In a world where revolution happens at night and laws are voted on at dawn, what new forms can insurrection take? TO DA BONE is a work that wants to express a certain intimate rebellion of youth. It also seeks to reflect on the role that new media can play, particularly social networks like Facebook or YouTube, in mobilising crowds and giving rise to opposition movements. On stage, several dances grouped under the term “post internet” will be reactivated, particularly those from hardstyle and hard dance such as tekstyle, shuffle, hakken and especially jumpstyle.
Extremely intense and physical for the dancers, on average a jumpstyle sequence lasts 25 seconds. The jumpers consume all their energy to get to the end of their free sequence. The result is a wild dance of legs, very powerfully going nowhere, reflecting a kind of release from a latent frustration. At the end of their solos, jumpers are out of breath but soothed, before a focused power emanates from them, full of defiance and confidence. Jumpstyle is a dance discovered on the internet that is initially practised alone in bedrooms. Jumpers film their sequences and post them on the internet to share their passion as well as their progress with the community. The process these self-taught people go through is often the same: the first videos are initially made in bedrooms, they then migrate to the sitting room and then develop them in the public sphere. Outside the videos are first shot in their street, and then they move to ever larger and more theatrical spaces. Therefore the practice of jumpstyle evolves naturally on social networks through the medium of videos, with the community adding comments and then responding with new videos of their own. Leagues are formed to create groups within the community that face each other off in virtual battles, which can be turned into real battles at jumpstyle gatherings organised in several European capitals. The ten-minute performance of TO DA BONE, which won second prize in the Danse Élargie competition at the Théâtre de la Ville in Paris in 2016, is the first part of a one-hour choreographic piece developed by (LA)HORDE for the 2017/2018 season.