Choreographers: Kenrick ‘H20’ Sandy and Michael ‘Mikey J’ Asante
For 2025, the National Youth Dance Company have teamed up with the established and celebrated Boy Blue, resulting in 55-minute performance Gravity, a piece choreographed especially for the 30+ strong team of young dancers from all over the UK: Blackpool to Colchester, Ipswich to Frome, Truro and Birmingham among others. Choreographed by Kenrick ‘H20’ Sandy and Michael ‘Mikey J’ Asante in the recognisable Boy Blue style, this piece combines hard and soft forms of hip hop to celebrate the emergence of a new generation of dancers, performed at Sadler’s Wells as part of the YFX Festival 2025.
Divided into multiple phases that focus on speed, pace and tone, Gravity explores the forces between soloists and groups of dancers. It opens with a single spotlit individual rising from the floor, arms and legs pulled into the air compelled upwards as the light rises, revealing a stage floor also covered in dancers waiting to be activated. This opening section focuses on unity, a forceful, almost militaristic stance as waves of dancers in packs move across the stage, stomping and slapping palms against raised elbows as a show of strength and solidarity.
A calmer section follows, the movement a walk forward that mirrors stepping heavily on the moon in which the dancers bounce momentarily on their knees as they step, slowing the pace and shape of Gravity, making it fluid and wavy, almost performed in slow motion. These two notions contend across the rest of the dance, intense phases followed by gentler ones as the company explores the pull of attraction towards one another, soloists drawing others to follow their example as leaders who set the tone of the dance at different moments.
Boy Blue has always paid considerable attention to the visual drama of their performance, and this collaboration with the National Youth Dance Company is no different, using Adam Carrée’s lighting techniques to change the mood as well as shadow and spotlight to focus on the hip-hop meets breakdance and contemporary stylings. A particularly notable sequence early on is bathed in red light as the dancers create a storm while Asante’s composition offers a series of metallic and industrial soundscapes that underscore the coordinated movement of the company.
Midway, a soloist controls the arrival of a five-minute video about the preparation process filmed in the studio, along with interviews with the young performers and some of their rehearsal directors who speak about the value of the programme and the opportunity the National Youth Dance Company provides to express their emotional experiences through dance. Sandy hopes the residency will provide them with a platform, the chance to move into ‘a new space’ when they emerge from the programme as professional dancers. Eventually, the soloist returns to bring the audience back into the world of Gravity itself and the performance resumes.
It concludes on a softer note with a greater sense of the individual connections before a couple of crowd-pleasing, fast-paced Boy Blue special encores that showcase the distinctive full body shudder, robotic styles and speedy shapes that have become a feature of this company, laced throughout the dance. As Sandy hopes, these young dancers emerge from their gravitational buffering in command of themselves and perhaps their performance future as well.
Reviewed on 19 July 2025
