DanceWorks Presents Bboyizm This Weekend

DanceWorks, Toronto's longest-running contemporary dance series now in its 37th season, proudly presents Ottawa's award-winning Bboyizm in a dynamic new work by its founder and artistic director Yvon Soglo a.k.a. b-boy Crazy Smooth. One of Canada's top street dancers, Crazy Smooth is dedicated to street dance culture. His newest creation, Music Creates Opportunity, forges a new frontier for urban street dance that runs tonight, April 25 to Saturday April 26 at Harbourfront Centre's Enwave Theatre.

Bboyizm delivers precise and mastered technique, explosive movement, synchronicity and individualism together - as well as a festive and communicative joyous spirit of movement, music and life. Bboyizm was founded by Crazy Smooth in 2004 with the vision of elevating and preserving the authenticity and essence of street dance and introducing it into the world of the performing arts. Drawing on his technical background in rocking and b-boying, Crazy Smooth created his first stage piece IZM in 2010 as an exploration into the very nature of artistic expression. DanceWorks presented it in 2012 where it earned a Dora nomination for Outstanding Production in the Dance Division,

While IZM challenged audiences' expectations of both street dance and the stage, Music Creates Opportunity considers the intersection of rhythm, expression and community in the making of music and dance.

Smooth's previous study of traditional partnering and contact improvisation led him to conclude that street dancers express themselves in relationship to the music while "contact improv" dancers express themselves through a relationship with other moving bodies. The contrast between these two styles ignited his desire to explore the possibilities of partnering concepts and adapting it to his aesthetic. Music Creates Opportunity introduces his new concept of "Rhythmic Contact" into the vocabulary of street dance.

Music Creates Opportunity features traditional street dances including rocking, b-boying, house dancing and pantsula - a street dance from Soweto, South Africa - and showcases music as a universal language that offers a multitude of possibilities for expression. Whether the music is an external force or created by the dancers themselves, music is the critical link between dancers. Their environment becomes a theatre - sometimes harmonious, sometimes antagonistic - but always transformative. http://www.bboyizm.ca

Bboyizm are currently on tour with Music Creates Opportunity. They appeared at Charlottetown's Confederation Centre on March 15 and are currently touring Ontario: Kirkland Lake (Mar 22), Deep River (Mar 26), St. Catharines (Mar 29), Dryden (Apr 2), Sioux Lookout (Apr 5), Burlington (Apr 11), Kitchener, ON (Apr 17), Toronto (Apr 24-26), culminating June 14 at the Canada Dance Festival in Ottawa.