HAPPY HOUR #19: The Many Pockets of Sydney Street Dance
Gabriela Quinsacara: Guest Curator
ReadyMade Works, Ultimo, 5th & 6th April, 2025
Performances by:
Dechen Gendun with Genevieve Craig
Patrick Huynh with Leon Endo, Takuma Takemesa, and Jeremy Iskander
Momoka Nogita with Vincent Kyle Garcia
Valdi Yudibrata with William Mak
review by Zain El-Roubaei
I got to watch ReadyMade’s Happy Hour #19 twice, both nights on a warm weekend in April, and it taught me that street dancers are generous witnesses. The show was an incursion of a sort, maybe even an infiltration of street dancers into ReadyMade's quarters, with its black floors always generating slightly too much heat, its wooden balcony terrace, a table donned with fruits for free, beer and wine for purchase, its lines for a bathroom tucked away in the corner, and its capacity to generate sweet conversation. Expanding what is meant by the ‘contemporary’ in dance, director Jane McKernan has made street styles a regular fixture at Happy Hour; in fact, six of the last eleven have involved street dancers. But during this one, Happy Hour #19, I understood something that felt true in my bones. I wrote it down: street dance is a gathering. One could say instead that street dance unifies, but I think that implies we are all similar and united among a shared vision. It’s not that. No, unify is too loaded a term: street dance does not unify; it gathers.
Gabriela Quinsacara curated this season’s Happy Hour, and it’s hard to imagine a better fit: her experience with various street styles—and more importantly, her experience with various street dancers—is extensive. This is someone who has danced, judged, taught, cyphered and shared with many pockets of the Australian dance scene. This is someone who has been a core part of the Sydney street dance crew Riddim Nation, a group that, among eight members, covers pretty much every street style—from waacking to breaking, from hip hop to Afrohouse and vogue femme, from popping to dancehall, extending even as far as headbanging and ska. Gabriela’s rigorous eclecticism, a playful traversing across street dance cultures at the highest level, is mirrored in her curation. We got to see Dechen Gendun, Sydney’s house & hip hop veteran; Patrick “Preemo P” Huynh, an explosive, unique and charismatic breaker; Momoka Nogita (Momo), a waacker relentless in refining her approach to her style and the stage; and Valdi Yudibrata, carrying within him a near-intimidating blend of krump, popping, choreography, and Randai, a dance from the Minangkabau people of West Sumatra.
In the first of these four mini-performances Dechen Gendun collaborated with Genevieve Craig. What shines immediately is Dechen’s detail, poise, subtlety; and it seems her dance refuses to be couched in the terms of any one style, despite being so strongly rooted in those styles. In just a few short solos, here’s what we are given: hip hop grooves, micro-isolations (reminding me so much of the techniques of animation); flirting with house footwork here and there; seamless transitions between dancing up-top and on the floor, likely inspired by the recent surge of contemporary-influenced floorwork among house dancers; a focused gaze toward the corner spotlight or eyes darting along the large hall of readymade. These, and so much more, made Dechen’s performance a highlight.
This piece was split into a few vignettes, the first with poet Genevieve Craig, the middle two solos by Dechen and Genevieve respectively, with Genevieve utilising her background in slam poetry, then another solo by Dechen that culminates in her moving, trance-like, to her collaborator’s poetry. With such a short amount of time, the switch between vignettes was abrupt, and it became difficult to feel into the connection between Geneveive’s lines and Dechen’s movement. Perhaps it was a difference of scale. Craig boldly uses many broad, hard-to-define concepts: peace, culture, history, justice and, of course, truth, the latter repeated multiple times to close the act. But how exactly do these terms relate to the idiosyncrasies of Dechen’s performance, the very idiosyncrasies that made her freestyle so enchanting? How exactly do these terms—peace, culture, history, and so on—relate to each other? What is the symbolic potential of truth here, and how does it animate what Dechen has accomplished in her dance? The textuality of dance and the dance of language are intersections that can furnish a life’s worth of work; and how truth can be expressed in a dance piece is another, related question. I look forward to seeing how Dechen and Genevieve can continue to inhabit those connections together.
The second performance, by Patrick “Preemo P” Huynh and his collaborators, in many ways peers into the truth of breaking. The form is rigorous, unforgiving; breakers can be siphoned off from the rest of the world, somewhat unique in their blend of creative, athletic and technical obsessions; mentors can be ruthless (sometimes problematically so), their respect for the artform outweighing the kindness afforded to a newbie. For better or worse, this is how skilled breakers have been made.
The work begins from the perspective of Leon Endo (Bboy Leon) the youngest of the group, as he struggles to follow his elder, Preemo P—sloppy footwork, crashes, poor transitions. Preemo and Leon eventually start to exchange rounds. Their talents are quickly revealed. Preemo’s top rocks are earthy yet effortless; he's fond of sweeps, tracing a semi-circle with the off leg; and a well-placed arm—on his leg, on his face—gives his dance a little extra flair. Leon, by contrast, utilises power moves done slowly; his growth from rookie to seasoned is highlighted. This all happens over some lo-fi beats, with lush piano chords and ethereal strings. Later, two more breakers join in: Takuma Takemesa, better known as Bob CC, whose elegant and graceful footwork was a highline; and Jeremy Iskander aka Faldeeze, a forceful breaker dressed in all black. Faldeeze continually antagonises the other breakers, pushing them, pulling at their leg to force a crash. Unfortunately, this presence as a force of antagonism went a little underexplored. Perhaps breaking is being likened to a fight, or even chess (Wu Tang's Intro to Shadowboxin'—"the game of chess, is like a sword fight"—is the opener to one of the group’s sequences)? I found this connection between breaking and other, similarly unforgiving art-forms to be curious and compelling—more so than Leon’s coming-of-age story, which at times felt like a forced narrative imposition to get the work going. This group I think have an ability to explore and communicate the darker sides of creative discipline, the psychic costs of training at the highest level (a level this crew has so much experience with). This shadow element of discipline was a subtle presence throughout their show—bringing it to the fore, making it more explicit, could be immensely generative.
Power and vulnerability are the subjects of Momoka Nogita’s piece, performed in collaboration with Vincent Kyle Garcia. This third offering begins with voice over interviews, each dancer taking their turn to respond to the same set of questions: What does power mean to you? If you had all the power in the world, what would you do? At what moments in your life did you feel vulnerable? What can be achieved through vulnerability? On a chair in the centre of the stage, Momo and Vincent dance to their responses, their gestures often a literal translation of what’s being said.
The interview responses are at times whimsical, at times serious, and at times a subtle glimpse into the dancers’ interiority. But the interviews and their inclusion sometimes fell flat. Again, when broad, all-encompassing concepts like power and vulnerability come into play, it becomes difficult to feel into what’s being said. In performances of this length it’s a risk to rely on lofty concepts, hoping the audience will know what you’re referring to. Perhaps by altering the scope of questions, or by cutting down the number of questions to be answered, or even by expanding this into a longer piece, Vincent and Momo could genuinely and effectively make their talk just as evocative as their dance.
And how evocative their dance! With a brief break over a hot drink, where Momo and Vincent chat quietly, maybe discussing their responses, Donna Summer's ‘Melody of Love’ kicks in. It's a party, and these waackers get to replicate Summer's gorgeous lyrics and silky voice with grace, poise and, of course, power. The dancers split apart and come together again, freestyling on their own and eventually connecting for a brief and hard-hitting choreography. Their waacking technique is undeniable: fast, clean, and sharp stops; beautiful circles traced with their forearms by hinging at the elbow; playing effortlessly with their arms overhead. Vincent has a penchant for level changes and struts across the space, and Momo is graceful in the way she melts before springing back to life. The two harmonise beautifully.
There’s a way that the closing act, offered by Valdi Yudibrata and collaborator William Mak, is also a meditation on power. But here it’s more explicitly the power of belonging to a tradition, be it by blood or by association. Though not from West Sumatra specifically (his background is Sundanese), Valdi’s power is ancestral; his voice quiets the room, alters its feel. Rhythms he’s picked up from the body percussion of Randai become a sonic articulation of that power. Technically speaking these rhythms mix well with the two dancers’ backgrounds in krump and popping, as both styles are uncompromising in their use of muscle contractions, sharp and sudden expressions of strength, and quick changes in velocity. You can use your pop to show a rhythm; you can create a rhythm with your stomp and jab. Will and Valdi explore this with maturity, allowing the play on rhythm and style enough time and space to breathe. All this mirroring is enacted at the level of costume, too. Valdi’s Destar—a patterned fabric that he would later tie around his waist—becomes the centrepoint around which the two dancers revolve: copying each other’s movements, finding their own unique expression while connecting with the other—Will does this in Nikes, Valdi without shoes. It’s hard not to experience the Destar’s centring as symbolic, for attention is continually drawn to Valdi’s expression in and through Randai. How Will can enhance this symbolism without detracting from his own voice, history, and movement is something I think still needs working out. Why, for example, is this not a solo act? (This is not at all to say that it should be a solo act, but that, in asking the question and others like it, Will and Valdi can make good on the collaborative potential they very clearly exhibit).
Krump, Will and Valdi’s shared language, finishes the show. While every dance style is communal, insofar as it involves some kind of shared set of movements or worldviews, krump is almost never a solo act. Krump needs hype. Krump feeds off energy. Will and Valdi bring their intense and impactful play on rhythms, claps, pops and stomps to a head when a krump remix of Kendrick Lamar’s (by now overplayed, surely?) ‘Not Like Us’ comes in. Every krumper in the room had a chance to jump on stage and get off, audience and performers alike, and the cheers, the hype, was infectious. Readymade was witness to how krump effortlessly collapses regimented separations between performer and audience, and therefore how important the embodied presence of the audience actually is. Even if you’re not performing, street dance teaches us, you have the agency and therefore responsibility to alter the energetics of the space.
It’s a testament to Gabriela’s curation that she chose to end with Will and Valdi. For by the end, at the zenith of hype and volume and energy, it seemed that everyone—the performers, with their irreducibly different skillsets and backgrounds; and the audience, coming with their own histories and expertise; both, with almost nothing left to give—deserved an applause. Exhausting yes, imperfect always, but in a gathering of street dancers there’s always room for magic.
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HAPPY HOUR #19
ReadyMade Works, Ultimo, 5th & 6th April, 2025
Guest Curator: Gabriela Quinsacara:
Performers:
Dechen Gendun with Genevieve Craig
Patrick Huynh with Leon Endo, Takuma Takemesa, and Jeremy Iskander
Momoka Nogita with Vincent Kyle Garcia
Valdi Yudibrata with William Mak
Tech: Sarah Stormont
ReadyMade Works: Director Jane McKernan, Studio Manager Ashleigh Veitch, Communications Manager Chanel Cheung.
“Happy Hour is ReadyMade Works’ signature short works program showcasing the practices of Sydney’s independent dance artists. Initiated by Linda Luke and Samantha Chester in 2016, Happy Hour is the platform for encountering the diverse and uncompromising work being made by local dance artists.”
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Zain El-Roubaei is a dancer and graduate student @ USYD. Contact: zain.elroubaei@gmail.com