Out of the Box

A piece of dance history by Niels Robitzky aka Storm & Christian Zacharas aka Robozee.

Out of the Box was premiered on December 8, 2022 at Kunstquartier Bethanien as part of Archivkompliz*innen – Tanzarchive in Bewegung.

The piece does not intend to recount history in chronological order, rather, it is an attempt at creating a living and danced archive of urban dance. “Everywhere, for everyone and at any time” can stand as a credo for this very diverse dance genre, which has long since inscribed itself into cultural and political memory, even if the history of urban dance is told rather marginally. Niels Robitzky, alias Storm, has since 1983 been a firm advocate for hip-hop and funk dance styles and is one of the leading European dance pioneers in this field.

Based on his own dance background, Storm looks at the history of urban dance in Europe: starting with its origins in the resistance among Black communities in the USA, its violent colonial history and its defining concept of community, through to today’s extensive networks across continents and dance styles. Together with urban dance artist Christian Robozee Zacharas, Storm invites the audience to join a lottery in which the wheel of stories is spun and the personal dance history of the two artists is brought to the stage in unpredictable ways and leaps in time: A rhizome of memories, entanglements and dance moves.

 

Performance Out of the Box
Two male figures are standing in the middle of several stacks of white cardboard boxes, both in representative dance poses and smiling at the camera. Both are wearing wide beige pants and blue denim shirts. The person at the back wears a beige hat and black glasses, the person in front has shoulder-length wavy brown hair.
(c) Storm
The picture shows Storm, a middle-aged man with a well-groomed and graying five-day beard, a green Fedora hat on his head, large glasses with transparent frames on his nose and a silver hoop earring in his left ear. In this picture, he looks rather deliberate and thoughtful, which is partly due to his seated cross-legged pose, but also because he is holding his left hand on his chin. The background of the picture is completely black. This makes the light green of his hat and the thin stripes of his top stand out in contrast.

Storm