Press – bal.exe

“[…] With bal.exe, Anne Nguyen launches a double cultural revolution in the hip-hop world. With something so completely new she needed to create a new hip-hop dance style, called “looping pop”, based on popping. What is popping? A highly articulated, mechanical hip-hop dance style, which is danced upright. […] Hip-hop ball, robotic ball, paradoxical ball. Here, popping is danced face to face, in pairs! […] It is all about states of body and mind, in a meeting between dance and romantic, even melancholic music. Suspense and fascination operate fully. It needed a mathematician choreographer to create this fluid circulation between Brahms and popping, and a dance that could be informed by algorithms. In the end, all appears very natural. bal.exe crosses the ages, from Brahms’ baroque to romantic ballet, with automaton characters such as Coppélia, Petrushka and the Nutcracker, to lead straight to the future of hip-hop dance.”

“bal.exe: and Anne Nguyen created “looping pop”
With bal.exe, Anne Nguyen has created no less than a cultural revolution in the hip-hop world: couple dancing. Baptism of fire for “looping pop”, a new dance style in which popping is performed face to face, in couples! […] The apparent simplicity of the plot and the drama is just an illusion. It is all about states of body and mind, in a meeting between dance and romantic, even melancholic music. Suspense and fascination operate fully.”

“By deconstructing hip-hop language to open new perspectives, Anne Nguyen explores in a subtle manner the intricacies, often ignored, of popping, a robotic dance with gestures made of micro-explosions, stops, broken-down movements and blocks. She leads [hip-hop dancers] to dance in a waltz, in a tango, so that they finally touch each other, even if mechanically. Anne Nguyen invents, in a way, hip-hop dancing in couples.”

“[Anne Nguyen’s] approach of the artistic language as a software thought leads to a successful combination of artistic styles of very different origins and natures into a fully coherent, harmonious and long-lasting set. Like a possible future for postmodernism and its stylistic juxtapositions, bal.exe is a successful choreographic attempt offering a sensitive overview of what an artistic expression can be when adapted to the era of the industrialization of thought. Suffering no discrepancy nor provocation, the show embarks the spectator-listener in a new place turning any referential system upside down. The spectator is then only confronted with the perception of the set of vibrations provoked by the bodies and instruments, the appreciation of an uncommon savourous cocktail of knowledge and expressiveness, and the benefic strangeness of being touched in a particular aspect of his human being, something that is not very conscious but that is nevertheless manhandled nowadays: neurons.”

“If the chamber music is melancholic and poetic, brilliantly played here by l’Orchestre Régional de Basse-Normandie, the dancers, on the opposite, jerk the movement. They offer series of gestures as in a computer program executing, whose name is prolonged by the famous .exe which is here added to bal. There is much humour in this piece, which creates a dialogue between different worlds with a repetitive comic effect. […] The ball carries us and cramps us and we would have a strong desire to turn the key to watch one more time these absolutely impressing automats dancers.”

“We don’t attend every day the birth of a new choreographic style! In hip-hop, it’s possible. Anne Nguyen transposes the technique of popping in the world of tango and waltz, to create a mechanical but amazingly human dance, in which the dancers play puppets.”

“bal.exe [by Anne Nguyen], subtitled Mechanical ball set to chamber music, has the mathematical rigour that one knows about her, and finds in its dancers impeccably dressed a virtuosity able to carry hip-hop dance towards grounds still to clear.”