Blanca Li, choreographer and director of Elektro Kif, the new Street Dance show coming to Southbank Centre in March 2012, tells us about how she got into dance, her big break and  the dance film she made that inspired our facebook competition Dance Your City (www.southbankcentre.co.uk/dyc). Blanca is one of the judges for the Dance Your City Live Final on 2 March.

How did you first get into dance? 

I started at 12 as a gymnast for the Spanish national team and at 15 I decided to go into dance which I found more artistic, creative and less competitive. I admired dance since I was very little and I had always told my mother I wanted to become a dancer, I loved it! I also wanted to create my own dances, so at a young age I started making my own choreography. I could never do one without the other.

Tell us about your dance company

My dance company exists since 1992. There are between 10 and 50 dancers that works regularly with the company with really different styles like hip hop, flamenco, contemporary, classical, electro (some combine different styles too). Some dancers have been with the company for 15 years and new  ones come in every year. This keeps the energy in the company. The dancers who really know my work for a long time assist me in helping the new dancers to learn and rehearsing, recreating the shows and keeping them in good shape. I have a really good team. Since the creation of the company we have been touring around the world with 13 different full length shows, across Europe, Africa, Asia and America, performing over a thousand times.

Did you have a big break in dance?

My big moment was at seventeen when I arrived in NY to study dance at the Martha Graham School. It was a great experience that lasted 5 years, I saw the birth of Hip hop and learned about all styles of dance from all over the world.
Also it was a very important time for me when I first came to France and performed at the Avignon Off Festival. This was the starting point of my dance company.

Tell us about the video you created for the Dance Your City competition

I love very much the Eiffel Tower; it’s very modern, even if it was constructed for the Exposition Universal in 1881. I think it represents Paris and Electro Dance started in Paris, so I thought it would be great to show this dance in front of the Tower to give it an identity. The opening scene of my first feature film “Le Défi” (The Dance Challenge) is in front of the Eiffel Tower because at the time I wanted to show how French hip hop had developed as its own style and with its own identity.

Filed under: Misc | Leave a Comment »

So, Dance Your City is now live and we’re ready to start watching all your video submissions! In the run up to the opening of the competition there’s been a lot going on behind the scenes to prepare for the big launch day. We’ve been setting up and carefully designing the Facebook page but most importantly we’ve been filming some excellent promo videos with Soul Mavericks and Flowzaic.

The idea behind these two videos was to film two dance videos at two different iconic locations to show you guys the kind of thing we’re looking for and challenge you to go one better! Because we were feeling particularly lazy last Wednesday our fist location was right outside our office…luckily working at Southbank Centre we were surrounded with options from Big Ben to Trafalgar Square. However, we finally settled on filming by the Hayward Gallery since the brutalist architecture gives the video a real feel of London with a great view of the London Eye in the background.

Once Coopdog had finished posing…

…he and R-Qi-Tek did some free style breaking interspersed with a couple of bits that they planned before hand. As all true professionals do they pulled this off first take (or maybe second!). It ended up looking something like this:

Flowzaic wanted to film somewhere iconic but a little different. Myself (filming) and Jessica, who programmes dance events here, met the girls at Greenwich foot tunnel. Well, technically we met at Starbucks and had a coffee, but don’t tell my boss that.

We filmed down in the tunnel which has given a really urban, grimy, dark feel to the video, which reminded me a little of The Prodigy’s music video for Firestarter. The girls put together a great routine with a little hint of boogaloo and some locking thrown in, so good that a passerby threw some money their way! Check out the finished product:

We hope you like what we’ve put together, but really these videos are just a starting point for you guys to go out and get inspired and creative. Find a location you feel is iconic – wherever you might live and then show us what you can do for the chance to perform on the Southbank Centre stage. Best of luck!

Enter the competition: southbankcentre.co.uk/dyc
Join the discussion on twitter: #danceyourcity

Filed under: Misc | Leave a Comment »