春水堂视频

Montreal-based dance company draws on hip-hop, ballet听and contemporary influences at Macky Auditorium, March 24

Growing up as a b-boy on the streets of Los Angeles, Victor Quijada never thought of hip-hop as an art form.听

鈥淭hat鈥檚 just what we were, we were hip-hoppers,鈥� he says. 鈥淚t wasn鈥檛 something we went to the dance studio to do. It was just the way that we moved, the way we talked, the music we listened to, the way we dressed, the way we expressed ourselves.鈥�

Back then, Quijada danced to get attention. A few years later, he enrolled at the Los Angeles County High School for the Arts and he learned about dance鈥檚 potential to change the world.听

鈥淚t was a very amazing moment for me to kind of realize that maybe my dancing 鈥� could possibly have the power to do more than what I was using it for,鈥� he says.

As a young adult, Quijada showed so much artistic potential that no less a figure than Twyla Tharp admitted him to her company鈥攄espite his total lack of ballet experience. He spent his early 20s practicing at the barre by day and ducking into clubs by night, wondering whether he could someday merge his two passions. And that鈥檚 how, in 2002,听听was born.

鈥淚t鈥檚 not just a cut-and-paste of ballet vocabulary, hip-hop vocabulary or break vocabulary,鈥� says Quijada of his Montreal-based company, which performs mostly his own choreography. 鈥淚t鈥檚 鈥� everything that I鈥檝e known and experienced to this moment.鈥�

Quijada鈥檚 company admits dancers with wildly different backgrounds, styles and stories. They identify as Latin American, Asian, African American and First Nations. Some, like Quijada, honed their craft on the streets, while others are classically trained. The idea, says Quijada, is that everybody鈥檚 background is equally valuable to the company鈥攂ecause it lends the troupe a style and stage presence seen nowhere else.

鈥淭he surprise is in how [Quijada] combines things, and in the weightless, unaccented but deeply virtuosic content and phrasing of his dances,鈥� says the Vancouver Sun. 鈥淗ere is a true original.鈥�