Underdogs

English

Three virtuoso, highly charged dancers set the mind in motion. The underdog is the one nobody expects to be successful. The one who is always overlooked. What does this mean, for both body and mind? 

With its highly charged dance, Underdogs shows what it means to be invisible. For body and mind. The underdog is the one nobody expects to be successful. The one who is always overlooked. If you run into the underdog in the streets, your eye quickly wanders. 

The three virtuoso dancers in this choreography embody the many ways in which a person can be marked by being the expected loser. It bleeds into a person’s attitude, energy and gestures. It influences their chosen heroes, their ambitions, and the way they relate to others. With its highly charged energy, provocative and liberating, Underdogs rebels against this social status of the outcast, driven by a soundtrack featuring work by Sly & The Family Stone, Gil Scott-Heron and others.

Anne Nguyen heads her own company, Compagnie par Terre. When she was young, she simultaneously developed her skills as a gymnast, writer and martial arts practitioner. Her wide range of interests can still be traced in her work that draws on architecture and mathematics, sociology, martial arts and mythology. 

Nguyen creates purely choreographic work, but also theatre dance pieces in which hip hop dance is a constituent element. Her work always reflects hip hop’s main driver: it questions the norm. It challenges the status quo. For Anne Nguyen, dance is a way to free the mind through the body. In her collection of poetry ‘Manual of the City Warrior’ she writes: “A mass of interiorized signs bubble within me. My actions express only a fraction of the collective body language. I celebrate my harmony with the city by jostling my memories of its inhabitants in one single concentrated noisy move. Here is my dance: welcome to my city.”