FLEXN

With their production, FLEXN, dance pioneer and choreographer Reggie (Regg Rec) Gray and acclaimed director Peter Sellars challenge the complex reality of American life. The United States is a country where shootings, police violence, social injustice,

dysfunctional legal systems, and underlying racial tensions affect the reality of many Americans. FLEXN developed in the midst of recent racially motivated shootings and police brutality, which resulted in the deaths of Trayvon Martin (Sanford, Florida), Michael Brown (Ferguson, Missouri) and Eric Garner (Staten Island, New York). The acquittals and/or light sentences awarded to the offending officers were seen by many Americans as a reflection of deep-rooted institutional racism. These incidents led to major social unrest, protests, riots and the founding of the Black Lives Matter movement. In the wake of these incidents, Gray and Sellars, with fifteen dancers from Gray's company The D.R.E.A.M. RING, have created a performance powered by grace, soul, and sheer exhilaration. Love and justice are explored in a variety of electrifying flex dance techniques and powerful personal narratives.

Flex is a type of street dance originating in Brooklyn, New York. Flex – also known as flexn, flexing, flex'n or FlexN – originated in the mid-1990s as a combination of various underground dance styles, rooted in the lively Jamaican reggae and dancehall culture of Brooklyn. The narrative, energetic dance style called bruk-up, named after the influential dancer George 'Bruck-Up' Adams, lies at the heart of flex. The form has evolved over the past ten years to include: pausing, snapping, gliding, bone breaking, hat tricks, animation and contortion. The flex dancers (or flexors) contort their limbs into intensely twisted postures (bone breaking), glide over the dance floor like movie characters (gliding), and may suddenly freeze and then jerkily start moving again (pausing). Flex dancers not only excel in terms of their often unbelievable body positions, but also in their ability to demonstrate deeply personal stories of triumph over social injustice and violence, Flex has its own evocative language to describe moves that simulate violence: gunshots, breaking of bones, ripping the heart from an opponent's chest.

The performance by Gray, Sellars, and The D.R.E.A.M. RING dancers is largely improvised within a fixed framework, and is driven by a soundtrack of reggae, pop and hip-hop. The result is a virtuosic dance performance about living in times of major social upheaval. The New York Times described the performance as, 'Part protest, part dance party, part collective autobiography. FLEXN rails against social injustice, from police brutality to the prison system’s failures in America.' The performance premiered in 2015 at the Park Avenue Armory in New York and has also been to Australia (Brisbane Festival), France (Festival de Marseille), Italy (Napoli Teatro Festival) and the United States (Jacob's Pillow Dance Festival and Dartmouth College). The Holland Festival marks the Dutch premiere.