Boy Blue, the hip hop dance theater company based in the UK, has been creating, performing and educating for nearly 25 years since its inception in 2001. In that time, the group has spawned seven regular companies under its umbrella for dancers from age five through adult. Driven by the concepts of education, enlightenment and education (The 3 Es), Boy Blue (founded by co-artists and directors Michael ‘Mikey J’ Asante and Kenrick ‘H2O’ Sandy), has impacted thousands over the years and in 2025 takes its award-winning show, Cycles, on tour in the UK and to New York City, for an opportunity to share their love of music and hip-hip on both sides of the Atlantic. Dance Informa had the chance to chat with both gentlemen about what makes Boy Blue unique, the state of hip hop in the UK and U.S., and why Cycles is such a special show.
You both have dedicated almost a quarter of a century to Boy Blue, to music, and to developing and sharing your love of hip hop dance theater. What makes Boy Blue so special, and what pillars do you uphold to maintain your vision?
“We remain in our core community and grassroots-led in the dance community. Yes, it’s a business. Yes, it’s a company…but we don’t see it as a hierarchical space. We don’t see it from the down going up. We see it going across. We see that your trajectory goes across within your journey. And this keeps us humble. It allows us to use a pinch of ego for the performance. We are very confident in ourselves, and we promote confidence in the space of our young artists, as opposed to this ego-driven thing, which sometimes the arts does.”
I’m speaking to you from NYC, and here in the U.S., hip hop is very commercial. Hip hop as dance theater isn’t a huge slice of dance shows. Is the type of performance you create more popular or supported in the UK or Europe, in general?
“I would say this is hip hop dance theater. The hip hop theater pioneers would use all the elements of hip hop in and put it into a theatrical space. Then, there is hip hop dance theater which uses dance to tell the story more than rapping or graffiti. You also have the hip hop dance, which is the general way of doing it and you’re just rolling and you’re expressing yourself. I would say we do more. We’re a smaller group that does hip hop dance theater. I would say it’s quite European, because the French do it, as well. The German do it, as well. The Netherlands, they do it as well. When I’ve gone to the U.S., I’ve not really seen much hip hop dance theater, so it’d be interesting to see how much is happening now.”
Can you say more about the differences between U.S. and UK hip hop? Of course, the birth of hip hop was right here in NYC, but it seems like there’s a different type of relationship to the dance world in each country. I’m curious about the influences that shape art forms as they age.
“There is a duality of where hip hop live lives from an American sensibility and a British sensibility. In America, you can see it was a solid art form that turned into a business. It was a self-expression that turned into a business. There are different financial aspects of what theater does as opposed to what hip hop music does, in terms of its international appeal, its effect and the way it’s traversed. Theater is subsidized in the UK by the Arts Council, which deciphers and decides who is going to have part of these national funds and support that growth. Theater is not as potent as a business idea, but you can talk about what theater does as a training ground. So for us, it was that gateway to get hip hop into the scene, because it wasn’t considered in the same way as a business in the UK.”
I want to pivot a bit and ask you about Cycles, your new show. Can you share some of the inspiration behind the creation and what makes it unique?
“Cycles was an attempt to draw us back into what that energy, as hip hop practitioners, and what that energy was, as original street dancers in how we began. The notion of the music had to come first, because I wanted it to feel like a dealer tape, or I wanted it to feel like a mad lib tape. I wanted it to feel intense and in-your-face. It wasn’t about its finesse or its grandeur. It was about showing, in a theatrical sense, how beautiful that original root of hip hop can be. It’s had a great energy that’s connected with it. And more than anything else, as an artist, you want to create the freshest thing. And in this regard, it was a major response to hip hop dance theater being gentrified. That’s the best way to describe it.”
What kind of process do you go through, musically and choreographically?
“Cycles is an attempt to get to the root of balance to groove, and a big element of the freestyle. All the performers we picked to work on this particular production are hip hop practitioners in a freestyle setting or battle setting. They’re even closer to the street dance element, outside of the theater space element. We’ve tried to build that into the show where we don’t 100 percent know what the show is going to look like every time, because it’s a cycle itself. We want that cycle. There are milestones that the dancers will hit in terms of choreographic moments, but we don’t know what the show is going to look like each night. There’s a section that’s just a battle track. We don’t know what they’re going to do each night, and so it constantly changes. And that was the other thing, is that we wanted it to constantly feel like it was a cycle with itself. More than anything else, I’m very very excited to bring it to the States.”
Boy Blue will present Cycles at Rose Theater as part of Lincoln Center Presents from March 27-29. For tickets and more information, visit lincolncenter.org/series/lincoln-center-presents/boy-blue-presents-cycles-546.
By Emily Sarkissian of Dance Informa.
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