the ways that choreographers can further push the limits of our world into a space of fantasy and magic.
